Home Societal / Political Alienation A PALLID HOPELESSNESS: REFLECTIONS ON ALIENATION

A PALLID HOPELESSNESS: REFLECTIONS ON ALIENATION

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The premises of object relations were developed largely from direct clinical practice. As Kovel
(1978/1988) notes”… the empirical base of psychoanalysis [isJ the lived life of the human” (pp. 107-108). Thus, these premises help provide practical, empirical groundwork for the abstractions of alienation theory, with “empirical” seen here, rather less restrictively than in some methodologies, as lived human species life and individual human’s lives.

Finally, incorporation of clinical insights helps address one shortcoming in the notion of alienation flowing from the influences on its ancestry of one central strain of Marxism: A tendency to view alienation as primarily a phenomenon of a narrowly cast labor process rather than as a broader cultural pattern.” In this vein, Martin Jay (1973) notes that, in a personal communication with him, critical theorist Theodor Adorno commented that “Marx wanted to turn the whole world into a giant work-house” (p. 57). See Chapter Three, page 103, for some more on the Marxist concept of labor.

Marx and Freud Together

The theoretical combining of Freudian notions with political analysis, particularly a critical Marxism, has a rich history, and is the intellectual tradition of the single most influence on this dissertation. To establish a tone and intellectual context for elaboration of the goals, scope, and methodology pursued herein, some salient writers and writings in this tradition are now sketched. The most prominent figures are, chronologically, Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Eric Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Joel Kovel, and Christopher Lasch.

Fenichel and Reich

First, a few words about some unpromulgated early leftist psychoanalysts are germane. Russell Jacoby has now told their story in The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians (1983). In the 1920s and 1930s, Fenichel and some other European analysts organized with the aim of applying psychoanalysis and political radicalism to studying and to changing European society. Jacoby traces how the rise of European fascism and the onset of World War II dispersed this movement, and how, subsequently, conservative established psychoanalytic communities, especially in America, drove it into secrecy and ineffectuality (Jacoby, 1983). These thinkers thus have few primary writings appropriate for this section.

Psychoanalyst and Marxist Wilhelm Reich was, until an acrimonious split, closely affiliated with this group. Unlike them, he wrote publicly and prolifically on the psychoanalytic-radical politics interplay. (Jacoby, 1983, pp. 80-84). The often-contentious Reich eventually parted ways with Freud as well, both over the etiology of neurosis and over psychoanalytic technique.

Reich differed with Freud over cultural theory, too. In his late-life writings, Freud came to posit a biologically based death instinct; Reich (1963) theorized rather that this phenomenon was based in the historically specific circumstances of the prevailing capitalist culture. Reich saw the etiology of neurosis and aggression in capitalism’s sexual constraints. Inhibited sexuality {specifically, inadequacy of orgasm) “… makes aggression a power beyond mastery, because inhibited sexual energy turns into destructive energy” {p. 290). Some see Reich as brilliant; others, as mad. He is undeniably energetic. Though he does provide some relevant theoretical support and some articulate rhetoric, his work is not especially vital to this one. Other thinkers have been more thorough and better grounded in saying the same sorts of things.

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