/edu/ - Education

read lacan

>>13048
also read deleuze

>>13047
Freudian psychology encourages the liberal version of fascism

My question is why they're so obsessed with some dead guy who peddled woo instead of modern, scientific forms of psychology

>>13047
They think Fascism is caused by sexual repression, which is bunk because ᴉuᴉlossnW, in spite of him being evil, was a gigachad

>>13052
That was Adorno not Freud

>>13052
You don't have to be sexless to be repressed

>>13054
ᴉuᴉlossnW wasn’t repressed in any way. Arguably Hitler was, but then again, probably so was Lenin, Stalin, Marx, etc. to some degree

>>13050
there is no other version

but whatabout the conservative version? conservatives are liberals

>>13055
I think the preeminence of the German strain of Fascism has muddied the perception since Germanic society pre-War is definitely repressed in some form or another, which is why it was far more deadly than the Italian or Spanish ones

We turn to Freudian psychology as a way to explain away the emergence of false consciousness (i.e chauvinism) among the working class. Personally i tend to lean more to Lacan's view that people derive ego enjoyment from racism instead of the Freudian view of Reich et al

>>13057
> since Germanic society pre-War is definitely repressed in some form or another
Lol no.
Weimar Germany was literally the most sexually liberal country in the world. Actually, part of the reason Hitler was elected was because Germans didn’t like all the sexual promiscuity going on

>>13059
>we didn't want to do the holocaust but you couldn't stop being so tolerant
t.

>>13059
Anon, who is to say that those two things cannot coexist together? It is precisely the authoritarian conservative nature of Germanic society that made Weimar as promiscuous as it was, we can see this today with immigrants of Arab descent; the more conservative their homeland is the more degenerate they become in the West. And who can forget the pinnacle of puritanical conservatism, Victorian England, where a quarter of all women became prostitutes?

>listening to the "LOL SEX LOLLLLLLL" neurologist to combat fascism
how and where the fuck did you come to this conclusion

>orthodox Marxists
Who? What is an "orthodox Marxist"?

>>13047
OP, you are labeling "orthodox" Marxism stuff that isn't actually orthodox Marxism.
My best guess is you confuse contemporary western academic Marxism for "orthodox Marxism". That's in error.
contemporary western academic Marxism do indeed try to juggle Freudan and Marxish theory.
Orthodox Marxists OTOH critiqued (and continues to critique) Freud and psychoanalysis more broadly as a bourgeois science (see Lenin's comments on it for just one example).

>>13047
I don't know if people are obsessed with Freud specifically but more psychology in general. Depending on what you mean by orthodox Marxist there could be several reasons. Some people who call themselves orthodox say it as a rejection of Lenin to say that he strayed from Marx. Those people are usually in the same group as liberals that try to use psychoanalysis to explain why people turn to "totalitarianism" and try to equate communism in practice with fascism. Some Marxists call themselves orthodox to say they are anti-revisionist for some specific change in the USSR which can vary depending on their view of how and why the USSR failed. They think its important to study psychology to explain how the masses could let the revolution be subverted. They might say something like blue jeans coca cola and rock and roll convinced people to give up on communism.

A lot of communists don't think there is a psychological reason for the failure of the USSR and think that it was overthrown by forces from the outside. Psychology might also be important to them to understand western propaganda and color revolutions and to explain them to others. Edward Bernays was the creator of modern advertising wrote a book called Propaganda and was Freuds nephew.

>His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954.

I think if your adversary is using this tool its important to understand it if you want to be able to have some kind of counter.

Freud was just one element of a large-scale German intellectual reaction against Marx and Engels that lasted decades

okay so hear me out:

communism is about society and stuff right?
And society is made of people
And people have their subjective experience, and they have agency and also conspicuous lack in agency.
This is where the unconscious comes in, and psychology as a whole after it.

Freud is a very prominent historical psychologist, and actually out of the early psychoanalysts he was one of the less woo, and out of the field of psychology as it is now, psychoanalysis is one of the most focused on theoretical understanding rather than an empirical approach. Lacan sort of takes this a step further and he pivoted away from clinical work towards theory; this is relevant because so many of the different approaches in psychology have to do with selling something, but his very theoretical approach is not so easily translated to any single marketable therapy method.

Given all of this, i don't get Freud hate? Tho OP: orthodox marxists like Lucaks are sort of idealistish in orientation so idk… i definitely understand the uneasyness around the big focus on subjectivity, but at the same time psychoanalysis is a science of subjectivity, and subjectivity is something we all deal with, so… it's a science of revolutionary subjects, we might as well at least consider what it has to tell us. Especially as another anon said, the bourgeoisie are using this stuff against us, because it's real, and we should know how to at least come to terms with or counter that if we can.

>>17633
Are you familiar with this?

I've not dug deep into psychology yet, only surface-level, but this was apparently the psychological theory that the soviets (pre-Khrushchevization) developed.
Would love to get some input from other comrades ITT about what you think of this, if you've read some of the papers etc.

Oops, here are the relevant links >>17854
>Cultural-historical psychology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural-historical_psychology
>Vygotsky Circle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vygotsky_Circle

Bumping for input on these
>>17854
>>17855

>>13047
freud is only good for novelists

>>13075
>Orthodox Marxists OTOH critiqued (and continues to critique) Freud and psychoanalysis more broadly as a bourgeois science (see Lenin's comments on it for just one example).
site:site:www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works "freud", "psychoanalysis"
>0 results
Post proofs or you're full of shit. I'm far from an expert on Freudian theory specifically, but it's obvious that it had an early impact on the socialist movement.

As for the definition of "Orthodox Marxist" - there's no universally agreed upon definition, but the people who call themselves Orthodox Marxists usually support a political strategy and party model closer to the early Second International than the Third International. Theory daddies being late Engels, early Kautsky, pre 1917 Lenin, Liebknecht, Bebel, etc. So if we're dealing with that period the connection is obvious. One of Freud's most foundational works was a case study of Ida Bauer, the sister of Otto Bauer, the Austrian Marxist leader whose whole schtick was how impeccably orthodox he was against revisionism and Bolshevism. Not just him though - Trotsky respected psychoanalysis and had his daughter moved to Berlin to undergo treatment. His confidence probably came from the fact that socialists dominated the first wave of Freudian practitioners, after all the Frankfurt School was founded starting in 1923.

Again, not an expert on Freud, but the connections seem obvious. I also very strongly doubt that the socialist movement would have preferred the alternative to Freud - for all the unconscious sex stuff people like to mock him for, his central thesis was that mental distress was a result of traumatic personal experiences. That's a hell of a lot better than mainstream biomedical psychiatry was at the time, which was deeply tied to the eugenics movement and blamed all anti-social behavior on "defective" genetics rather than a sick society.

>>18532
Humble yourself.

http://www.marxists3va6eopxoeiegih3iyex2zg3tmace7afbxjqlabmranzjjad.onion/archive/zetkin/1924/reminiscences-of-lenin.htm

>Clara Zetkin - Reminiscences of Lenin (January 1924)
>Chapter 6
>Women, Marriage and Sex

Read the entire book, or at the very least the entire chapter.

>>18533
I stand corrected.on Lenin. You yourself state that this is "just one example", however - what are the others? I'm not trying to tear you down or to try to defend Freud's theories, I'm curious to know what classical ("orthodox") Second International Marxism thought about psychiatry.

One interesting thing I found while looking around on Marxists.org was that Karl Kautsky, who was definitely an authority of the Second International era, made a fairly in-depth critique of Freudian theory in his 2,000 page magnum opus The Materialist Conception of History published in 1927. Here's a quote from page 58:

<Truly, the notion is absurd that the nature of primitive man, as he was prior to all culture, could be studied by examining the waste-products of civilization in Professor Freud’s office.

<That is not to say anything against the importance of the Freudian hypotheses for medical science. They may stimulate it in a very fruitful manner. On that question I cannot pass judgment. But the object to which they refer, the unconscious, demands for its study, more than any other, the acutest self-criticism, sobriety, and precision. And it is just this object that most easily tempts one to arbitrary construction, exaggerations, and premature hypotheses. Unfortunately, Freud is very much inclined to such excesses, and many of his disciples have taken over from their master not his genius but his excesses. [Kautsky here quotes two passages from Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, pp. 137, 121, and comments:] When one reads Freud, one could believe that all of man is only an appendage of his genitals. …

<I have repeatedly been called on to incorporate results of psychoanalysis into my conception of history. However, I have not yet found any that would cast a new light on the historical process. 1 therefore sec no reason to move onto this, for the present, at least for me as a layman, still very insecure territory. Should others who are more familiar with the nature of psychoanalysis want to draw upon it for the solution of historical problems, there is no objection to that; only it must be demanded that they understand something not only about psychoanalysis, but also about history and political economy. Without these, a conception of history is impossible.

Interesting stuff. It's worth noting that the bulk of Materialist Conception.. is said to have been written before 1914, with the project put on hold in favor of Bolshevik-bashing polemics and the like, so I'm especially curious when these lines were written. I still stand by my claim that classical / orthodox Marxists originally became interested in Freud's theories, rather than cabal of academic Freudians suddenly attaching themselves to Marxism at some point.

>>13047
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudo-Marxism

Freudo-Marxism mostly arose as a way to explain fascism. I am critical of the pathology paradigm and the psychocentric reductionism of Freudo-Marxism but there are some valuable insights there.

It's hard to dismiss freud when your enemies are trying to make their breeding fetishes enforced by the state.

>>13047
>and I don't understand why.
They are stuck in 19th century pseudo-science.

marx opens capital vol. 1, chapter 1, section 4 ("the fetishism of commodities"), with these words:
<"A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties."
the "fetishism" of commodities has its dialectical dynamics. the "economic cell-form" comes to represent the entire body of social labour - embodying the universal essence in a particular way. the social relation of men is also reversed into the objectifying intercourse of exchange, where value itself, becomes the subject.

we ought to say something similar about the erotic fetish, which equally abounds in
metaphysical and theological mystery (as transsexualism may communicate). the ass and foot fetish for example, entail what practitioners call the "worship" of the object; whereby the essence of the person is transposed into the thing, and so is attempted to be consumed, literally or figuratively (this transposition of essence was also present in druid rituals for mistletoe). oral sex has this aspect, where one "eats" the other person, like a catholic eats Christ in the eucharist. the sanctified fetish object is a medium for the transcendent (sublime), which cannot otherwise be immediately expressed. this is why a fetish is so erotic; because it projects what is typically repressed.

marx, following from feuerbach, sees that man then worships himself through the form of commodities, obscuring himself. in the fetish, a person is objectified, yet what one loves in the object is simply the inexpressible love he feels for the other. this is why the misanthrope will often project his love onto animals, as a reservoir for an impotent humanism; the same way a childless woman will raise pets like children. the fetish compensates for what is lost from immediacy, in the same way that all desire, is a desire for what we can never truly possess.

we might say that marx studied political economy, while freud studied libidinal economy. in each of their conceptions, there is closure and expansion. to marx, there is commodity circulation (C-M-C) and capital circulation (M-C-M'), while to freud, there is the pleasure principle and the death drive. lets see how they intersect.

where value is spent for marx, we may say that libido is spent for freud. the economy revolves around these social substances. value to marx in the first place, is social labour transformed into commodities, while to freud, libido is the sex drive transformed into symbols of the psyche. in each conception, there is an essence and appearance - given in the fetish objects.

according from each, there is production and exchange. in exchange (C-M-C), there is a fixed amount of substance which terminates by expenditure. to marx, value embodied by the commodity is used up in consumption, while to freud, libido is expended in the erotic (aristotle's poetic theory of "catharsis" applies, such as the orgasm being the "climax"). this pursuit of expending libido is called "the pleasure principle". pleasure to freud is about the release of tension, and so pleasure must be produced by this original condition.

in production (M-C-M'), we see how in capitalism, a commodity's value is constituted by surplus-value. this is precisely mirrored by freud in his theory of the death drive, where a surplus pleasure is achieved by a compulsion of repetition. this forms the drive to death, which is simultaneously a will to life. an example is addiction, where we seem to be addicted to harmful things, showing us how pleasure (release) primarily depends upon death drive (tension). the production of tension then acts as surplus pleasure. this may also explain why the working class never revolt; because they enjoy their suffering (as per all martyrdoms), paired with the repetition-compulsion of labour. the workers are addicted to work! is paul lafargue's revolutionary laziness a potential solution?