Convincing support for such a strategy will be found if, after having been developed and presented, it helps thoughtful people compose some broad, meaningful insights about themselves and others, and about their array of concrete and abstract interrelationships. Introductory support may come here from favorable comparison with similar strategies which others have fruitfully pursued.
Socio-politically radical analyses and traditions of thought
Much of the argument to be presented here draws on analyses and traditions that have been in the forefront of alienation thinking, particularly that thinking about an alienation which more suffuses society at its roots. At times, radicalism is the socio-economic-political stance of psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners.
This is the case for British clinical psychologist Barry Richards. Richards is the editor of Capitalism and Infancy: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Politics (1984) and his summation of one of that book’s contributions reflect a strategy overlapping that in this work:
Peter Barham suggests that socialists might see psychoanalysis, especially Kleinian and object-relational theory, as offering important, perhaps necessary, contributions to the thinking through of the socialist project and its requirements for action in a capitalist world…. [Raymond Williams’ theory of “cultural materialism”, which Barham draws upon] calls for explorations of individual internalizations of the social order.” (p. 12)
Joel Kovel (1988) similarly proposes that two strands of thought come to confluence in the person. Where Richards (1984) rather likes the theoretical utility of psychoanalysis for a “socialist project,” (Ibid.), Kovel emphasizes a psychoanalysis/Marxism epistemological interrelatedness:
What we learn psychoanalytically is the subjectification of everyday life–the way immediate social existence is registered subjectively under the peculiar conditions of human psychic representation…. What Marxism provides in the way of a dialectical history has to be transcribed, then, into a dialectics of the objects of everyday life, suitable for representation in the dialectical psychology of psychoanalysis. (p. lll)
It is abundantly recognized in this work that both psychoanalysis and Marxism are anathematic to most Americans. Beginning with Chapter Four, it is examined how the social and psychological matters of primary importance to each are apprehended–and misapprehended- by typical Americans. Here, to introduce and to undergird the strategic inclusion of the particularly anathematic Marxism in this dissertation, the undeservedly distorting or dismissive stances of many observers toward it is addressed.
Kovel (1978/1988) protests how “attenuated and vulgarized 11 (p. 110) a view of Marxism is.. held by many in the West. He notes, as an example, one psychoanalyst’s sutm11ary of Marx as characterizing the individual human as “‘a pawn in an economic process.'” He replies that
. . . or Marx, man has indeed become a kind of economic pawn, but is not to be considered as such in his essence. This essence is that of a socially self-transformative active agent, one who acts on nature to make the world and is dialectically made by it. (p. 110)
