Psychoanalysis and the communist movement

Science, Marxism and Freud aren't related.

Marxism and Freud aren't scientific.

Someone's been reading Popper

Psychoanalysis can useful in some contexts, especially in studying and understanding certain historical sources, but this is just my background speaking. It doesn't have to be "scientific" to be useful as an epistemological tool.
Thanks for linking to this article Alf; will read it later.

tbh I think it's pretty obvious that "scientific socialism" is a load of shite; you don't need Popper to tell you that.

No, though I am familiar with what Popper said, I'm speaking as a scientist who has some familiarity with Marxism and Freud and doesn't see either of them as being scientific.

Glad to see this subject brought up.

It certainly relates to "The Decadence Of The Shaman", a fascinating pamphlet by "A member of the ICC" (nudge, nudge).

My main source on Freud and his historical position is The Discovery Of The Unconscious by Henri Ellenberger. Indeed, as far as I can determine, this is a unique text for understanding the evolution of both psychoanalysis and scientific thought from the 19th to the early twentieth century (though it only touches on Marx peripherally).

One point that Ellenberger makes is that Freud both popularized the notion of the unconscious and gave the impression that this idea was a unique to him, that the power of the unconscious was an idea which had previously been suppressed by the establishment. Ellenberger, however, chronicles a broad series of precursors to Freud as well as Freud's immediate descendants.

The obvious problem with Freud is not only did he not achieve anything like modern levels of experimental rigor, his theories were based on observing individuals and so would be subject to many, many kinds of observer bias that modern science has documented.

If Freud had a virtue, it was that he traced the world-historical vision implications of unconscious processes (along with Friedrich Nietzsche, Wilhelm Reich, Julian Jaynes and others). Tor Norretranders, in The User Illusion, documents the point in the 1950's, at the advent of subliminal messaging, when the psychology profession actively suppressed the concept of the unconscious, with professionals falsely that subliminals had no effect. As Norretranders further describes, modern experimentation has, in fact, demonstrated conclusively that the conscious mind comes out of unconscious processes and is influenced by unconscious desires (while subliminals cannot control a person, they can certainly influence a person, etc).

Of course, any writer who has traced world-historical processes is pretty much stepping out on a limb beyond where modern scientific verification is willing to go. Whether Marx's economic theories would qualify as scientific or not, his communist manifesto and other descriptions of the overall historical dynamics of capitalism and communism wouldn't qualify as science in the modern sense.

Still, I think that it would be worthwhile for communists making world-historical extrapolations from science to be as conservative as possible still recognizing that they aren't going to really be scientific. It seems reasonable to compare Freud's ideas of the unconscious with those of Nietzsche, of Janet, Charchot, Bandler, Jaynes, Taoism and Buddhism, Richard Bandler and NLP and others. Also, evolutionary game theory isn't directly a theory of the unconscious but I think it also provides considerable insight into the distinction between a human being's ostensible motives and their "real" motives in a variety of situations. Attribution Theory is another field which may help sort out unconscious and conscious processes.

There has been a lot of debate around 19th dialectical approaches version modern experimental approaches.

But without mumbo-jumbo, I would just say that we revolutionaries should understand that
A) There are variety of unconscious processes happening between human beings.
B) We aren't going to understand these processes at the level of mechanically predicting what they are.
C) We know these processes are real enough that we should be using our human facility of understanding to grasp and process them.
D) Communism, in particular, will be a new process of social relations, a process which at one or another levels is going to have to spread with it's own internal dynamic. Our job is to tease-out, logically, experimentally and cautiously, it's tendencies and historical manifestations. The Leninist error is to view communism as something that will built by a centralized party. But this is just of a general error - viewing communism as something that begins first as a set-program and is only then created.

In aiming to be part of the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, we will have to understandings which haven't been to the fine tolerances of modern physics. But it seems rather that's what happens when one acts in the world, certainly we don't have certain scientific knowledge of the results of the continuing domination of capitalism but it's easy to imagine they are rather bleak.

I know that Lukács in 'The Destruction of Reason' gives a critique of Freud. Would anyone have a copy of that book to send to me? - it's not on the internet.

I would definitely regard the only legacy of psychoanalysis that is worth revisiting is with people that are outside all of the irrational (neo-)Freudian schools, such as Lev Vygotsky and A. N. Leontyev.

What would a list of psychologists of interest to materialist look like?
In rough, chronological order, the names that come to mind are:

Ancient texts: Tantrism, Taoism and Buddhism,
Mesmer and later mesmerists (Janet, Charcot, etc)
Joseph Dietzgen,
Paul Ree and Nietzsche
Freud, Reich etc
Lev Vygotsky, A. N. Leontyev and A. R. Luria
Alfred Korzybski
Joseph Gable
Gregory Bateson
Fritz Perls
Richard Bandler and John Grinder

There's lots more...

Well I have read das capital, all three (or four) volumes and large chunks of Grundrisse. I am also a practising scientist (chemist) with a considerable scorn, scepticism and bias against all things that fall within the orbit of the social ‘sciences’ and philosophy etc.

However I think Karl took a scientific approach in Capital particularly when it came to the theoretical basics eg the ‘labour theory of value’.

In the books it would be inevitable I think given the nature of the subject that pseudo scientific sociological type stuff would end up getting mixed up with it along the way.

That is not to say that I think that Karl had a propensity or natural talent for the scientific approach, there were one or two too many fundamental errors for that.

On the history of the understanding of the nature of the sub conscious; that has been around for as long as literature. Some of the basic concepts like displacement, projection, transference, reaction-formation and rationalisation etc were understood by 19th century authors like Jane Austen and George Elliot who understood them well enough to weave them into the plot lines and make the characters come alive and have more than a two dimensional feel.

Undoubtedly there are earlier examples and a few later ones.

In fact this was a point made by one of the first neo Freudians Karen Horney, friend of another un mentioned one the Marxist Erich Fromm.

It was unfortunate that one of the first people to popularise the idea of bringing the subject under the orbit of ‘scientific’ observation, as were all subjects about then, was a fakir.

As much as you regard mental ‘illness’ or extreme forms of neurosis as not having a ‘biological’ cause, the extent of it in society can be seen as an indicator of how compatible society is to our ‘human nature’. Or that we are living in an environment (probably social) that we were not designed or evolved for.

Which I think is the basic tenet of the ‘humanist’ psychoanalyst Fromm in his book Sane Society.

The following is an extract from one of Karen Horney’s books in which she attempts to stick to the subject matter and not politicise it, too much, otherwise she may have used the word capitalism instead of ‘western civilisation’ I think;

New Ways in Psychoanalysis, Karen Horney MD, Chapter X, Culture and
Neurosis, W. W Norton 1966 pg 173, first published 1939?

May I ask why? What would be a proper scientific way of looking at the past for example (assuming it's the "unscientificness" you despise)?

Well, I just don't think there is any way of approaching human beings taking action "on the stage of history" that could possibly have the same rigor as natural sciences. There are too many unknowns and the processes are too complex. Marx's Capital may have attempted to be conventionally scientific (though I think Marx himself might have argued against this). The historical framework laid in the communist manifesto clearly couldn't be so. And most folks "influenced by Marx" get their politics from the manifesto or from later writings which also sketch the struggle between capitalist and proletarian.

But I think this makes the problem of finding the proper method even more pressing than finding a proper method within natural sciences. We could veer off back into the whole discussion of dialectics but I think the minimum one can say is that one needs a method which takes into account that we're engaged with the process of change in our society using our highly imperfect knowledge, knowledge hasn't been scientifically verified but which is a product of our evolution (if we threw-out all of our biased, uncertain, scientific knowledge, we'd be left with none of the effective rules of thumb that actually allow us to deal with the world).

On the fear in capitalism; I am just reading Dieter Duhm's book called "fear in capitalism". I can reccommend it..

On marx and science; I think for Marx science was not about being "socially objective" or something like that. In fact (as a sociologist) I can say that all the social sciences are full of shit. They are not objective in any way. Most of the social sciences (including history, sociology, political sciences, economics, philosophy, etc) are eclectical ideological garbage. Their merit is in their effort to turn underlying ideological assumptions into statistical (sociology, economics) or "historical" truths i.e. lying

For instance the "refutable hypothesis" of sociological research is in practice done by constructing academically "common sense" concepts and "theoretical mechanisms". The theoretical mechanisms can be fully flawed, theoretically weak and eclectical. For sociological researher that does not matter. His magic is in showing it "scientific" by "collecting data"...

In that sense Communist Manifesto is one of the most scientific texts I have ever read. It is historical. It is clear in its assumptions and theoretical mechanisms. And it is open to logical criticisms done by its own methodology...

I don't think it's really possible to rigorously define science, so I think you'll have a hard time proving Marx's work isn't scientific; at the same time I don't think it's particularly useful to assert that it is. If we say Marx was (or wasn't) scientific in his approach, does that make his approach any more or less valuable or interesting? Imho, no.

Whether or not Marx was a scientist, he was still an insightful theorist of the workings of capitalism. His insights are the same whether we call his working scientific or not.

Clearly not everything Marx ever wrote can be considered scientific, nor was it meant to be. The Manifesto, in particular, is a political pamphlet which was not intended to lay out all of the arguments in a clear and transparent way, but to present theses of a program in a persuasive style (and in this it was genre-grounding). The text is actually based on a number of presuppositions which it does not explain at all.

On the other hand, Marx's work on the critique of political economy - that is, most of what he wrote - can be, in my opinion, considered as a scientific project, although based on a very specific understanding of what science is (radically different from what the mainstream standard was back then, and different in many ways from what it is today). To a proponent of Comte-styled positivism or Mill's empiricism, Marx's talk of "forms of appearance" and "essences" may seem unscientific, of course. However, I think it is quite clear from the preparatory writings as well as from the correspondence that Marx's norms on rational procedures and argumentation were extreme (unlike those of most philosophers, utopians, "theorists" etc.) and that his intention was to "revolutionize a science" (i.e. political economy) by means of a deep methodological critique, based on well-defined standards and categories.

Also, I think one has to bear in mind that 1. What K. R. Popper criticizes in The Poverty of Historicism is Marxism, i.e. a caricature of Marx's thought and 2. Popper's philosophy of science itself has been subjected to a lot of devastating critique over the last 60 years and not just (not even mostly) by marxists.

I'm all in favor of the critique of political economy and it is possible that the bulk of the words penned by Marx were on political economy. But the significance of Marx is that he laid out, in works like the manifestothe, a political/historical/economic framework/program: communism.

The communist program (or conceptual framework or whatever) can only called scientific with a significantly different definition of "scientific" than we are used to.

Red, sure, but the critique of political economy (which, I think, is scientific) serves as a theoretical justification of the program. And, on second thought, wasn't precisely this why Marx embarked on his theoretical research?

I tend to use the word "scientific" as opposed to the "ideological"...

On Critique of Political Economy Karl did in fact do a brilliant, and I think scientific, analysis on paper money in 1859 including the velocity of money theory.

Something for which Milton Friedman won a Nobel prize in economics almost 100 years later;

I seem to remeber getting my pencil and paper out and doing a mathematical proof when i read it.

Karl Marx: Critique of Political Economy c. Coins and Tokens of Value

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch02_2c.htm

The whole thing is worth a read.

However Karl didn’t have the obvious example of the 1930’s Germany to go from.

However having said that he did rob the idea a bit from some predecessors.

But he admitted it.

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=f61a158a-aff7-42cf-b433-1ef78ffa20fd&k=78243

Freud was a trained neuro-scientist, but because the tools of neuroscience were and still are too primitive to accurately observe subjective phenomena like the psychodynamic power of sub-conscious inner conflics, he and we are forced to interpret this phenomena using instead the the experience of millions of case studies that comprehensively and accurately map-out the patterns of human behavior.

Psychodynamics (psychoanalysis) is thus an interpretive science not yet an empirical science.

Yet, just as Freud predicted, every year that neuroscience advances it's sophistication, neuro-scientists like the world famous Vilayanur S. Ramachandran become increasingly able to empirically verify Freud's observations.

Freud observed that, not only does mass society = mass neurosis, but that, all our social relations are determined by dialectical inner conflicts in childhood.

Unfortunately, the neurosis that stems from childhood inner conflicts will always prevent us from living together as true sisters and brothers in the communal egalitarianism of anarchy.

Anarchy is thus, a mental health issue.

If Freud is right, a successful revolution to change our social relations must be based on resolving our mass society's mass neurosis, after which, a change in our means of production will be automatic.

Just started to read: Freud Was Wrong by Richard Webster.

Psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience.

This short article in the Soicialist Standard on Marx and Freud may be of interest

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/may06/page14.html

and the letters it provoked here

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/jul06/text/page5.html

And another book review here

http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/dec02/booksdec.html#SubHead2

Then Maddison Avenue is spending $300 billion a year artfully manipulating the subconscious motivations of a pseudoscience!!

I strongly recommend digesting 'ajjohnstone's letters in reply- link.

There are things that you can rescue from Freud but on the whole I am hostile to it.

The problem with it as far as I am concerned is that it is like unravelling spaghetti, and it is about 10 years since I last went into it. And like areas that you investigate and consider garbage, you tend to send it all into the recycle bin and try to forget it.

I think Freud started of from a Darwinian perspective and that the whole function of any living organism and therefore its instincts is to have sex (instinct A) and to stay alive until tomorrow, ego (instinct B), in order to have more sex.

Rather than rational processes or ‘consciousness’ being an independent thing in itself, it was in fact a slave to the ‘selfish’ instinct to preserve the organisms existence and to copulate. Or at least to obtain sexual pleasure which allegedly can be obtained in a perverted and twisted form by listening to a Mahler symphony or eating ice cream.

And thus all human activity has to be reduced to merely the manifestation, albeit often a surreal distortion, of the sex drive and the ego. Etc etc.

Actually I think that that basic starting point is not as mad as it seems and is a reasonable hypothesis or scientific reductionist starting point.

It is of course an anti ‘blank slate position’, but that is OK with me. As the default position must be that humans are animals, animals have instincts and therefore humans must have instincts.

The position that humans have evolved out all their instincts into a purely adaptable animal is the position that has to be proved. Not the other way around, where the ‘blank slate’ is a given and has to be disproved.

Taking Freud’s position, and running with it so to speak, he did leave out two points or at least possibilities from his premises.

One was the possibility of a ‘social instinct’ (instinct C) which would if it existed would be experienced as compassion for others, empathy and a sense of the solidarity of a pack animal and mutual aid etc etc. That could form an additional instinctual drive and motivation and sub conscious direction of rational or conscious thought etc.

Another would be perhaps the ‘The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’ thing where humans may have evolved a useful instinct or impulse of ‘curiosity’ to understand and thus manipulate its environment (instinct D).

The useful ‘pleasure’ of satisfying curiosity about the world around it would come before the unintended consequences, which may or may not be useful.

But overall were evolutionarily useful hence the instinct.

There was an interesting programme on the unintended consequences of pure science recently in the ‘In our time series’ on BBC radio 4. Trying to resolve the ‘baffling’ question as to why cross culturally over the ages people try to investigate the way the world works with no clear objective or possibility of finding any use for it.

If instincts A,B C and D existed then under Freud’s theory he would be forced to explain C and D, ‘positive’ human emotions and intellectual curiosity in terms of A and B, the desire and pleasure of sex and egotistical self interest. And thus one might expect, some incredible consequences as a result of a flawed premise and an attempt to fit a round peg in a square hole.

For example, amongst other things, that pure scientists could abandon the pure self interest of shagging a Nicole Kidman, and find an intellectual substitute for that pleasure..

And that instead of sex they can obtain ‘perverted’ sexual pleasure by investigating the behaviour and faecal matter of giant otters in South America (it came up recently on the tribes of scientists, the Zoologist episode, another Radio four programme).

And that concern, compassion and empathy for the suffering of others etc is nothing but a sublimated and frustrated sexual pleasure of copulating with Nicole Kidman, it is just that I am not aware of it.

I probably do have a Nicole Kidman problem but at least I am facing up to it.

Staying with the assumed concepts of A,B,C &D , I think Freud became absurd in his attempts to explain C&D in terms of A&B.

(He completely disappeared up his own arsehole with his death instinct I think.)

There were people I think who accepted the rigour and honesty of the scientific method who accepted Freud at first.

They failed abysmally to find any evidence in their patients of the castration theories, penis envy and wanting to shag your mother despite desperate attempts and a willingness to do so.

Even involving analysing each other under hypnosis, and you would have thought that auto- suggestion might have produced something.

Eg Karen Horney couldn’t find any evidence for it and and was one of the first that started to disbelieve it, although she had the advantage of being a proper scientist and a woman in a sexist male orientated theory.

As I remember she played an important role in the ethical debate about whether or not people who did not possess a proper medical degree, or lay people, should be allowed to practice psychoanalysis. It wasn’t just about professional snobbery and was about the problem of quacks, and people being dismissed when they may have had a genuine medical problem as being ‘hysterical’ or a hypochondriac etc.

Karen of course had a MD and Freud (cocaine as a cure for tooth ache fame and eye irritation) didn’t, her card was marked in the Stalinist-Freudian psychoanalytical committern.

Science rest substantially on the integrity of the experimenter, people who falsify results that invariably results in experiments and results not being repeatable are shits and time wasters.

Freud had the advantage of the anonymous source of his ‘data set’ which as it turned out was highly dubious.

Very interesting thread. As a former bitter skeptic in relation to Freud, who has changed his mind after many decades of debating with alf and the recent discussion in the ICC, I think that it is important to see the question in its historical context. To this end The Discovery Of The Unconscious by Henri Ellenberger is an excellent introduction: it helped to change my skepticism. Peter Gays Marx's, a man for our times is also very good. Gay is a pyschoanalysist but is also makes a critical assessment of Freud. Central points of Freud such as the oepidus complex as a historical part of humanity and his understanding of primitive society have been shown to be wrong, but placed in the context of the time this is not surprise. However, despite all of its limitations his central concern that humans have to understand these deep pyschological process in order to have a conscious control over their lives is fundamental. Yes you can find all sorts to quotes and ideas in Frued that one's toes curl but his whole work is marked by a passionate concern for humanity.
As for whether it is a science or not, don't know? Still mulling over the arguments on this thread.
I think Dav B is incorrect concerning Frued not have a MD, surely he was a qualified doctor. In fact all the early pscyhoanalyists had to be, until Freud defended the idea of wildanalysis. I could well be wrong.

Ajjohnston

Thanks for the links I think the two replies are very interesting and would fully go along with the sentiments that the first one put forwards ie Freud's deep concern for suffering humanity.