History of “Alienation” and of Marx-Freud Synthesizing
As a societal condition, alienation of one or another sort is presumably as ancient as sentient human society. Alienation as an organizing concept for a cultural analysis goes back about two centuries to the work of philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, who saw alienation as humanity estranged from, though unfolding toward, what he called Absolute Spirit (Hegel, l807). In the 1930s, with the retrieval and spread of some mid-nineteenth century writings of Karl Marx (especially his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844), the word and concept of alienation resurfaced, now more in socioeconomic than in Hegel-like philosophical form.
“Alienation” and Its Shortcomings
Marx had extended and transformed Hegel’s work to argue that the cultural and personal effects of the exploitive capitalist productive system bloc s humans, as a class of workers, from their species-being, by which he meant the communal, self-productive aspects of their nature. From the 1930s into the 1970s, alienation was widely explored from diverse Marxist and extra-Marxist platforms. Alienation often overlapped–to some thinkers, override—such concepts as Anomie, mass society, and reification.
In current studious literature, both alienation and its conceptual cousins are found with much less frequency and salience than they had been in the past. One now typically meets “alienation” either as an incidental descriptive. term or as only one of an array of sub-headings in empirical research, for instance as one category of voters’ attitudes toward a polity. In the literature of clinical psychology, the presence of “alienation” is confined almost exclusively to writings on adolescence. Alienation, it very much seems, now tends to be regarded by social thinkers primarily in a non-radical, non-Marxist manner.
Downplaying of Alienation
The recent downplaying of alienation surely in some measure came about from changing political times and variations in intellectual fashion, such as an increased tendency to see the nature of problems as being of individual psychology rather than social, or as approachable–and soluble–only when defined in quite discrete ways.'” Such influences, though far from unimportant, are not emphasized in this dissertation because their impact upon the substantive notions of alienation1is mostly indirect.
Rather, it is seen that the radical explanatory promise of the notion of alienation has, with limited exception,” been disappointed by its lack of underpinning by a clinically based depth psychology. Alienation writings typically have examined peoples’ acquisitions of reality, meaning, ideology, and belief systems, their development of thinking and cognitive patterning, their affective lives, and their formation of relations to others, to otherness; and to the external world, familiar and novel; alienation thinkers have examined, in a word, peoples’ psychologies, writ individually and/or socially. But the means of examination have been wide philosophical or religious conjecture, narrow empiricist social science, inexactly constructed polemics, or literary fictionalization.
In methodological contrast, the group of psychoanalytic views termed object relations are a continuation, enhancement, and transformation of Freudian theory that apprehends personality, cognition, and psychosocial meanings as created in the conscious and unconscious dialectics among subjects and internal and external literal and representational objects. Richards (1984) summarizes that post-Freudian [psychoanalytic] theories are characterized by a relational conception of the basis of psychic life'”‘ (p. 9). These are just the sort of resources alienation thinking needs to become more insightful, sophisticated and, especially, radical.
