Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Social Freedom
A four-day seminar on Freudian-Marxism and its critics
I’m offering a four-day seminar on Freudian-Marxism starting on September 20th and would like to formally invite you to join me. This will be my second seminar on Freudian-Marxism with the Global Center for Advanced Studies and I’m pleased to learn that these seminars will be made into a book on the history and legacy of Freudian-Marxism. In my first course I focused on the theory of the social bond and how thinkers from Jacques Lacan, Wilfred Bion, León Rozitchner, Marcuse to Norman O Brown attempted to fuse Freud with Marx.
Here is an intro video to my upcoming course and the syllabus and readings below that. If you can’t swing the cost of the seminar feel free to message me and I can help explore other options.
Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Social Freedom
Course Description:
After Freud’s groundbreaking turn in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and later Civilization and its Discontents (1930), he discovers a new method for historicizing the revolutionary power of capitalism to at once erode collective social ideals while simultaneously liberating the subject from authoritarian modes of social control. This fundamental ambiguity embedded in capitalism—a system that is both progressive and liberating at the same time as it is authoritarian and hierarchical—has resulted in an internal schism amongst Freudian Marxists. How do we apply Freud’s insights for the achievement of social freedom?
In this seminar, we will study how Freud’s concepts have split Marxist and psychoanalytic theorists. Beginning with the tradition of Freudian-Marxism in thinkers such as Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari we find a utopian conception of revolutionary activity that aims to liberate pleasure by abolishing deeper modes of authority and collective ideals. Critics of Freudian Marxism, as diverse in perspective as Jacques Lacan, Christopher Lasch, Michel Clouscard, Philip Rieff to Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel have proposed that Freudian Marxism proposes a faulty conception of liberation that has misdirected the revolutionary subject away from Marxist objectives of proletarian and working-class liberation, resulting in a new ideology for the bourgeoisie. We will read these two currents of interpretation as opening a significant debate that remains essential for any contemporary social critique. We will conclude with a consideration of the new discontents of civilization in the 21st century and ask how Freud’s method might help us solve the problem of social freedom today.
Schedule: September 20 & 21 + September 27 & 28 (Saturday and Sunday) at 11 am New York time.
Format: Live online lecture and discussion. Each session will be recorded for those cannot make the live sessions, but it is highly recommended that students attend the live sessions.
Readings and Topics
September 20
Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Historicizing Capitalism
Freud, Sigmund Civilization and its Discontents (excerpts)
Karatani, Kojin “Transcritique: On Kant and Freud” (Kant and Freud pp. 33 – 64)
Rozitchner, Léon “The Return to Historical Origin” and “Dialectic of Collective Forms” (Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism pp. 435 – 476)
Recommended background reading: Freud, Sigmund Beyond the Pleasure Principle
September 21
Freudian-Marxism and Social Critique: The Aims of Utopian Liberation
Jameson, Fredric “Pleasure: A Political Problem”
Zaretsky, Eli “From the Maturity Ethic to the Psychology of Power”
Bloch, Ernst “The not-yet-conscious” (The Principle of Hope pp. 114 – 153)
Brown, Norman “Neurosis and History” (Life Against Death pp. 11 – 19)
September 27
The Critique of Freudian-Marxism as Liberal-libertarian Ideology
Micheá, Jean-Claude [Introduction to Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism]
Clouscard, Michel Neo-fascism and the Ideology of Desire
Rieff, Philip The Triumph of the Therapeutic (excerpts)
Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine The Ego Ideal: A Psychoanalytic Essay on the Malady of the Ideal (Introduction by Christopher Lasch)
September 28
21st Century Psychoanalysis and its Discontents
Stiegler, Bernard “The Automatization of the Super-Ego and the Passage of Desire as Original Diversion of Libidinal Energy” (Lost Spirit of Capitalism pp 42 – 77)
Svolos, Thomas “The American Plague” and “Realist, modern and postmodern diagnosis in the psychiatric field” Psychoanalysis in the Twenty-First Century