The Social Implications of Freudian "Revisionism"
Marcuse, Herbert
The following article forms an epilogue to a book that is to appear this fall under the imprint of Beacon Press. Tentatively entitled EROS AND CIVILIZATION. Mr. Marcuse's book deals with some...
...cit., p. 108...
...a qualifying "in so far as it is possible" is the only trace left of the explosive contradiction in the aim...
...Freud's conception is predominantly relativistic: he assumed that psychology can "help us to understand the motivation of value judgments but cannot help in establishing the validity of the value judgments themselves...
...The Death Instinct and its derivatives are no exception...
...The revisionists do not insist, as Freud did, on the enduring truth value of the instinctual needs which must be "broken" so that the human being can function in interpersonal relations...
...he recognized the "general unhappiness" of society as the unsurpassable limits of cure and normality...
...Often, the style alone betrays the attitude...
...Fromm revives all the time-honored values of idealistic ethics as if nobody had ever demonstrated their conformistic and repressive features...
...The basic direction of the organism is forward...
...therefore he is haunted by "inner emptiness and insecurity" in spite of his triumph in the "battle for success...
...43 Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, p. 1. 44 A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 130-131...
...In contrast, Freud's basic "biologistic" concepts reach beyond the ideology and its reflexes: his refusal to treat a reified society as a "developing network of interpersonal experiences and behavior" and an alienated individual as a "total personality" corresponds to the reality...
...Now it is precisely this goal which is essentially unattainable— not because of Iimitations in the psychoanalytic techniques but because the established civilization itself, in its very structure, denies it...
...Thus he turns into its opposite our belief that we destroy in order to live: we live in order to clestroy...
...Some of the new needs lead in a constructive direction and stimulate further development...
...Far better off is the person who has attained "inner strength and integrity": though he may be less successful than his "unscrupulous neighbor," he will have security, judgment, and objectivity which will make himmuch less vulnerable to changing fortunes and opinions of others and will in many areas enhance his ability for constructive work...
...Our scientific discoveries and technical achievements enable us to visualize the day when the table will be set for all who want to eat . . . 43 These statements are true—but only in the light of their contradiction: precisely because man has never come so close to the fulfillment of his hopes, he has never been so strictly restrained from fulfilling them...
...In Freud, they are included in and developed by the basic concepts themselves...
...The "claim for happiness," if truly affirmed, aggravates the conflict with a society which allows only controlled happiness, and the exposure of the moral taboos extends this conflict to an attack on the vital protective layers of society...
...For Freud, a whole world separates freedom and happiness from their pseudos which are practiced and preached in a repressive civilization...
...With the historical obsolescence of an established society, with the growth of its inner antagonisms, the traditional mental ties are loosening: Libidinal forces become free for new forms of utilization and thus change their social function...
...But behind the tolerant attitude of the "neutral" analyst is concealed "respect for the social taboos of the bourgeoisie...
...The striving for a better future is "paralyzed" not by Freud's awareness of these implications but by their Neo-Freudian "spiritualization," which covers up the gap that separates the present from the future...
...In such a society, the self-realization of the "personality" can only proceed on the basis of a double repression: first the "purification" of the Pleasure Principle and the internalization of happiness and freedom, secondly, their reasonable restriction until they become compatible with the prevailing unfreedom and unhappiness...
...Either our safety is really threatened, then our wish to destroy is a sensible and rational reaction...
...12 This irreducible core of conformity is further strengthened by Freud's conviction that the repressive basis of civilization cannot be changed anyway—not even on the supra-individual, societal scale...
...4 Ibid., p. 53...
...37 Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, p. 1. 38 The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, p. 284...
...However, Reich's notion of sexual repression remains undifferentiated, the historical dynamic of the sex instincts and of their fusion with the destructive impulses is neglected (Reich rejects Freud's hypothesis of the Death Instinct and the whole depth dimension revealed in Freud's late metapsychology) . Consequently, sexual liberation per se becomes for Reich a panacea for individual and social ills...
...2510, page 29...
...we shall not be able to deny that the behavior in love of the men of present-day civilization bears in general the character of the psychically impotent type...
...41 The escape from psychoanalysis to internalized ethics and religion is the consequence of the revision of psychoanalytic theory...
...Not the values are spurious but the context is' in which they are defined and proclaimed: "inner strength" has the connotation of that unconditional freedom which can be practiced even in chains and which Fromm himself once denounced in his analysisof the Reformation.32 If the values of "inner strength and integrity" are supposed to be more and other than the character traits which the alienated society expects from any good citizen in his business (in which case they merely serve to sustain alienation) , then they must pertain to a consciousness that has broken through the alienation as well as its values...
...Therefore he considered a civilization oriented on the realization of happiness as a catastrophe, as the end of all civilization...
...The "adjusted" person is blamed because he has betrayed the "higher self," the "human values...
...42 Fromm, Man for Himself, p. 140...
...It might be tempting to speak of a split into a left and right wing...
...In this sense, therapy is a course in resignation: a great deal will be gained if we succeed in "transforming your hysterical misery into everyday unhappiness" which is the usual lot of mankind...
...17 Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, Rinehart and Co., New York, 1947, p. 34...
...In his Einbruch * "Repression," repressive" is used in this article in the non-technical sense to denote both conscious and unconscious, external and internal processes of restriction, constraint, and suppression...
...It was precisely because he saw in sexuality the representative of the integral Pleasure Principle that Freud was able to discover the common roots of the "general" as well as neurotic unhappiness in a depth far below all individual experience, and to recognize a primary "constitutional" repression underlying all consciously experienced and administered repression...
...cit., p. XVII...
...The affirmative attitude toward the claim for happiness then becomes practicable only if happiness and the "productive" development of the personality are redefined so that they become compatible with the prevailing values, that is to say, if they are internalized and idealized...
...cit., p. 50...
...These various revisions now appear in their logical consistency: one entails the other...
...11 Breuer and Freud, Studies in Hysteria, Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph no...
...This psychology has no other objective standards of value than the prevailing ones: health, maturity, achievement are taken as they are defined by the given society—in spite of Sullivan's awareness that in our culture, maturity is "often no particular reflection on anything more than one's socioeconomic status and the like...
...III, 1934...
...27Ibid., p. 119...
...This aim certainly does not (or should not) imply that the patient becomes capable of adjusting completely to 225 an environment repressive of his mature aspirations and abilities...
...the latter provided the primary source for the former and at the same time the ground for their necessary restriction in civilization...
...The decision rests with man's "ability to take himself, his life and happiness seriously...
...Later on, when Central and Eastern Europe were in revolutionary upheaval, it became clear to what extent psychoanalysis was still committed to the society whose secrets it revealed: the psychoanalytic conception of man, with its belief in the basic unchangeability of human nature, appeared as "reactionary": Freudian theory seemed to imply that the humanitarian ideals of socialism were humanly unattainable...
...certain basic elements may be said to be characteristic of all forms of productive love...
...The decisive relations are thus those which are the least inter-personal...
...45 This rendering of Freud's conception is incorrect: he did not assume that we live in order to destroy...
...Specifically, it was charged that their objectionable features might be the work of a genuine pacifist organization, but that they were much more likely the subversive efforts of Communists .. . One highly salutory effect has been the assurance of the publishers that all gory and pacifist features have been removed from their product...
...If his is one of the more radical groups, the activity of more remote memory in the synthesis of decisions and choice may he suppressed almost completely, and the activity of prospective revery channelled rigidly in the dogmatic pattern...
...No matter how much the therapeutical findings motivated the theoretical reduction in the role of sexuality, such reduction was indispensable for the revisionist philosophy...
...no essential distinction is made between repressive and non-repressive sublimation, and progress in freedom appears as a mere release of sexuality...
...The strengthening of this link was the initial impulse behind the revisionism of the cultural school...
...13 Clara Thompson, Psychoanalysis: Evolution and Development, Hermitage House, Inc., New York, 1951...
...Do you really believe that a handful of unprincipled placehunters and corrupters of men would have succeeded in letting loose all this latent evil, if the millions of their followers were not also gnilty...
...15 Ibid., p. 9, 13, 26 f, 155...
...civilization has not caused any conflicts between them which the mature person could not solve without serious damage...
...2 "Uber Methode and Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie" (On the Method and Task of Analytical Social Psychology) in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, vol...
...Navy personnel because some of the contents were deemed contrary to the best interests of our country...
...By personality I understand the totality of inherited and acquired psychic qualities which are characteristic of one individual and which make the individual unique.t 9 I think it is clear that Freud's conception of counter-transference is to be distinguished from the present-day conception of analysis as an interpersonal process...
...Some of the new needs lead in a destructive direction and are not good for man...
...The autonomous personality, in the sense of creative "uniqueness" and fullness of its existence, has always been the privilege of a very few...
...the principle of "competitiveness, and the potential hostility that accompanies it, pervades all human relationships...
...Repression, unhappiness must be if civilization shall prevail...
...E Ibid., p. 215...
...They insist that society "is not a static set of laws instituted in the past at the time of the murder of the primal father, but is rather a growing, changing, developing network of interpersonal experiences and behavics...
...The problem of sublimation is minimized...
...It should be stressed that, in the context of Mr...
...Normality is a precarious condition: "Neurosis and psychosis are both of them an expression of the rebellion of the Id against the outer world, of its 'pain,' unwillingness to adapt itself to necessity —to ananke, or, if one prefers, of its incapacity to do so...
...Coinsequently, the critical insights of psychoanalysis gain their full force only in the field of theory—and perhaps particularly where theory is farthest removed from therapy: in Freud's "metapsychology...
...This assimilation took place in two ways: first the most speculative and "metaphysical" concepts which were not subject to any clinical verification (such as the Death Instinct...
...But the revisionist combination of psychoanalysis with idealistic ethics is not simply a glorification of adjustment...
...Since they have spiritualized freedom and happiness, they can say that "the problem of production has been virtually solved:"42 Never before has man come so close to the fulfillment of his most cherished hopes as today...
...This is the accepted, "realistic" meaning of productiveness and love...
...II, p. 279...
...Psychoanalysis was re-oriented on the traditional consciousness— psychology of pre-Freudian texture...
...The reader is left with the conviction that the "higher values" can and should be practiced within the very conditions which betray them—and they can be practiced because the revisionist philosopher accepts them in their adjusted and idealized form—on the terms of the established Reality Principle...
...Here follows a brief discussion of the Neo-Freudian concept of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex: in the revisionist interpretation, this sphere is presented without exposing the instinctual danger zones of society.] The same beneficial result is obtained by the rejection of the Death Instinct...
...If these possibilities would be allowed within the limits set by the need for the productive development of the person ality rather than by the need for the domination of the masses, the fulfilment of this one fundamental happiness would of necessity lead to an increase in the claim for gratification and happiness in other spheres of the human existence...
...the economic conditions are the primary modifying factors...
...Fromm devotes a large part of his writing to the critique of the "market economy" and its ideology which place strong barriers in the way of productive development...
...22° Sullivan refrains from such a redefinition—he makes his concepts conform with conformity: The person who believes that he voluntarily cut loose from his earlier moorings and by choice accepted new dogmata, in which he has diligently indoctrinated himself, is quite certain to be a person who has suffered great insecurity...
...This ambiguity makes the revisionist philosophy appear as critical where it is conformistic, as political where it is moralistic...
...28 Karen Homey, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, W. W. Norton and Co., New York, 1937, p. 284...
...It rests upon his courage to be himself and to be for himself...
...Fromm has devoted an admirable paper to "The Social Conditions of Psychoanalytic Therapy," in which he showed that the psychoanalytic situation (between analyst and patient) is a specific expression of "bourgeois-liberalist toleration" and as such dependent on the existence of such toleration in the society...
...However, we tried to show that his "fatalism" was not without qualifications...
...26 Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1950, p. 7.3 ff...
...But the very same terms also denote the free realization of man, or the idea of such realization...
...The new ideology is especially palliative of conflict in its promise of a better world that is to rise from the debris to which the present order must first be reduced...
...41 Psychoanalysis and Religion, p. 76...
...Feel Better, Now...
...14 Thompson, Inc...
...40 Man for Himself, p. VIII...
...The sadomasochistic tendencies can hardly be associated with a forward direction in mental health—unless "forward" and "mental health" are redefined to mean almost the opposite of what they are in our social order—"a social order which is in some ways grossly inade quate for the development of healthy and happy human beings...
...32 Escape from Freedom, Rinehart and Co., New York, 1941, p. 74 ff...
...Beyond its legitimate manifestations, love is destructive and by no means conducive to productiveness and constructive work...
...The new ideology rationalizes destructive activity to such effect that it seems almost, if not quite, constructive...
...der Sexualnioral (1931) , Wilhelm Reich emphasized the extent to which sexual repression was enforced by the interests of domination and exploitation, and the extent to which these interests were in turn re-inforced by sexual repression...
...cit., p. 143...
...The new movement has given him group support for the expression of ancient personal hostilities that are now directed against the group from which he has come...
...While we have created wonderful things we have failed to make of ourselves beings for whom this tremendous effort would seem worthwhile...
...During the twenty years of its development prior to the first World War, psychoanalysis elaborated the concepts for the psychological critique of the most highly praised achievement of the modern era: the individual...
...Paradoxically (but only apparently paradoxically) , such a development was the consequence of the improvements in therapy...
...Freud's "biological orientation" led him to concentrate on the phylogenetic and ontogenetic past of the individual: he considered the character as essentially fixed with the fifth or sixth year (if not earlier), and he interpreted the fate of the individual in terms of primary instincts and their vicissitudes, especially sexuality...
...24 Deep conformity holds sway over this psychology, which suspects all those who "cut loose from their early moorings" and become "radicals" as neurotics (the description quoted above fits all of them, from Jesus to Lenin, from Socrates to Giordano Bruno) , and which identifies almost automatically the "promise of a better world" with "Utopia," its substance with "revery," and mankind's sacred dream of justice for all with personal resentment (no more injustice "for them") of maladjusted types...
...The personality which the individual is to develop, the potentialities he is to realize, the happiness he is to attain—they are regimented from the very beginning, and their content can be defined only in terms of this regimentation...
...III Psychoanalysis elucidates the universal in the individual experience...
...No psychoanalytic theory was necessary to arrive at these conclusions with which individual and national aggression has been justified since times immemorial...
...It has been brought to the committee's attention that the entire output of one such promoter [of war comic books] had been officially banned from distribution among U.S...
...24 The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, W. W. Norton and Co., New York, 1953, p. 298...
...However, the term eclecticism does not adequately express the substance of the revisionist philosophy...
...He talks of the productive realization of the personality, of care, responsibility, and respect for one's fellow men, of productive love and happiness as if man could actually practice all this and still remain sane and full of "well-being" in a society which Fromm himself describes as one of total alienation, dominated by the commodity relations of the "market...
...Freud's own insights into the historical character of the modifications of the impulses vitiate his equation of the Reality Principle with the norms of patricentricacquisitive culture...
...Wholesale competitiveness and the ruthless exploitation of the helpless are examples of destructive products of culture...
...Marcuse's controversial article in our next issue...
...Accordingly, Freud's theory is consistently oriented on early infancy —the formative period of the universal fate in the individual...
...Theory moved from the surface to the depth, from the "finished" and conditioned person to its sources and resources...
...or we only "feel" it is threatened, then the individual and supra-individual reasons for this feeling have to be explored...
...In order to present these values as freedom and fulfillment, they have to be expurgated from the material of which they are made, and the struggle for their realization has to be turned into a spiritual and moral struggle...
...21 The above passages testify to the confusion between ideology and reality prevalent among the revisionist schools...
...cit., p. I52...
...Confronted with the revisionist schools, Freud's theory now assumes a new significance: it reveals more than ever before the depth of its criticism, and—perhaps for the first time—those of its elements which transcend the prevailing order and link the theory of repression with that of its abolition...
...The Editors Psychoanalysis has changed its function in the intellectual culture of our time, in accordance with the fundamental social changes that occurred during the first half of the century...
...At the present stage, the personality tends towards a standardized reaction pattern established by the hierarchy of power and functions and by its technical, intellectual, and cultural apparatus...
...18 This passage may serve as a starting point for exemplifying the decline of theory in the revisionist schools...
...Freud did not see that sickness, treatment, and cure are a matter of "interpersonal relationships" in which total personalities are engaged on both sides...
...In doing soi, the revisionists discarded those of Freud's psychological tools which were incompatible with the anachronistic revival of philosophical idealism—the very tools with which Freud had uncovered the explosive instinctual and social roots of the personality...
...Such renunciation may indeed be an indispensable step on the road to human progress...
...In an alienated world, specimens of the genus confront each other: parentchild, male-female...
...the function of the unconscious...
...22 Ernest Beaglehole, "Interpersonal Theory and Social Psychology," in A Study in Interpersonal Relations, ed...
...Whatever society may do to the individual, it prevents neither him nor the analyst from concentrating on the total personality and its productive development...
...Of such a nature are the ideas of justice, equality and cooperation...
...cit., vol...
...The realization of a "better future" involves far more than the elimination of the bad features of the "market," of the "ruthlessness" of competition, etc.—it involves a fundamental change in the instinctual as well as cultural structure...
...3o Fromm, Man for Himself, esp...
...If he refrains from regarding the inhuman existence as a passing negative aspect of progressing humanity, he is more human than the good-natured tolerance of his critics who brand his "inhuman" coldness...
...Fromm, who has demonstrated the repressive features of internalization as few other analysts have done, revives the ideology of internalization...
...Fromm traces the effectiveness of these taboos at the very core of Freudian theory, in Freud's position toward sexual morality...
...Ours is a life not of brotherliness, happiness, contentment but of spiritual chaos and bewilderment...
...To this, the following insights are added: One cannot become a human being except through cultural experience...
...Even without the hypothesis of the Death Instinct and of the conservative nature of the instincts, Sullivan's proposition is shallow and questionable...
...the libidinal claims propel progress toward freedom and universal gratification of human needs beyond the patricentric-acquisitive stage...
...Freud had established a substantive link between human freedom and happiness on the one hand and sexuality on the other...
...In contrast, the revisionists shift the emphasis "from the past to the present," 14 from the biological to the cultural level, from the "constitution" of the individual to his environment...
...Society's part in the regimentation of man is thus played down...
...That is, the analytic situation is essentially a human relationship...
...In contrast, there is a strong undertone of irony in Freud's usage of "freedom," "happiness," "personality"—these terms seem to have invisible quotation marks, or their negative content is explicitly stated...
...Clara Thompson13 is taken as a representative historian of the revisionists...
...Freud demonstrated constraint, repression,* and renunciatioln as the stuff from which the "free personality" was made...
...As the repression of instinctual gratification recedes into the background and loses its decisive importance for the realization of man, the depth of societal repression is reduced...
...This may still be practicable in a social environment where toleration is a constitutive element of personal, economic, and political relationships, but must endanger the very idea of "cure" and even the very existence of psychoanalysis when society can no longer afford such toleration...
...44 But the impulses which this hypothesis assumes are incompatible with the moralistic philosophy of progress espoused by the revisionists...
...39 Man for Himself, p. 250...
...The "goal" of the Pleasure Principle, namely, "to be happy," "is not attainable," 0 although the efforts to attain it shall not and cannot be abandoned...
...The instinctual apparatus itself is—in certain of its foundations—a biological datum, but to a high degree modifiable...
...IV Once the human aspirations and their fulfilment are internalized and sublimated to the "higher self," the social issues become primarily spiritual issues, and their solution becomes a moral task...
...Or one defines them in terms of their transcending content, including their socially denied potentialities beyond (and beneath) their actual existence: in this case, their realization would imply transgression beyond the established form of civilization and to radically new modes of "personality" and "individuality" incompatible with the prevailing ones...
...16 Then the subject of psychoanalysis becomes the "total personality" in its "relatedness to the world," and the "constructive aspects of the individual," his "productive and positive potentiali ties" receive the attention they deserve...
...If man is inherently destructive and consequently unhappy, why strive for a better future?46 The revisionist argument minimizes the degree to which, in Freudian theory, impulses are modifiable, subject to the "vicissitudes" of history...
...The mutilation of the instinct theory completes the reversal of Freudian theory...
...The chief objections of the revisionists to Freud may be summed up as follows: Freud has grossly underrated the extent to which the individual and his neurosis are determined by conflicts with his environment...
...In abandoning this insistence, from which psychoanalytic theory drew all its critical insights, the revisionists yield to the negative features of the very Reality Principle which they so eloquently criticize...
...IV, 1935, p. 374 f. 8 Ibid., p. 395...
...8 However, with these demands, psychoanalysis faces a fateful dilemma...
...there are also the constructive, productive aspects...
...31 The style suggests the Power of Positive Thinking to which the revisionist critique succumbs...
...House Report No...
...The revisionist mutilation cif the instinct theory leads to the traditional devaluation of the sphere of material needs in favor of spiritual needs...
...the hypothesis of the Primal Horde, the killing of the primal father and its consequences) were minimized or discarded altogether...
...Behind all the differences between the historical forms of society, Freud has seen the basic inhumanity common to all of them, and the repressive controls which perpetuate, in the instinctual structure itself, the domination of man by man...
...According to Homey, society creates "certain typical difficulties . . . which, accumulated, may lead to the formation of neurosis...
...Fromm writes: Genuine love is rooted in productiveness and may properly he called, therefore, 'productive love.' Its essence is the same whether it is the mother's love for the child, our love for man, or the erotic love between two individuals...
...Society creates new needs in people...
...The critical sociological insights contained in Reich's earlier writings are thus arrested...
...The discussion has no other purpose than to throw in relief, by contrast, the critical implications of psychoanalytic theory emphasized in the preceding chapters of this study...
...here, they appear as uncomprehended, external factors...
...Thus purified, the psyche can again be redeemed by idealistic ethics and religion...
...Society, to be sure, receives a share of the indictment, but, in the last analysis, it is man himself who is at fault...
...In Freud's theory, civilization appears as established in contradiction to the primary instincts and to the Pleasure Principle...
...They thus tend to cancel individuality...
...To that extent, and only to that extent can psychoanalysis break the reification in which the human relations are petrified...
...And this critical sociological function of psychoanalysis derives from the fundamental role of sexuality as a "productive force...
...The revisionist concept vacillates between the two definitions...
...Today, this would mean "curing" the patient to become a rebel or (which is saying the same thing) a martyr...
...5 Loc...
...Freud refrains from calling repression by any other name than its own...
...Identifying the energy of the Life Instincts as libido meant defining their gratification in contradiction to spiritual transcendentalism: Freud's notion of happiness and freedom is eminently critical in so far as it is materialistic: protesting against the spiritualization of want...
...It would be revealing to make a comparative analysis of the Freudian and Neo-Freudian style...
...The latter, in the more philosophical writings, comes frequently close to that of the sermon, or of the social worker...
...Now they no longer contribute to the preservation of society but strive for the building of new social formations...
...Fromm emphasizes that the idea of a matricentric culture—regardless of its anthropological merit—envisions a Reality Principle geared not to the interest of domination, but to gratified libidinal relations among men...
...Moreover, in this process some of Freud's most decisive concepts (the relation between Id and Ego...
...The most serious attempt to develop the critical social theory implicit in Freud was made in Wilhelm Reich's earlier writings...
...they are interrelated at first in specific modes of the universal alienation...
...it is elevated and yet clear...
...The acceptance of the Reality Principle, with which psychoanalytic therapy ends, means to the individual acceptance of the civilized regimentation of his instinctual needs, especially of sexuality...
...The new conception is chiefly characterized by an "unconditional affirmation of the patient's claim for happiness" and the "liberation of morality from its tabooistic features...
...38 According to Fromm, the negative impact of society upon the individual is more seric us, but this is only a challenge to practice productive love and productive thinking...
...in so far as it is possible it seeks to free him from its irrational demands and make him more able to develop his potentialities and to assume leadership in building a more constructive society.29 The tension between health and knowledge, normality and freedom, which animated Freud's entire work, here disappears...
...Their acceptance in this form demands the shift in psychological emphasis from infancy to maturity, for only at the level of developed consciousness does the cultural environment become definable as determining character and personality over and above the biological level...
...It must also paralyze efforts to change anything in these conditions...
...The following article forms an epilogue to a book that is to appear this fall under the imprint of Beacon Press...
...However, we believe that in this shift of emphasis the exact opposite happens: the impact of society on the psyche is weakened...
...In only very few people of culture are the two strains of tenderness and sensuality duly fused into one: the man almost always feels his sexual activity hampered by his respect for the woman and only develops full sexual potency when he finds himself in the presence of a lower type of sexual object . . . a4 According to Freud, love, in our culture, can and must be practiced as "aim-inhibited sexuality," with all the taboos and constraints placed upon it by a monogamic-patriarchal society...
...Either one defines "personality" and "individuality" in terms of their possibilities within the established form of civilizatioln, then their realization is for the vast majority tantamount to successful adjustment...
...Neurosis, too, appears as an essentially moral problem, and the individual is held responsible for the failure of his self-realization...
...If this is indeed (as the author thinks) the course which revisionism has taken, then it is due to the objective social dynamic of the period: in an anti-liberal society, individual happiness and productive development are in contradiction to society...
...When the destructive elements predominate, we have a situation which fosters war...
...Marcuse's book deals with some of the social, political and cultural implications of Freudian theory...
...Whereas Freud, focusing on the vicissitudes of the primary instincts, had discovered society in the most concealed layer of the genus and individual man, the revisionists, aiming at the reified, ready-made form rather than at the origin of the societal institutions and relations, fail to comprehend what these institutions and relations have done to the personality whom they are supposed to fulfill...
...If sexuality does not play the constitutional role which Freud attributed to it, then there is no fundamental conflict between the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle...
...By virtue of this insight Freud's "static concept of society" is closer tt, the truth than the dynamic sociological concepts supplied by the revisionists...
...Freud wrote during the first World War: Think of the colossal brutality, cruelty and mendacity which is now allowed to spread itself over the civilized world...
...The analyst and his patient share this alienation, and since it does not usually manifest itself in any neurotic symptom but rather as the hallmark of "mental health," it does not appear in the revisionist consciousness...
...and in spite of the outspoken critique of some social institutions, the revisionist sociology accepts the foundations on which these institutions rest...
...Freud was fully aware of this discrepancy, which may be formulated—much over-simplified—as follows: while psychoanalytic theory recognizes that the sickness of the individual is ultimately caused and sustained by the sickness of his civilization, psychoanalytic therapy aims at curing the individual so that he can continue to function as part of this civilization without surrendering to it altogether...
...The latter is all that therapy can achieve...
...Freud did indeed not believe in prospective social changes that would alter human nature sufficiently to free man from external and internal oppression...
...However, Freud's question whether the higher values of culture have not been achieved at too great a cost for the individual should be serious enough to enjoin the psychoanalytic philosopher from preaching them without revealing their forbidden content—without showing what they have denied to the individual...
...Short of such demonstration, the revisionist improvement of Freud's `one-sidedness" is a blank discarding of his fundamental theoretical conception...
...a sweeping primitivism becomes prevalent which foreshadows the wild and fantastic hobbies of Reich's later years...
...Then there is the adduction of sociological concepts...
...23 Sullivan, Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry, loc...
...The inner direction of the latter was (in apparent contrast to "the therapeutic program" from Id to Ego) that from consciousness to the unconscious, from personality to childhood, from the individual to the generic processes...
...man is not only against but also for himself...
...He took this discovery very seriously—much too seriously to identify happiness with its efficient sublimation in productive activities...
...The notion that "civilization and its discontent" had their roots in the biological constitution of man profoundly influenced Freud's concept of the function and goal of therapy...
...Psychoanalysis was a radically critical theory...
...tc Ibid., p. 42...
...39 In the period of totalitarianism, where the individual has so entirely become the subject-object of manipulation that, for the "healthy and normal" person, even the idea of a distinction between being "for himself" and "for others" has become meaningless, where the omnipotent apparatus punishes real non-conformity with ridicule and defeat—in such a situation the Neo-Freudian philosopher tells the individual to be himself and for himself...
...36 Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, p. 119...
...Considering what civilization has made of man, the difference in the development of personalities is chiefly that between an unproportional and a proportional share of that "everyday unhappiness" which is the common lot of mankind...
...Conversely, the weakening of the psychoanalytic conception, and especially of the theory of sexuality, must lead to a weakening of the sociological critique and to a reduction of the social substance of psychoanalysis...
...The right to such re-orientations in the interest of successful therapy and practice is not questioned here, but the revisionists have converted the elimination of Freudian theory to a new theory, and the significance of this theory alone will be discussed presently...
...And this redefinition must in turn entail a weakening of the explosive content of psychoanalytic theory as well as of its explosive social criticism...
...If and when they cease to be so and grow into truly personal relations, they still retain the universal repressiveness which they surmount as their comprehended negative—then they do not require treatment...
...Freud does not readily believe that the "basic direction of the organism is forward...
...The critical insights do not lead to a transvaluation of the values of productiveness and the "higher self"—which are exacly the values of the criticized culture...
...In this Utopia, he and his fellows will be good and kind—for them will he no more injustice, and so forth...
...25 See Freud's statement in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 332-333...
...To the revisionists, the brute fact of societal repression has transformed itself into a "moral problem"—as it has done in the conformist philosophy of all ages...
...But the latter survives in the Id, and the civilized Ego must permanently fight its own timeless past and forbidden future...
...The "basic" direction of the organism appears as a quite different one in the persistent impulses towards relief of tension, toward fulfilment, rest, passivity...
...But looking at himself what can he say...
...Looking at his creation, he can say, truly, it is good...
...We shall try to show that in these schools, psychoanalytic theory turns into ideology: the "personality" and its creative potentialities are resurrected in the face of a reality which has all but eliminated the conditions for the personality and its fulfilment...
...Underlying the societal organization of the human existence are basic libidinal wants and needs—highly plastic and pliable, they are shaped and utilized to "cement" the respective society...
...man's instinctual nature is "purified" and adapted to attain, without mutilation, socially useful and recognized happiness...
...29 Clara Thompson, loc...
...cit., p. 15, 182...
...This intellectual feat is accomplished by expurgating the instinctual dynamic and reducing its part in the mental life...
...With this attitude, Fromm contrasts another conception of therapy, first perhaps formulated by Ferenczi, according to which the analyst rejects patricentric-authoritarian taboos and enters into a positive rather than neutral relation with the patient...
...The "higher self" thrones over the domesticated impulses and aspirations of the individual who has sacrificed and renounced his "lower self" not only in so far as it is incompatible with civilization but in so far as it is incompatible with repressive civilization...
...The Neo-Freudians reverse this inner direction of Freud's theory, shifting the emphasis from the organism to the personality, from the material foundations to the ideal values...
...Moreover, secondary factors and relationships (of the mature person and his cultural environment) are now given the dignity of primary processes—a switch in orientation designed to emphasize the influence of the social reality on the formation of the personality...
...Karen Horney states succinctly the revisionist position: Freud's assumption [of a Death Instinct] implies that the ultimate motivation for hostility or destructiveness lies in the impulse to destroy...
...15 "One can understand the biological development better if one discards the concept df libido altogether" and instead interprets the different stages "in terms of growth and of human relations...
...Erich Fromm's early articles are devoted to the effort to free Freud's theory from its identification with present-day society, to sharpen the psychoanalytic notions which reveal the connection between instinctual and economic structures and at the same time indicate the possibility of progress beyond patricentricacquisitive culture...
...Thus, in what Fromm calls the patricentric-acquisitive society the libidinal impulses and their satisfaction (and deflection) are co-ordinated with the interests of domination and thereby become a stabilizing force which binds the majority to the ruling minority...
...Report of the Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, 1952...
...35 Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 77, footnote...
...permeated with well-meaning and tolerance and yet moved by an "esprit de serieux" which makes transcendental values into facts of everyday life...
...otherwise it is merely an inconsequential adornment, bought at the expense of mutilating Freud's theory of instincts...
...Fromm stresses the sociological substance of Freud's theory: psychoanalysis understands the socio-psychological phenomena as processes of active and passive adjustment of the instinctual apparatus to the socio-economic situation...
...precisely because we can visualize the universal satisfaction of individual needs, the strongest obstacles are placed in the way to such satisfaction...
...the general repressiveness shapes the individual and universalizes even his most personal features...
...Compare with Fromm's sermon on love Freud's almost incidental remarks in "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life...
...The Neo-Freudian "sociological" or "cultural" orientation provides the other side of the picture—the "not only but also...
...19 Erich Fromm, loc...
...But to such consciousness these values themselves become intolerable because it recognizes them as accessories to the enslavement of man...
...33 Man for Himself, p. 98...
...It is distilled from the representative works of Erich Fromm, Karen Homey, and Harry Stack Sullivan...
...Only if the sociological analysis elucidates this connection does it go beyond Freud...
...Consequently, the revisionist emphasis on the influence of "social conditions" in the development of the neurotic personality is sociologically and psychologically far more inconsequential than Freud's "neglect" of these conditions...
...30 But here the matter rests...
...For the individual situations are the derivatives and appearances of the general fate, and, as Freud has shown, it is the latter which contains the clue to the fate of the individual...
...It is true that man appears as an individual who "integrates" a diversity of inherited and acquired qualities into a total personality, and that the latter develops in relating himself to the world (things and people) under manifold and varying conditions...
...The revisionist schools have obliterated this discrepancy between theory and therapy by assimilating the former to the latter...
...If, beyond this truism, the concept implies more, namely, that "two or more persons come to define an integrated situation" which is made up of "individuals" 22—then the implication is fallacious...
...Freud had recognized the work of repression in the highest values of Western civilization—they presuppose and perpetuate unfreedom and suffering...
...Love must be semi-sublimated and even inhibited libido, keeping in line with the sanctioned conditions imposed on sexuality...
...We shall give here only a brief illustration: One of the most cherished demands of the revisionists is that the "total personality" of the individual rather than his early childhood or his biological structure or his psychosomatic condition be made the subject of psychoanalysis: The infinite diversity of personalities is in itself characteristic of human existence...
...This movement was essential for Freud's critique of civilization: only through the "regression" behind the mystifying forms of the mature individual and his private and public existence did he discover their basic negativity in the foundations on which they rest...
...9 This rebellion, although originating in the instinctual "nature" of man, is a disease which has to be cured—not only because it is against a hopelessly superior power, but because it is against "necessity...
...Conversely only the playing-down of the biological level, the mutilation of the instinct theory, makes the personality definable in terms of objective cultural values divorced from the repressive ground which denies their realization...
...The revisionists fail to recognize, or fail to draw the consequences from the actual state of alienation which makes the person into an exchangeable function and the personality into an ideology...
...Love, taken seriously, is outlawed: There is no longer any place in present-day civilized life for a simple natural love between two human beings.ss But to the revisionists, productiveness, love, happiness, and health merge in grand harmony...
...Over and against such a "minimum program," Erich Fromm and the other revisionists proclaim a higher goal of therapy: "optimal development of a person's potentialities and the realization of his individuality...
...The revisionist usage of these terms plays on this ambiguity which designates both the unfree and the free, the mutilated and the integral faculties of man, thus vesting the established Reality Principle with the grandeur of promises that can be redeemed only beyond this Reality Principle...
...the destruction instinct operates against the Life Instincts or in their service...
...For this reason, the distinction is merely eclectic, extraneous to theory, and tantamount to the conformistic "accentuate the positive": Freud was right, life is bad, repressive, destructive—but it isn't so bad, repressive, destructive...
...As a result, productiveness, love, responsibility become "values" only in so far as they contain manageable resignation and are practiced within the framework of socially useful activities—in other words, after repressive sublimation, and then they involve the effective denial of free productiveness and responsibility—the renunciation of happiness...
...46 Ibid., p. 132...
...37 The disharmony between society " and the individual is stated and left alone...
...Erich Fromm will reply to Mr...
...28 The revisionists claim that their psychoanalysis is in itself a critique of society: The aim of the 'cultural school' goes beyond merely enabling man to submit to the restrictions of his society...
...4 Fromm followed up this conception in his article on "The Sociopsychological Significance of the Theory of Matriarchy...
...Moreover, only by pushing his critical regression back to the deepest biological layer could Freud elucidate the hidden content of the mystifying forms and, at the same time, the full scope of civilized repression...
...In this case, except for his dealings with his fellow radicals, the man may act as if he had acquired the psychopathic type of personality discussed in the third lecture...
...The hypothesis of the Death Instinct and its role in civilized aggression shed light on one of the neglected enigmas of civilization: it revealed the hidden unconscious tie which binds the oppressed to their oppressors, the soldiers to their generals, the individuals to their masters...
...the whole may be summed up as follows: The "cultural orientation" encounters the societal institutions and relationships as finished products, in the form of objective entities—given rather than made facts...
...How much reality is behind individuality depends on the scope, form, and effectiveness of the repressive controls prevalent at the respective stage of civilization...
...According to Horney, we wish to destroy because we are or feel endangered, humiliated, abused," because we want to defend our safety or our happiness or what appears to us as such...
...The instinctual structure demands rather than precludes the rise of a free civilization on the basis of the achievements of patricentric culture, but through the transformation of its institutions: Sexuality offers one of the most elemental and strongest possibilities of gratification and happiness...
...2 1 Harry Stack Sullivan, Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry, William Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation, Washington, 1947, p. 48...
...still, the analyst, as a physician, must accept the social framework of facts in which the patient has to live and which he cannot alter...
...Leadership in building a more constructive society" is to be combined with normal functioning in the established society...
...11 The subsequent discussion is concerned only with the later stages of Neo-Freudian psychology where the regressive features of the movement appear as predominant...
...45 New Ways in Psychoanalysis, p. 130-131...
...But this personality and its development are preformed down to the deepest instinctual structure, and this preformation, the work of accumulated civilization, makes the diversities and the autonomy of individual "growth" secondary phenomena...
...The revisionist solution of the conflict through the spiritualization of freedom and happiness demanded the weakening of the link...
...There is furthermore the distinction between good and bad, constructive and destructive (Fromm: productive and unproductive, positive and negative) , which is not derived from any theoretical principle but simply taken from the prevalent ideology...
...See A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, New York, Garden City Publishing Co., 1943, p. 397 f. 12 See New Introductory Lectures, New York, W. W. Norton, 1933, p. 206...
...22 Patrick Mullahy, Introduction to A Study of Interpersonal Relations, loc...
...Then, the revisions of psychoanalysis began to gain momentum...
...NOTES: i See Edward Glover, Freud or Jung, W. W. Norton, New York, 1950...
...The character of the revisionist philosophy shows forth in the assimilation of the positive and negative, the promise and its betrayal...
...The revisionist rejection of the Death Instinct is accompanied by an argument which indeed seems to point up the "reactionary" implications of Freudian theory as contrasted with the progressive sociological orientation of the revisionists: Freud's assumption of a Death Instinct paralyzes any effort to search in the specific cultural conditions for reasons which make for destructiveness...
...The affirmation absorbs the critique...
...What this omission does to psychoanalytic theory may be illustrated by contrasting Fromm's and Freud's idea of love...
...In the interpersonal situation, the analyst is seen as relating to his patient not only with his distorted affects but with his healthy personality also...
...Its consequences for psychoanalytic theory are much graver: the revisionist "supplementation" of Freudian theory, especially their adduction of cultural and environmental factors consecrate a false picture of civilization and particularly of present-day society—in minimizing the extent and depth of the conflict, the revisionists proclaim a false but easy solution...
...For example, productiveness, proclaimed as a goal of the healthy individual must normally (that is, outside the creative, "neurotic" and "eccentric" exceptions) show forth in good business, administration, service, with the reasonable expectation of recognized success...
...20 Clara Thompson, loc...
...What has become a sham is taken as real...
...When the process of alienation is discussed, it is usually treated, not as the whole that it is, but as a negative aspect of the whole...
...Marcuse's book, the article printed below follows upon a full development of his own views...
...This limitation is enforced not only by my own lack of competence but also by a discrepancy between theory and therapy inherent in psychoanalysis itself...
...cit., p. 96...
...Freud destroys the traditional illusions of idealistic ethics: the "personality" is but a "broken" individual who has internalized and successfully utilized repression and aggression...
...IV, p. 210...
...Theoretically, the difference between mental health and neurosis lies only in the degree and effectiveness of resignation: mental health is successful, efficient resignation— normally so efficient that it shows forth as moderately happy satisfaction...
...The fulfilment of this claim requires the availability of the material means for its satisfaction and must therefore entail the explosion of the prevailing social order.fi The social content of Freudian theory becomes manifest: sharpening of the psychoanalytical concepts means sharpening their critical function, their opposition to the prevailing form of society...
...The wholesale destructions which marked the progress of civilization within the framework of domination were perpetuated, in the face of their possible abolition, by the instinctual agreement with their executioners on the part of the human instruments and victims...
...the Neo-Freudians sometimes sublimate it into its opposite...
...The therapy of adjustment is rejected in the strongest terms;28 the "deification" of success is denounced...
...and the psychoanalytic theory of the mental apparatus can be rewritten as a philosophy of the soul...
...9 "The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis," in Collected Papers, Hogarth Press, London, 1950, Vol...
...the scope and significance of sexuality) were redefined in such a way that their explosive connotations were all but eliminated...
...Moreover, Freud had a "static" concept of society and thought that society developed as a "mechanism for controlling man's instincts," whereas the revisionists know "from the study of comparative cultures" that "man is not biologically endowed with dangerous fixed animal drives and that the only function of society is to control these...
...He shows no durable grasp of his own reality or that of others, and his actions are controlled by the most immediate opportunism, without consideration of the probable future.23 The idea does not occur that the insecurity was rational and reasonable, that not his but the others' self-organization was derogatory and hateful, that the destructiveness involved in the new dogma might indeed be constructive in so far as it aims at a higher stage of realization...
...These are care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge...
...This philosophy is achieved by directing the criticism against surface phenomena, while accepting the basic premises of the criticized society...
...We have suggested that the energy of the Death Instinct must not necessarily "paralyze" the efforts to obtain a "better future"—on the contrary, such efforts are rather paralyzed by the systematic constraints which civilization places on the Life Instincts, and by their consequent inability to "bind" aggression effectively...
...If the "wound" in the human existence is not operative in the biological constitution of man, and if it is not caused and sustained by the very structure of civilization, then the depth dimension is removed from under psychoanalysis, and the (ontogenetic and phylogenetic) conflict between pre- and supra-individual forces appears as a problem of the rational or irrational, moral or immoral behavior of conscious individuals...
...The sociological concreteness of the revisionists reveals itself as surface: the decisive struggles are fought out in the "soul" of man...
...the therapeutical merits of the revisionist schools are entirely outside the scope of this discussion...
...The collapse of the liberalistic era, the spreading totalitarian trend and the efforts to break this trend, are reflected in the position of psychoanalysis...
...17 Consequently, his psychology contains no ethics or only his personal ethics...
...The discussion will neglect the difference among the various revisionist groups and concentrate on the theoretical attitude common to all of them...
...27 Present-day society and culture are accused of greatly impeding the realization of the healthy and mature person...
...o The preconception to which I am leading is this: personality tends toward the state that we call mental health or interpersonal adjustive success, handicaps by way of acculteration notwithstanding...
...p. 67 ff, 127 f. 31 Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, p. 75...
...See Helen Merrel Lynd's review in The Nation, January 15, 1949...
...This `operational" identification of mental health with "adjustive success" and progress eliminates all the reservations with which Freud hedged the therapeutic objective of adjustment to an inhuman society 25 and thus commits psychoanalysis to this society far more than Freud ever did...
...33 Compare with this ideological formulation Freud's analysis of the instinctual ground and underground of love, of the long and painful process in which sexuality with all its polymorphous perversity is tamed and inhibited until it ultimately becomes susceptible to fusion with tenderness and affection—a fusion which remains precarious and never quite overcomes its destructive elements...
...On the "right wing" of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung's psychology soon became an obscurantist pseudo-mythology.l The "center" of revisionism took shape in the cultural and inter-personal schools—the most popular trend of psychoanalysis today...
...The substance of psychoanalytic theory lies not simply in the discovery of the role of the unconscious but in the description of its specific instinctual dynamic, of the vicissitudes of the two basic instincts...
...7 Loc...
...61, New York, 1936, p. 232...
...There is first the laboring of the obvious, of routine wisdom...
...if they are defined as values to be realized within this society, they become themselves repressive...
...And as the clinical fact of neurosis becomes "in the last analysis, a symptom of moral failure," 40 the "psychoanalytic cure of the soul" becomes education in the attainment of a "religious" attitude...
...moreover, not destruction per se is the objective of the Death Instinct but the elimination of the need for destruction...
...is Thompson, toe...
...By the same token, however, fundamental changes in the social structure will entail corresponding changes in the instinctual structure...
...the Neo-Freudian schools propagate the very same values as cure against unfreedom and suffering—as the triumph over repression...
...Society is not only this, but also that...
...In the last analysis, the question is only how much resignation the individual can bear without busting up...
...The revisionists have no such trouble...
...Contrary to appearance, this is what has happened in the "cultural schools...
...10 Civilization and It.s Discontents, London, Hogarth Press, 1949, p. 39...
...Only the history of these vicissitudes reveals the full depth of the oppression which civilization imposes upon man...
...I, 1932, p. 39 f. a Ibid., p. 51...
...The subsequent mature relations "recreate" the formative ones...
...then master-servant, boss-employee...
...He is often a person whose self-organization is derogatory and hateful...
...they cease, as it were, to be cement and instead become dynamite...
...These distinctions are meaningless and—as we shall try to show—even wrong unless the task (which Freud took upon himself) is fulfilled: to demonstrate how, under the impact of civilization, the two "aspects" are interrelated in the instinctual dynamic itself, and how the one inevitably turns into the other by virtue of this dynamic...
...The depth dimension of the conflict between the individual and his society, between the instinctual structure and the realm of consciousness was flattened out...
...cit., vol...
...Anxiety, love, confidence—even the will to freedom and solidarity with the group to which one belongs 3 come to serve the economically structured relationships of domination and subordination...
...Present-day authoritarianism and the "deification of the machine and of success" threaten the "most precious spiritual possessions" of man 3 6 The revisionist minimization of the biological sphere, and especially of the role of sexuality shifts the emphasis not only from the unconscionus to consciousness, from the Id to the Ego, but also from the pre-sublimated to the sublimated expressions of the human existence...
...To be sure, personality has not disappeared (this would be a fatefully wrong formulation) : it continues to flower, it is even fostered and educated, but in such a way that the expressions of personality fit and sustain perfectly the socially desired pattern of behavior and thought...
...This process, which has been completed in the "mass culture" of late industrial civilization, vitiates the concept of interpersonal relations if it is to denote more than the undeniable fact that all relations in which the human being finds itself are either relations to other persons or abstractions from them...
...Patrick Mullahy, Hermitage Press, New York, 1950, p. 54...
...on his willingness to face his and his society's moral problem...
...34 Collected Papers, vol...
...Tentatively entitled EROS AND CIVILIZATION...
Vol. 2 • July 1955 • No. 3
