Joel Kovel
Joel Kovel’s major work of synthesizing Marx and Freud is The Age of Desire (1981). Kovel was for years a practicing psychoanalyst, giving his writing the authenticity of peoples’ actual, if often inarticulate, psychosocial experiences. It is somewhat of a disservice to Kovel’s complex and subtle thinking to summarize it, but in short, he aims to explicate the dialectics of transhistorical essential human qualities with the features of t e historically specific society of his lifetime, advanced capitalism.
For earlier Freudian-leaning leftists, alienation hinges on desires (or instincts or the like) denied or displaced; for Kovel, alienation centers around desires that are mobilized, but in a distorted, manipulated way, for the dehumanized productive and consumptive needs of inhuman capital (Kovel, 1981). The contrast in part reflects that the other authors wrote during differing historical times of capitalism. It also reflects a methodological difference vis-a-vis the earlier theorists., for Kovel, the critical-thinking, paradigm-examining clinician, communicates a much clearer and empathic sense of the actual human experiences of alienation than do philosophers. Kovel’s writings, though more recent than, say, Marcuse’s, similarly do not travel far from the Freudianism of Sigmund Freud, nor from the Marxism of Karl Marx. The main shortcoming of Kovel, then, is his over-reliance upon the father figures of each intellectual strand.
Christopher Lasch
The work of Christopher Lasch, a non-clinician, attains grounding in the lived human psyche from his extensive and perceptive use of clinical literature, especially that of psychoanalysis. Lasch was an historian who wrote two works that are particularly applicable to this dissertation: The Culture of Narcissism (1979) and The Minimal Self (1984).
In a sense Lasch summarizes his view on cultural analysis and change-aimed politics when he says “what’s really at stake here [is] a radical shift in the way that culture is transmitted and internalized” such that personality “is dominated by very early and archaic psychic mechanisms” (Lasch and discussants, as cited in Richards, 1981, p. 35). His complex and subtle analysis is especially sustaining of two important notions developed later in this dissertation: al The paradox of peoples’ conservatively clinging to often-exploitive settings, and b} their hungrily, defensively, and immaturely seeking of reliable objects and objectivity.
His work is frequently reinjected into subsequent chapters. The main reason why Lasch’s is not such a definitive Marx-Freud work is that his emphasis on the socio-political-historical reverberations of narcissism leads him to deemphasize directly subjective experiences, making “alienation” and its subjectivity-objectivity dialectics, much less of a primary phenomenon than it is here.
