113 * University of New Mexico, Department of Philosophy, Albuquerque, USA aojohns@unm.edu | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2208-4084 Adrian Johnston* The Drive of Capital: Freudo-Marxism’s Dialectical Materialism Filozofski vestnik issn 0353-4510 | Volume 44 | Number 1 | 2023 | 113–43 cc by-sa 4.0 | doi: 10.3986/fv.44.1.06 Keywords Luria, Vygotsky, Reich, Fenichel, Marcuse, Freud, Lacan, Marxism, psychoanalysis, drive Abstract Especially during the brief post-revolutionary period before the rise of Stalinism, certain thinkers in the Soviet milieu offered some attention-worthy reflections regarding Freud’s body of work. In particular, Luria and Vygotsky put forward thoughtful Marxism-in- formed assessments of the metapsychology and methodology of psychoanalysis. And strong cross-resonances are audible between these Soviet thinkers’ reflections and the early stages of Western Marxism’s rapprochement with Freud, starting in texts by Reich and Fenichel and continuing with the Frankfurt School, of whose members Marcuse ar- guably furnishes the most sophisticated and sustained engagement with analysis. In this essay, I argue that Luria, Vygotsky, Reich, Fenichel, and Marcuse share in common a fun- damentally correct insight according to which the theory of drive (Trieb) is a load-bearing pillar for any psychoanalytic Marxism. Moreover, not only is the Freudian metapsycho- logical concept of drive applicable to and productive of Marxism and its form(s) of ma- terialism—echoing Lacan’s claim that Marx invented the symptom, I contend, here and elsewhere, that Marx’s mature critique of political economy already anticipates the later analytic idea of Trieb. In fact, I would go so far as to credit Marx with (also) being the in- ventor of the analytic drive (albeit avant la lettre). Gon kapitala: dialektični materializem freudo-marksizma Ključne besede Luria, Vigotski, Reich, Fenichel, Marcuse, Freud, Lacan, marksizem, psihoanaliza, gon 114 adrian johnston Povzetek Predvsem v kratkem porevolucijskem obdobju pred vzponom stalinizma so nekateri mi- sleci v sovjetskem okolju ponudili nekaj pozornosti vrednih razmislekov o Freudovem delu. Zlasti Lurija in Vigotski sta podala premišljene, z marksizmom podprte ocene me- tapsihologije in metodologije psihoanalize. Med razmišljanji teh sovjetskih mislecev in zgodnjimi fazami približevanja zahodnega marksizma Freudu, začenši z besedili Reicha in Fenichela ter Frankfurtsko šolo, med katere člani Marcuse podaja verjetno najbolj iz- popolnjen in trajnosten angažma do analize, je slišati močno navzkrižno sozvočje. V tem eseju trdim, da je Luriji, Vigotskemu, Reichu, Fenichelu in Marcuseju skupno temeljno pravilno spoznanje, po katerem je teorija gona (Trieb) nosilni steber vsakega psihoanali- tičnega marksizma. Še več, ne le da je freudovski metapsihološki koncept nagona upora- ben in produktiven za marksizem in njegove oblike materializma – v skladu z Lacanovo trditvijo, da je Marx izumil simptom, tu in drugod trdim, da Marxova zrela kritika politič- ne ekonomije že anticipira kasnejšo analitično idejo Trieb. Pravzaprav bi šel tako daleč, da bi Marxu pripisal, da je (tudi) izumitelj analitičnega gona (čeprav avant la lettre). ∞ Certain thinkers in the Soviet milieu, during the brief post-revolutionary period between 1917 and the rise of Stalinism, offer some still-attention-worthy reflec- tions regarding Sigmund Freud’s body of work. In particular, Alexander Luria and Lev Vygotsky put forward thoughtful Marxism-informed assessments of the metapsychology and methodology of psychoanalysis. And strong cross-reso- nances are audible between these Soviet thinkers’ reflections and the early stag- es of Western Marxism’s rapprochement with Freud, starting in texts by Wilhelm Reich and Otto Fenichel and continuing with the Frankfurt School, 1 of whose members Herbert Marcuse arguably furnishes the most sophisticated and sus- tained engagement with analysis (incidentally, Reich claims that Freud’s crit- icisms of communism in Civilization and Its Discontents were responses to his [Reich’s] Marxism). 2 1 Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 86. 2 Paul A. Robinson, The Freudian Left: Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 31–32, 36–37; Russell Jacoby , The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 80. 115 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism Martin A. Miller, at one point in his 1998 study Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, pivots from doing histo- ry to engaging in theory. He interjects into his historical narrative an argument according to which all efforts to marry Marxism and psychoanalysis, includ- ing those attempted in the Russian and Soviet settings, are doomed to inevita- ble failure. In Miller’s assessment, Freudianism’s purported focus on clinical- ly treating individual psycho-sexual pathologies, allegedly ineliminable by any socio-political changes, renders it fundamentally incompatible with Marxist and Bolshevik positions. 3 Luria and Vygotsky themselves furnish powerful counter-arguments against Miller’s sort of assessment. In a co-authored introduction to the 1925 Russian translation of Freud’s 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, they write optimisti- cally of how “a new and original trend in psychoanalysis is beginning to form in Russia,” one that “attempts to synthesize Freudian psychology and Marxism [. . .] in the spirit of dialectical materialism.” 4 What might have resulted from this 1920s Russian analytic trend if it had not been snuffed out by the effects of Stalinism in the immediately following years? I now will turn to the de- tails of Luria’s and Vygotsky’s Marxist reflections on Freudian psychoanaly- sis, with particular attention to be devoted to the former’s extended 1925 essay “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology.” Luria begins his thorough 1925 Marxist examination of psychoanalysis by as- serting the trans-disciplinary validity of dialectical materialism. 5 By “dialecti- cal materialism,” he clearly has in mind the Friedrich Engels of Anti-Dühring, Dialectics of Nature, and Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. More precisely, Luria, in line with and appealing to this Engels, characterizes dialectical materialism as a “materialist monism” of an always-in-process inextricable intertwining of all things, an ever-fluctuating 3 Martin A. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 96–97. 4 Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria, “Introduction to the Russian Translation of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Vygotsky Reader, ed. René van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner, trans. René van de Veer and Theresa Prout (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 11. 5 Alexander Luria, “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology,” Soviet Psychology 16, no. 2 (1977): 8, http://doi.org/10.2753/RPO1061-040516027. 116 adrian johnston organic whole of cross-resonating parts. 6 Vygotsky likewise associates dia- lectical materialism with an emphasis on “development” as change, process, transformation, etc. 7 This development also is said by him to exhibit: irregu- lar staccato rhythms; unevenness between its various unfolding levels; com- plex reciprocal interconnections between its constituents; and revolutionary abruptness as well as evolutionary gradualness. 8 Whether knowingly or not, Louis Althusser later echoes Luria. In particular, Althusser repeatedly subsumes psychoanalysis under the overarching intel- lectual authority of historical and/or dialectical materialism. He asserts that “no theory of psychoanalysis can be produced without basing it in historical ma- terialism.” 9 Additionally, Althusser anticipates historical materialism, in con- junction with advances in biology, playing a key role in making possible future “discoveries that will one day allow the elaboration of the scientific theory of the unconscious.” 10 He also avows that “Freud, exactly, like Marx, offers us the example of a materialist and dialectical thought.” 11 Hence, Freudian psychoa- nalysis would be ready-made for absorption into the enveloping framework of Marxist materialism. Althusser’s most emphatic and elaborate version of the gesture of situating psychoanalysis within the wider jurisdiction of historical/dialectical material- ism is laid out in his 1966 “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses.” Therein, Althusser rather uncontroversially defines psychoanalysis as a theory of the un- conscious. But, more controversially, he then maintains that psychoanalysis de- 6 Luria, 8–10, 13; Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two: A Weak Nature Alone (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019), 73–136. 7 Lev Vygotsky, “Problems of Method,” in Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, ed. Michael Cole et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 64–65. 8 Vygotsky, 73 9 Louis Althusser, “Freud and Lacan,” in Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, ed. Oliver Corpet and François Matheron, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 32. 10 Louis Althusser, “The Discovery of Dr. Freud,” in Corpet and Matheron, Writings on Psychoanalysis, 103; Johnston, Future Materialism, Volume Two, 137–53. 11 Althusser, “Discovery of Dr. Freud,” 107. 117 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism fined thusly is a “regional theory” in need of a “general theory,” with the latter as a ground establishing the scientificity of the former. 12 Bringing Jacques Lacan into the picture along with Freud, Althusser, in 1966, sketches a hierarchy of theories. Within this hierarchy, the regional theory of psychoanalysis is subsumed under the general theory of the signifier (as per Lacanianism). Then, the general theory of the signifier is, in turn, itself sub- sumed under the even more general theory of historical materialism. 13 Thereby, historical materialism once again is put forward by Althusser as grounding the Freudian field. 14 One of the justifications for all this in “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses” is Althusser’s contention that the analytic unconscious is, in part, a “subject-effect” of ideologies, with their discourses and practices, turning individuals into (heteronomous) subjects (qua subjected) via interpellations. 15 Hence, for this Althusser, historical materialism’s critical analyses of ideologies, appropriately informed by a structuralism-inspired gen- eral-semiological account of signifiers, would offer access to the preconditions and underpinnings of the unconscious and, with it, of psychoanalysis as the “science of the unconscious.” Well before Althusser, and without Althusser’s reliance on structuralism, Lacan, etc., Luria already could be said, like the French Marxist, to also situate psycho- analysis as a regional theory within the general theory of Marxist materialism. Luria insists that the psy- disciplines, including psychoanalysis, need dialecti- cal materialism in order to be truly scientific 16 (Reich similarly insists that psy- choanalysis can supplement, but not replace, “sociology” qua the explanatory jurisdiction of Marxist materialism). 17 Such scientificity would involve synthe- sizing elements from both biology and historical materialism. 18 12 Louis Althusser, “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses,” in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003), 38–41, 43. 13 Althusser, “Three Notes,” 63–67. 14 Althusser, 67. 15 Althusser, 53–63, 71–73. 16 Luria, “Monistic Psychology,” 14. 17 Wilhelm Reich, Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis (London: Socialist Reproduction, 1972), 14–15, 43. 18 Luria, “Monistic Psychology,” 10. 118 adrian johnston For Luria, the anchoring of a regional theory of the psyche to the general theo- ry of dialectical materialism should be especially easy to achieve in the case of psychoanalysis. Why? According to him, this would be because Marxism and psychoanalysis could be described as meeting each other halfway. 19 On the one hand, Luria, like others after him including Althusser, portrays psychoanaly- sis as implicitly sharing the sensibilities and core commitments of dialectical materialism, including the latter’s materialist monism and organicist holism. 20 On the other hand, Luria emphasizes that Marxist materialism, as vehemently anti-reductive despite its indebtedness to the eighteenth-century French mate- rialists and Feuerbach, acknowledges the relative autonomy of individual per- sonalities and correspondingly refuses to dissolve without remainder singular psyches into anonymous material bases. 21 As Russell Jacoby notes, Reich simi- larly adheres to the insistence of Karl Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach on a ma- terialism retaining rather than dissolving subjectivities. 22 Vygotsky also underscores that dialectical materialism likewise refuses to dis- solve the human into the animal. 23 Relatedly, Vygotsky, appealing to Engels, contrasts reductive naturalistic with anti-reductive dialectical approaches to the detriment of the former. 24 For him as for Luria, the dialectical materialism to which psychoanalysis can and should be joined is anything but atomistic, mechanical, etc. Despite the ancient Greek etymology of “psyche” tethering it to what the word “soul” connotes, Luria is adamant that the Freudian psyche is no soul in any idealist sense whatsoever. For him, analysis is not an idealism. As such, its psy- che is not an immaterial mind independent of everything bodily. 25 So, if the Freudian psychical apparatus is not disembodied as per anti-material- ist idealisms and/or Cartesian-style ontological dualisms, how does Luria con- 19 Luria, 35. 20 Luria, 14–15, 19–20, 22, 24, 34, 37. 21 Luria, 15–17, 36–37, 39–40. 22 Reich, Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, 18–19; Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 90. 23 Vygotsky, “Problems of Method,” 60. 24 Vygotsky, 60–61. 25 Luria, “Monistic Psychology,” 18. 119 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism ceive of the soma-psyche relationship in analytic metapsychology? At one mo- ment in “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology,” he suggests that unconscious dynamics are “on a level with other processes in the organism from which they are functionally, but not fundamentally, distinct.” 26 He immediately specifies that this more subtle difference amounts to psyche being soma insofar as the latter is socially mediated, namely, suffused with and reshaped by “social stimuli” registered thanks to the body’s “complex system of receptors and effec- tors” attuned to surrounding social environments. 27 Luria, for whatever reason(s), does not invoke Freud’s Hilflosigkeit in connec- tion with this asserted receptivity. However, the young human organism’s un- derlying inclination to be profoundly affected in its motivations, emotions, and cognitions by the “social stimuli” it registers is symptomatic of the biological fact of its prolonged prematurational helplessness. From a Marxist standpoint sympathetic to psychoanalysis, this Hilflosigkeit arguably plays a crucial role in establishing a crossroads between, on the one hand, both nature and society as understood by dialectical materialism and, on the other hand, the analytic psychical apparatus. This renders Luria’s omission apropos helplessness some- what strange. That said, Luria’s above-noted notion of a functional-but-not-fundamental dis- tinction between soma and psyche appears to entail, as it does for Vygotsky too, 28 that the psychical is a modification of the somatic resulting from social media- tion (albeit with the origins of social mediation itself left unspecified). Yet, Luria promptly proceeds to muddy these waters somewhat. He quickly shifts from characterizing psychoanalysis as a materialism in which the mental is a modi- fication of the physical to depicting analysis as implicitly a Spinozistic dual-as- pect monism in which the soma-psyche distinction arises out of an underlying, undifferentiated “energy” 29 (both Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms embrace Spinozistic dual-aspect monism as the most fitting philosophical framework for 26 Luria, 19. 27 Luria, 19. 28 Lev Vygotsky, “The Problem of the Cultural Development of the Child,” in Van der Veer and Valsiner, The Vygotsky Reader, 59. 29 Luria, “Monistic Psychology,” 20. 120 adrian johnston neuro-psychoanalysis, 30 with Solms also being a great admirer of Luria). 31 Even if these two renditions of Freudianism by Luria both qualify as monisms, they are two very different forms of monism arguably incompatible with each other. The bio-materialism Luria attributes to Freud with ample justification has no need for (nay, would repudiate) Spinozism’s metaphysical posit of a God-like natura naturans as the productive power underlying the physical universe as the congealed materiality of natura naturata. Freud’s science-shaped material- ist sensibilities are such that, in relation to the Spinozistic distinction between the constituting activity of natura naturans and the constituted entities of nat- ura naturata, he would insist on accounting for human mindedness strictly on the basis of natura naturata alone (first and foremost as the biology of the or- ganisms belonging to the species homo sapiens), without recourse to anything beyond, behind, or beneath nature as the physical universe. Instead of Baruch Spinoza’s Deus sive natura, there is simply Freud’s lone natura. As regards the hypothetical natura naturans (or Luria’s hypothetical “energy”), Freud would protest Hypotheses non fingo. Despite both Luria’s avowed fidelity to Marxist materialism as well as Soviet interest in Spinoza as a forerunner of Marx via Marx’s debts to G. W. F. Hegel, I would suggest that the same would hold for Marx as for Freud here. 32 Luria considers the psychoanalytic concept of drive (Trieb) to be the basis and epitome of Freud’s monism. Although Luria construes drives as endogenous stimuli—this is at least true of the drive source (Quelle) and its attendant pres- sure (Drang) as a “demand for work”—he also recognizes that exogenous stim- 30 Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (New York: Harcourt, 2003), 12, 133, 209; Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (New York: Other Press, 2002), 56–57. 31 Karen Kaplan-Solms and Mark Solms, Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis: Introduction to a Depth Neuropsychology (London: Karnac, 2002), 26–43. 32 A. M. Deborin, “Spinoza’s World-View,” in Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy, ed. and trans. George L. Kline (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952), 90–91, 102, 108–13; I. K. Luppol, “The Historical Significance of Spinoza’s Philosophy,” in Kline, Spinoza in Soviet Philosophy, 175; Adrian Johnston, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 23–49; Johnston, Future Materialism, Volume Two, 73–136. 121 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism uli shape drives too (particularly at the level of the drive’s object [Objekt]). 33 Speaking of “the psychoanalytic system,” Luria states: Its concept of drive is rigorously monistic, as is its view of the individual in gen- eral. Indeed, a drive is not a psychological phenomenon in the strict sense, since it includes the effects of somatic and nervous stimuli and of the endocrine sys- tem and its chemistry, and often has no clear-cut psychological cast at all. We should be more inclined to consider drive a concept at the ‘borderline between the mental and the somatic.’ The dualism of the old psychology is thus complete- ly discarded. Whether or not the particular person is or can be conscious of drive is entirely of secondary importance, depending on a number of minor details in the development of drive. Moreover, all the hypotheses about the relationship between soul and body, their psychophysical parallelism or interaction (so nec- essary to the old psychology), are also left by the wayside. Psychoanalysis has shifted the problem to an entirely new plane—a monistic approach to the mind. 34 A couple of pages later in “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology,” he embellishes further on this line of reflection—“for psychoanalysis, drives are not a purely psychological concept, but have a much broader sense, lying at ‘the borderline between the mental and the somatic,’ and are more of a biological nature.” 35 He continues: Thus, psychoanalysis attaches special importance to the dependence of mental functions on organic stimuli. It makes mind an integral part of the organism’s sys- tem; it can hence no longer be studied in isolation. This is what sets psychoanaly- sis apart from the old scholastic psychology, which attempted to depict the mind as something with no connection at all with the overall life of the organism and studied the brain quite apart from any influence other organs of the body might have on it (e.g., the endocrine glands) and the general dynamics of the organism as a whole. Indeed, the outstanding merit of psychoanalysis has been that it situ- ates the mind within a general system of inter-relations of organs, views the brain 33 Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905),” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 7:147–48; Sigmund Freud, “Papers on Metapsychology [1915],” in Standard Edition, 14:118, 120–23. 34 Luria, “Monistic Psychology,” 22. 35 Luria, 24. 122 adrian johnston and its activity not in isolation, but on a level with the other organs of the body, and attempts to give psychology a solid biological foundation and to effect a deci- sive break with the metaphysical approach to the study of the mind. I should not be wide of the mark if I said that in doing this, psychoanalysis took an important step toward creating a system of monistic psychology. 36 Luria, through his focus on the metapsychological concept of drive, appears to move towards conflating monism with holism. This holism, regardless of Luria’s own views, would not require endorsement of any sort of reductionism or ep- iphenomenalism, including the epiphenomenalist implications of Spinozistic monism. As just seen, Luria accepts the distinction between soma and psyche relied upon by Freud’s drive theory as well as his metapsychology in general. By contrast, a reductive materialism or naturalism would seek to collapse psyche into soma. And, a dual-aspect monism would treat this distinction as merely apparent in relation to an undifferentiated underlying ontological substrate (paradigmat- ically, Spinoza’s substance as the hidden ground of the attributes of thinking and extension). If and when Luria has such reductionism or Spinozism in mind when speaking of “monism” in connection with Freudian psychoanalysis, he is wrong to attribute such monism to Freud. But, when he attributes holistic ten- dencies to Freud’s drive theory, including complex entanglements of soma (as material body) and psyche (as more-than-material mind), he is amply justified in doing so. When discussing Freudian drives in “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology,” Luria indeed highlights the holistic sensibilities informing Freud’s metapsychological conception of Triebe. In so doing, Luria enriches the holism of Freudian drive theory and the entire analytic metapsychology for which this theory is so central. Freud himself gestures at the holistic entanglement of soma and psyche, with drives as hybrid constructs sandwiching together somatic and psychical components. Luria’s remarks indicate that, in addition to this, there are, as regards various phenomena of interest to psychoanalysis (espe- cially an analysis aligned with dialectical materialism), further holistic distri- butions: across multiple components within the internally differentiated cen- 36 Luria, 24–25. 123 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism tral nervous system; between the highly complex brain and the rest of the body with its numerous anatomical and physiological aspects; amongst the various functions and dimensions of mental/psychical life; as well as in interactions be- tween the intra-somatic, the intra-psychical, and both the extra-somatic and the extra-psychical natural and social circumstances surrounding the minded and embodied individual. 37 Seen from Luria’s Marxist and scientific perspectives, Freudian analysis, in its holism, is nothing if not anti-localizationist about the phenomena with which it concerns itself. Freud already warned against attempts at anatomical locali- zations of such metapsychological models as his topographies of the psychical apparatus. 38 Likewise, Solms, avowedly taking inspiration from both Freud and Luria, vehemently distances his version of neuro-psychoanalysis from any lo- calizationist agenda. 39 Like Luria in particular, Solms stresses the sprawling extent of the neuroanatom- ical distribution of most mental functions in human psychical life. Freud can be read as leaving open the possibility of future neuroanatomical localizations of aspects of psychoanalytic metapsychological models based on the assumption that the limits of (then-)present neuroscientific knowledge permit continuing to entertain the viability of this possibility. However, Luria and Solms both argue that the neurosciences already know enough to rule out the legitimacy of ana- tomical localizations as forming the key links between psychoanalysis and neu- robiology. Scientific knowledge (rather than ignorance) of neuroanatomy, with its insights into the high degree of the anatomical distribution of mental func- tions across the regions and sub-regions of the central nervous system, already rules out reliance on localizations as the load-bearing bridges connecting anal- ysis’s psyche with science’s brain. 37 Luria, 24–25, 28–29, 39–40. 38 Freud, “Papers on Metapsychology,” 174–75; Sigmund Freud, “A Short Account of Psycho- Analysis (1924 [1923]),” in Standard Edition, 19:191; Sigmund Freud, “ An Autobiographical Study (1925 [1924]),” in Standard Edition, 20:32; Sigmund Freud, “Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays (1939 [1934–38]),” in Standard Edition, 23:97, 144–45. 39 Kaplan-Solms and Solms, Clinical Studies in Neuro-Psychoanalysis, 17–25, 43, 54–55, 60, 250–51, 260, 276. 124 adrian johnston Yet, despite Luria’s just-mentioned anti-localizationism, Luria and Vygotsky, in their co-authored introduction to the Russian translation of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, echo Freud’s hopes for eventual natural scientific vindications of psychoanalytic hypotheses 40 (as does Luria in “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology”). 41 These co-authors and collaborators signal their ap- proval of Beyond the Pleasure Principle’s science-inspired (and Empedoclean) speculations having it that the conflict between Eros and the Todestrieb oper- ative within the human psyche is itself just one expression amongst countless others of a natural strife between forces of unification and destruction writ large across the entire cosmos from top to bottom. 42 Whatever Luria’s distribution- ist reservations about neuroanatomical localizations, he nonetheless does not hesitate to side with Freud’s more biologistic moments and argues that psycho- analysis globally grounds the psychical in the somatic, the human subject in the human organism. 43 For the Luria of “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology,” Freudian drive theory, with the role played therein by anatomi- cal drive-sources, anchors the libidinal economy, and, with it, the psyche as a whole, in the biological body. 44 Luria’s stance combines a denial of discrete neuroanatomical localizations with an affirmation of global organic localization (i.e., the rooting of the entire psyche in soma). Luria’s “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology” and the “Introduction to the Russian translation of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle” co-authored by Luria and Vygotsky both date from the same year (1925). Yet, there is a strange tension between these two texts’ assessments of Freud and the soma-psyche relationship in psychoanalysis. “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology,” after lauding Freud’s labors for moving psy- chology towards being founded upon a “materialist monism” compatible with dialectical materialism, 45 inserts the following critical remark as this essay’s pe- nultimate paragraph: 40 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920),” in Standard Edition, 18:174–75; Vygotsky and Luria, “Introduction,” 13. 41 Luria, “Monistic Psychology,” 27. 42 Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 40–53; Vygotsky and Luria, “Introduction,” 14. 43 Luria, “Monistic Psychology,” 27–29. 44 Luria, 30–34. 45 Luria, 34–35. 125 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism If the system of psychoanalysis is to measure up better to the requirements of dia- lectical materialism, however, it must develop fully the dynamic dialectic of men- tal life and take a third step toward a holistic approach to the organism: it must now integrate the organism into a system of social influences. 46 An endnote specifies that this integration would be tantamount to a psychoana- lytic “advance from mechanical materialism to dialectical materialism.” 47 Luria therefore appears to conclude that Freud’s corpus does not amply acknowl- edge “social influences” in its account of human mindedness. In Thought and Language, Vygotsky similarly indicts Freud for putting forward “the untenable conception of a pleasure principle preceding a reality principle” 48 (an indict- ment contested by Reich). 49 Yet, this faulting of Freudian analysis for neglecting the interactions between the somatic-psychical organism and its surrounding social milieus should be contrasted with the concluding paragraphs of Luria and Vygotsky’s preface to the Russian edition of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (contemporaneous with Luria’s “Psychoanalysis as a System of Monistic Psychology”). Therein, Luria and Vygotsky observe: If the biological conservative tendency to preserve the inorganic equilibrium is concealed in the deeper layers of psychical life, how can humanity’s devel- opment from lower to higher forms be explained? Where are we to look for the root of the stormy progression of the historical process? Freud provides us with a highly interesting and deeply materialistic answer, i.e., if in the deep recesses of the human psyche there still remain conservative tendencies of primordial biol- ogy and if, in the final analysis, even Eros is consigned to it, then the only forces which make it possible for us to escape from this state of biological conservatism and which may propel us toward progress and activity, are external forces, in our terms, the external conditions of the material environment in which the individ- ual exists. It is they that represent the true basis of progress, it is they that create the real personality and make it adapt and work out new forms of psychic life; fi- 46 Luria, 35. 47 Luria, 45. 48 Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language, ed. and trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962), 21. 49 Reich, Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, 25, 27, 38–39. 126 adrian johnston nally they are the ones that suppress and transfer the vestiges of the old conserv- ative biology. In this respect Freud’s psychology is thoroughly sociological and it is up to other materialistic psychologists who find themselves in better circum- stances than Freud to reveal and validate the subject of the materialistic founda- tions of this theory. 50 They continue: So, according to Freud, the history of the human psyche embodies two tenden- cies, the conservative-biological and the progressive-sociological. It is from these factors that the whole dialectic of the organism is composed and they are respon- sible for the distinctive ‘spiral’ development of a human being. This book repre- sents a step forwards and not backwards along the path to the construction of a whole, monistic system, and after having read this book a dialectician cannot fail to perceive its enormous potential for a monistic understanding of the world. 51 Soon after this, Luria and Vygotsky conclude their introduction to Beyond the Pleasure Principle (i.e., “this book” in the preceding quotation) thusly: Bourgeois science is giving birth to materialism: such labour is often difficult and prolonged, but we only have to find where in its bowels materialistic buds are showing, to find them, to rescue them and to make good use of them. 52 By contrast with Luria on his own in 1925, Luria with Vygotsky in the same year grants that Freud puts forward a “dialectic of the organism” in which society (as Freud’s Kultur [civilization]) significantly configures the reality principle embed- ded in and modulating the psychical apparatus with its driving pleasure princi- ple. Luria and Vygotsky together acknowledge that the Freudian psyche is shot through with and sculpted by the sorts of social mediators of concern to Marxist materialism. Hence, worries about Freud as not socially minded appear to be put to rest in this co-authored introduction to Beyond the Pleasure Principle, with Freudian psychoanalysis, according to the latter text, being “thoroughly sociological.” I would claim that this putting to rest is fair and appropriate—and 50 Vygotsky and Luria, “Introduction,” 16. 51 Vygotsky and Luria, 16–17. 52 Vygotsky and Luria, 17. 127 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism this unlike Luria’s and Vygotsky’s solo indictments of Freud for allegedly ignor- ing social factors. 53 Reich, in his 1929 article “Psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union” written shortly af- ter a visit by him to Russia, rightly rebuts Bolshevik condemnations of Freudian psychoanalysis for insufficient sensitivity to social forces 54 (strangely, in an es- say on Reich, Bertell Ollman repeats these same criticisms of Freud rejected by Reich himself). 55 Marcuse likewise problematizes efforts to lump Freud together with bourgeois individualists. 56 In the introduction to Eros and Civilization, he insists that “Freud’s theory is in its very substance ‘sociological,’ and [. . .] no new cultural or sociological orientation is needed to reveal this substance.” 57 Marcuse soon proceeds to assert that “Freud’s individual psychology is in its very essence social psychology.” 58 Jacoby, citing Theodor Adorno, 59 lends his support to Reich’s and Marcuse’s defense of Freud as himself already a thor- oughly social thinker, with the Freudian psychical creature as a zoon politikon. 60 Luria on his own concludes that Freud himself, as a materialist, has yet to take the step from a mechanistic neglect of social mediation to a dialectical inclusion of such mediation in “the distinctive ‘spiral’ development of a human being.” But, in his joint statements with Vygotsky apropos 1920’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he drastically tempers, if not abandons altogether, this critical con- clusion. The judgment shifts from Freud being a non-dialectical mechanical materialist to him being, even if only despite himself, a spontaneous dialecti- cal materialist. According to this latter verdict (one echoed outside the Soviet 53 Reich, Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, 30, 41–42; Otto Fenichel, “Psychoanalysis as the Nucleus of a Future Dialectical-Materialist Psychology,” ed. Suzette H. Annin and Hanna Fenichel, trans. Olga Barsis, American Imago 24, no. 4 (Winter 1967): 297–98. 54 Wilhelm Reich, “Psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union,” in Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929–1934, ed. Lee Baxandall, trans. Anna Bostock, Tom DuBose, and Lee Baxandall (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 82. 55 Bertell Ollman, “The Marxism of Wilhelm Reich: The Social Function of Sexual Repression,” in The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism since Lenin, ed. Dick Howard and Karl E. Klare (New York: Basic Books, 1972), 219–20. 56 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), 55–58; Robinson, Freudian Left, 197. 57 Marcuse, 5. 58 Marcuse, 16. 59 Theodor W . Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Continuum, 1973), 351. 60 Jacoby, Social Amnesia, 79. 128 adrian johnston Union by Reich and Fenichel), 61 all that is needed for Marxism to embrace psy- choanalysis is the performance with respect to Freud’s oeuvre of the classical Marxian-Engelsian operation of extracting (or “rescuing”) the “rational kernel” (i.e., “materialistic buds”) from the “mystical shell” (i.e., “bourgeois science”). Vygotsky’s Thought and Language again suggests the need for such a rescue op- eration of extraction with respect to Freud 62 (incidentally, Lacan expresses great admiration for Vygotsky and his Thought and Language especially). 63 The “dialectic of the organism” with its “distinctive ‘spiral’ development of a hu- man being” referred to by Luria and Vygotsky in their joint presentation (and echoed by Vygotsky in another piece) 64 of Freud arguably alludes to Engels, es- pecially Engels’s 1876 essay “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” (contained in Dialectics of Nature). 65 Vygotsky elsewhere invokes this Engels, along with the Hegel and Marx channeled by Engels. In particular, Vygotsky appeals to Hegel’s, Marx’s, and Engels’s observations about the mak- ing and using of tools in the praxes of social laboring as responsible for the pe- culiar dialectics of human nature and history. 66 Luria begins an essay of his en- titled “The problem of the cultural behaviour of the child” by highlighting tools along the exact same lines as Vygotsky. 67 Luria and Vygotsky’s joint attribution to Freud of a dialectical conception of the human being render him particularly proximate to the Marxist materialism they uphold. Starting with Reich in the 1930s, the Soviets’ more positive evaluations of Freudian psychoanalysis are echoed in some of the earliest Western efforts to 61 Reich, Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, 15–16, 55; Fenichel, “Dialectical- Materialist Psychology,” 301; Robinson, Freudian Left, 19, 43–45. 62 Vygotsky, Thought and Language, 10. 63 Jacques Lacan, “Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XII: Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, 1964–1965” (unpublished typescript, December 9, 1964), PDF document; Jacques Lacan, “Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XIII: L’objet de la psychanalyse, 1965–1966” (unpublished typescript, April 20, 1966), PDF document. 64 Vygotsky, “Cultural Development of the Child,” 63–64. 65 Friedrich Engels, “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man,” in Dialectics of Nature, trans. and ed. Clemens Dutt (New York: International Publishers, 1940), 279–96. 66 Lev Vygotsky, “Internalization of Higher Psychological Functions,” in Cole et al., Mind in Society, 54; Vygotsky, Thought and Language, 48–49. 67 Luria, “The Problem of the Cultural Behaviour of the Child,” in Van der Veer and Valsiner, The Vygotsky Reader, 46. 129 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism wed Marx and Freud. Below, I will address what arguably are the two most so- phisticated initial attempts in the non-Soviet European context to marry psy- choanalysis and Marxist materialism: Reich’s 1929/1934 Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis (which Paul Robinson describes as “the most tightly argued piece he ever wrote”) 68 and Fenichel’s 1934 “Psychoanalysis as the Nucleus of a Future Dialectical-Materialist Psychology.” In my subsequent treatment of Reich and Fenichel, the cross-resonances with Luria and Vygotsky as summa- rized above will be audible. In the meantime, I want to address the perhaps best- known classic articulation of Freudo-Marxism, namely, Marcuse’s 1955 Eros and Civilization. Whereas such Western Marxist works as Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism and the Frankfurt School’s collaborative effort The Authoritarian Personality ar- guably mishandle psychoanalysis in the heat of the urgent anti-fascist struggle, Marcuse’s 1955 manifesto on Freudo-Marxism is much more faithful to and care- ful with Freudian theory. In what follows, I will not reconstruct the contents of Eros and Civilization in their entirety. Instead, I will selectively underscore cer- tain manners in which Marcuse contributes to the issues presently under dis- cussion through his handling of Freud vis-à-vis Marxism in Eros and Civilization. Marcuse rejects the Luria-type Soviet charge against Freudian psychoanalysis of failing to pay attention to the socio-historical dimensions of human existence. However, he develops a different line of criticism with regard to Freud, one fore- shadowed by Reich. 69 Specifically, Marcuse, as a historical materialist, warns against Freud’s wholesale equation (most notably and famously in Civilization and Its Discontents) of any and every “civilization” (i.e., all human societies in all times and places) with the inevitable imposition of neurosis-inducing repres- sion als Verdrängung. 70 Freud’s “reality principle,” especially in the context of Civilization and Its Discontents, is in no small part a reflection of specifically social, as distinct from natural, external reality. It can and does dictate certain intra-psychical repres- 68 Robinson, Freudian Left, 41. 69 Reich, Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, 24–25; Robinson, Freudian Left, 33. 70 Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents (1930 [1929]),” in Standard Edition, 21:86–92, 94–97, 129; Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 4–5, 17. 130 adrian johnston sions. However, Eros and Civilization, drawing on Marxist sensibilities, main- tains that the Freudian reality principle, as reflective of the externalities of dif- ferent societies, must be historicized in ways Freud fails to carry out—with this nevertheless being imperative insofar as societies consist of historically varia- ble structures and dynamics. 71 Relatedly, and latching onto things Freud says in connection with “Ananke” (the ancient Greek personification of unavoidable necessity and compulsion), 72 Marcuse accuses Freud of falsely eternalizing so- cially created and historically transient material scarcity as dictating discon- tent-inducing “instinctual renunciation.” 73 Another Marxist line of criticism Marcuse brings to bear on Freud in Eros and Civilization has to do with the distinction between work and play. Marx, in con- nection with his long-running concern with the alienated status of labor under capitalism, observes that the very notion of an antithesis between labor and lei- sure is symptomatic of capitalistic alienation. That is to say, only when labor is alienated does it appear as the necessity of dull, unrewarding drudgery as op- posed to leisure as the freedom of enjoyable, gratifying recreation. 74 A socialist or communist supersession of capitalism presumably would de-alienate labor, thereby transforming work (back) into play (or, in a hybrid Schillerian-Freudian manner, overcoming the antagonism between drive and necessity). 75 Marcuse accuses Freud of uncritically taking for granted the bourgeois ideologi- cal eternalization/naturalization of capitalism’s work-play zero-sum dichotomy symptomatic of the specifically capitalist alienation of labor 76 (and this in addi- tion to perhaps not foreseeing the economic and ideological colonization of the “happiness” of workers’ “free time” by capitalism and its forms of repressive desublimation). 77 This accusation forms part of the larger argument in Eros and Civilization about Freud’s insufficiently historical account of external social re- 71 Marcuse, 34–37, 40, 44–45, 87–88. 72 Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 101, 139. 73 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 134. 74 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844),” in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Penguin, 1992), 327–31; Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 470, 611. 75 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 213–14, 223–24. 76 Marcuse, 47, 154. 77 Marcuse, 46–48, 157, 245. 131 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism ality. In other words, the instinctual renunciations demanded by the social side of the Freudian reality principle are, by Marcuse’s Marxist lights, the gratuitous impositions of socially alienating labor conditions, not the unavoidable conse- quences of naturally dictated work to which the entirety of humanity is hope- lessly condemned forever. Implicitly linked to the immediately preceding by the tie between labor and time (including subjects’ experiences of lived temporality) as conceptualized in Marxism, Eros and Civilization also discusses time at the intersection of histori- cal materialism and psychoanalysis. In this vein, Marcuse states: The fatal enemy of lasting gratification is time, the inner finiteness, the brevity of all conditions. The idea of integral human liberation therefore necessarily con- tains the vision of the struggle against time. 78 Later, in the final chapter of Eros and Civilization, he expands on this thusly: ‘Joy wants eternity.’ Timelessness is the ideal of pleasure. Time has no power over the id, the original domain of the pleasure principle. But the ego, through which alone pleasure becomes real, is in its entirety subject to time. The mere anticipa- tion of the inevitable end, present in every instant, introduces a repressive ele- ment into all libidinal relations and renders pleasure itself painful. This primary frustration in the instinctual structure of man becomes the inexhaustible source of all other frustrations—and of their social effectiveness. Man learns that ‘it can- not last anyway,’ that every pleasure is short, that for all finite things the hour of their birth is the hour of their death—that it couldn’t be otherwise. He is resigned before society forces him to practice resignation methodically. The flux of time is society’s most natural ally in maintaining law and order, conformity, and the in- stitutions that relegate freedom to a perpetual utopia; the flux of time helps men to forget what was and what can be: it makes them oblivious to the better past and the better future. 79 The second half of the second of these two block quotations makes it clear that Marcuse considers the psychoanalytic account of temporality to play into the 78 Marcuse, 191. 79 Marcuse, 231. 132 adrian johnston hands of capitalism’s undue burdens of “surplus repression” 80 and ideological rationalizations (via eternalization/naturalization) of these burdens. He here sides with Marxism against Freudianism. For both Marx and Marcuse following him, a future realization of something along the lines of a communist “realm of freedom” would be inseparably bound up with changes in how people spend the time of their lives on a day-to-day basis. More precisely, the end of the reign of capital ends its logic of M-C-M′, in which surplus-value is the overriding socially efficacious telos. With the ter- mination of this logic also would come the elimination of the socio-economic compulsion to condemn the vast bulk of humanity to the tedious lost time of ever more surplus labor (as ever more gratuitous thanks to the material abun- dance made possible by capitalism’s enhancements of social productive power). In other words, with the post-capitalist reduction of labor time to that necessary for the satisfactory production and reproduction of the laborers—this is distinct from the surplus labor time “necessary” for producing surplus-value appropri- ated by the minority formed by non-laboring capitalists—the day-by-day bal- ance of laboring persons’ lifetimes between the necessity of work and the free- dom of play would tilt substantially in the direction of the latter. 81 Additionally, given Marcuse’s Heidegger-acquired phenomenological sensibili- ties, combined with his appreciation for the young (circa 1844) Marx’s vivid de- scriptions of the laborer’s lived experience of “alienation,” 82 the later Marcuse of Eros and Civilization probably assumes that a subjective change at the level of phenomenal temporality will be induced as a consequence of an objective trans- formation at the level of socially structured time. Put differently, Marcuse likely believes (and believes that Marx too assumes) that, once the external objectiv- ity of the collective organization of individuals’ daily scheduled rhythms and routines are radically reconfigured, a dramatic mutation will ensue in the inter- 80 Marcuse, 35–37, 40, 44–45, 87–88. 81 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume Three, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1981), 958–59; Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 152–53, 194–95. 82 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 322–34; Herbert Marcuse, “New Sources on the Foundation of Historical Materialism,” in Heideggerian Marxism, ed. Richard Wolin and John Abromeit (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 89–93, 96–97, 104–7; Herbert Marcuse, “On the Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Labor in Economics,” in Wolin and Abromeit, Heideggerian Marxism, 139, 149. 133 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism nal subjectivity of persons’ awarenesses of the ebbs and flows of past, present, and future. This Marcusian belief perhaps is knowingly reinforced by the early Georg Lukács’s more phenomenological musings about the experience of time under the influence of capitalist reification. 83 Similarly, in Eros and Civilization, Marcuse, in line with his Freudo-Marxism, makes a connection between time and sex, hypothesizing that increased amounts of regular leisure will result in people liberating themselves through resexualizing their bodies in “polymor- phously perverse” fashions, as instances of non-repressive desublimation 84 (with Göran Therborn noting that “unlike Reich, sexual liberation in the genital sense is not the psycho-analytical aim of Frankfurt theory so much as the invest- ment of all human activity with libidinal energy”). 85 Yet, much of what Marcuse has to say about time in Eros and Civilization argua- bly hints, contrary to Marcuse’s own intentions, that he might not be so justified in favoring Marxism over Freudianism on this particular issue. Marcuse indeed is correct that psychoanalytic accounts of temporality, starting with those ad- vanced by Freud himself, propose an antagonism between time and pleasure. Marcuse’s previously quoted remarks about temporality also indicate that he sees psychoanalytic metapsychology as situating time on the side of external (and natural rather than social) reality and the ego’s registration of this external reality in the form of the intrapsychical reality principle regulating the pleasure principle. The supposed inner depths of the id, in line with Freud’s repeated depictions of it and the unconscious as “timeless” (Zeitlos), are manifestly con- trasted by Marcuse with the time-sensitive ego sensitized by the brute given fact of the transience of all things. I now will succinctly contest Marcuse’s reading of temporality in Freudian analysis. In so doing, I will additionally challenge how Eros and Civilization in particular interfaces psychoanalysis with Marxism. My 2005 book Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive amounts, in its entirety, to a sustained rebuttal of Marcuse’s manner of handling 83 Georg Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 89–90. 84 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 201; Robinson, Freudian Left, 207–8. 85 Göran Therborn, “The Frankfurt School,” in Western Marxism: A Critical Reader, ed. New Left Review (London: Verso, 1977), 100. 134 adrian johnston psychoanalytic temporality in Eros and Civilization. 86 Time Driven, relying heav- ily on Lacan as well as Freud, proposes that the unconscious is timeless only in the sense of not conforming to the iron rule of the chronological time so promi- nent at the level of conscious experience. Relatedly, I maintain that other forms of temporality different from linear chronology can and should be recognized as informing the configurations and operations of unconscious dimensions of psychical life—and this even by Freud’s own lights, in addition to Lacan’s sug- gestions to the same effect. 87 Furthermore, insofar as the id is the seat of the drives, Time Driven temporal- izes the id in analyzing all drives (Triebe) as split, in their inherent metapsy- chological make-up, between two discrepant, conflicting temporal dimensions. The source (Quelle) and pressure (Drang) of drive are caught up in the cyclical, recurring temporality of what I designate as the psychoanalytic drive’s “axis of iteration.” By contrast, the aim (Ziel) and object (Objekt) of drive are situat- ed within a temporal dimension I call the drive’s “axis of alteration.” This sec- ond dimension consists of complex interactions between projective (from past, through present, to future) and retroactive (from present to past) movements of/ in time. While the somatic axis of iteration involves (attempted) repetition, with its stubbornly relentless seeking after the eternal return of an unaltered past, the psychical axis of alteration involves (repetition-thwarting) difference, with its perpetual retranscriptions and modifications of its mutable, shifting idea- tional contents, both phenomenal and structural. 88 These just-summarized features of Time Driven raise several objections to the Marcuse of Eros and Civilization. First of all, they indicate that Marcuse is wrong to restrict the place of time in psychoanalytic metapsychology to external natu- ral reality and the ego’s inscription of this externality within its secondary-pro- cess reality principle. Marcuse’s mistake is to treat both the unconscious and the 86 Adrian Johnston, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), xxxiv, 154–55, 244–45, 253–55; Adrian Johnston, “A Blast from the Future: Freud, Lacan, Marcuse, and Snapping the Threads of the Past,” in Umbr(a): Utopia, ed. Ryan Anthony Hatch (Buffalo: Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2008), 67–84. 87 Johnston, Time Driven, xxix–xxx, 5–57, 218–19, 315–16. 88 Johnston, xxvii–xxxviii, 218–332, 343–47. 135 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism id, with their primary-process pleasure principle, as internal psychical depths untouched by time/temporality. Moreover, with the temporalization of the drives (along the lines argued in Time Driven) going hand-in-hand with a temporalization of the unconscious and the id, I make a detailed metapsychological case for the insurmountability of the psychoanalytic time-pleasure antagonism as described by Marcuse in the above quotations from Eros and Civilization. The “splitting of the drive” of Time Driven’s sub-title refers to each and every Trieb being internally divided along the fault line between its axis of iteration (source and pressure) and its axis of alteration (aim and object). These two axes are permanently and by their very natures out of synch and at odds with each other. This inner antagonism be- tween incompatible temporal axes renders all drives inherently unable to attain the satisfactions they nonetheless, and in vain, demand. Therefore, pace the Marcuse of Eros and Civilization, time’s interference with pleasure is not just an issue of an exogenous factor affecting the secondary pro- cesses of the ego. Temporality’s thwarting of gratification and enjoyment is also a matter of an endogenous arrangement bound up with and inseparable from the primary processes of the unconscious- and id-level libidinal economy in and of itself at the level of this economy’s own components (i.e., drives) and their in- ner workings. In terms of Marcuse’s above-quoted playing off of Marxism against Freudianism apropos the topic of temporality, my preceding summary of Time Driven and its upshots for Eros and Civilization indicates that psychoanalytic in- sights into the antagonism between time and pleasure are even weightier and harder to offset with appeals to socio-historical variables than Marcuse realizes. Even if a socialism and/or communism arrives in which socially necessary la- bor time is substantially reduced for all persons, this will not usher them into a libidinal paradise in which dissatisfactions disappear with the lifting of cap- italism’s needlessly excessive surplus repressions. 89 If and when such liberat- ed persons get to, for instance, experience the non-repressive desublimation of resexualizing their polymorphously perverse bodies, they will discover that certain stains of discontent, displeasure, malaise, pain, suffering, and unease appear to be well-nigh indelible—including (and especially) within the field of 89 Robinson, Freudian Left, 202–3. 136 adrian johnston their very sexualities. Although the lived experience of temporalities may well change, perhaps even quite significantly, on the other side of the rule of capital’s clocks, time will not cease and will not cease to function as an ineliminable im- pediment to the machinations of the drives. To assume otherwise is utopian in a bad sense that ought to be rejected by Marxism itself in line with its sober-mind- ed rejections of other unrealistic utopias. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis does not, and should not, commit the error of making the perfect into the enemy of the good. Both Freud and Lacan rightly avoid doing this with respect to Marxism. Freud, in his critical reflections on the Bolsheviks in Civilization and Its Discontents, acknowledges that Marxist- type economic redistributions would be a real boon for humanity, an instance of major historical progress to be welcomed and applauded. He merely appends to this a reasonable cautionary note to the effect that revolutionaries should not project onto such sweeping material redistributions overly inflated “idealis- tic” (idealistiches) hopes for a total transubstantiation of “human nature” (men- schlichen Natur) from top to bottom. 90 Alas, Marcuse seems to indulge in pre- cisely such utopian projections. Maybe the better stance here, compromising between the authors of Civilization and Its Discontents and Eros and Civilization, would be to say: Do not count on revolutionary economic, political, and social transformations replacing a bad old human nature with a good new one; but, if such a replacement unexpectedly does happen, one will be free to be pleasantly surprised. Lacan, like Freud, warns that radical leftists would be wise to manage their rev- olutionary expectations, to rein in their paradisal anticipations. Without doing so, such political actors, if and when they pass to the revolutionary act and find themselves on the other side of it, are in grave peril of succumbing to brutally crushing disappointment. In Lacan’s own terms, the unavoidable discrepancy between the “jouissance expected” versus the “jouissance obtained,” a discrep- ancy insurmountable even via any Marxist revolution, risks provoking a dev- astating “subjective destitution” ravaging at least those revolutionary subjects 90 Sigmund Freud, “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur,” in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Anna Freud et al. (London: Imago, 1940–52), 14:504; Freud, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 143. 137 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism who were unable or unwilling to see this discrepancy coming while in the grip of their fevered pre-revolutionary utopian dreams. 91 The inevitable dashing of these dreams threatens to make the dreamers and those they oversold on their dreams into embittered reactionaries undoing what- ever real revolutionary gains are made either from within (a leftist Thermidor) or from without (a right-wing counter-revolution). From this Lacanian vantage point, pre-revolutionary fantasies driving revolutionaries to undertake their rev- olution are some of the greatest dangers to actual post-revolutionary progress if and when it comes to pass—and this despite these fantasies’ roles in helping to catalyze revolutionary activity. As Lacan observes in his 1965 text “Science and Truth” regarding such risky but indispensable supports (or “dangerous supple- ments”) to radical political projects, “an economic science inspired by Capital does not necessarily lead to its utilization as a revolutionary power, and history seems to require help from something other than a predictive dialectic.” 92 This “something other,” at least in the case of revolutionaries’ pre-revolutionary fan- tasies of the jouissance expected on the other side of the revolutionary passage à l’acte, both assists in making revolution more likely (however slightly) while si- multaneously also jeopardizing the revolution’s post-revolutionary longer-term survival if and when the revolution indeed comes to pass. In the absence of a pre-revolutionary psychoanalytic working-through of revo- lution as a fantasy in the strict analytic sense—the “rêve” in “rêve-olution,” like all dreams for an analyst, must be interpreted—any revolution that might in fact arrive one fine day cannot but end up appearing—even (and especially) to the revolutionaries themselves—to be the proverbial “God that failed.” The worry is that such revolutionaries would themselves respond to the shortcomings of their first-imagined-but-now-arrived savior with a version of making the perfect into the enemy of the good. They thereby would fail to value and preserve the post-revolutionary jouissance obtained (as tangible economic, political, and/ or social gains) because it does not measure up to the pre-revolutionary jou- issance expected (i.e., aspirations for such things as the transubstantiation of 91 Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 111–12; Johnston, Time Driven, xxiv, xxx- iv–xxxv, 239–41, 243, 248, 250, 282–83, 285–87 , 297–98, 318, 324–25, 327 , 329–30, 336–37 , 339. 92 Jacques Lacan, “Science and Truth,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 738. 138 adrian johnston human nature and the complete elimination of discontent and suffering). Any revolution inspired specifically by Marcuse-type hopes—this also would apply, mutatis mutandis, to the mirage of the “New Man” deceptively upheld as a re- ality by Really Existing Socialism, including in the sort of Soviet propaganda surrounding the likes of Luria and Vygotsky—would face such dangerous disil- lusionment. Down the path of disappointment, regression to the pre-revolution- ary past, or worse, beckons. 93 I now leave behind this line of psychoanalytic criticism of Marcuse’s brand of Freudo-Marxism in bringing this intervention into the more sophisticated and thoughtful Marxist assessments of psychoanalysis to a close. In these conclud- ing moments, I wish to place a spotlight on certain shared commitments com- mon to Luria, Vygotsky, Reich, Fenichel, and Marcuse as Marxists engaging critically yet charitably with the Freudian field. The three analytically-inclined Western Marxists dealt with here (i.e., Reich, Fenichel, and Marcuse) all assert that Freud’s version of the soma-psyche distinction (most prominently on dis- play at the level of his metapsychological drive theory) is a microcosmic, intra- subjective reflection of the dialectical logic of the macrocosmic, inter/trans-sub- jective infrastructure-superstructure distinction (as proposed by historical materialism’s account of social history). 94 According to this parallel, Freudian soma mirrors Marxian infrastructure and Freudian psyche mirrors Marxian su- perstructure. However, Reich, Fenichel, and Marcuse subscribe to a version of historical mate- rialism in which the superstructural can and does reciprocally react back on the infrastructural base upon which it rests and from which it arises. That is to say, for Reich, Fenichel, and Marcuse alike, there is a dialectical interaction between infrastructure and superstructure. Theirs is thus a dialectical historical materi- alism (as opposed to an economistically reductive and mechanical one). Hence, in drawing a parallel with Freud’s soma-psyche couple, they urge a sympathetic 93 Jacques Lacan, “Radiophonie,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 424; Jacques Lacan, “Television,” in Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 32–33, 46. 94 Reich, Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, 20–21, 56; Fenichel, “Dialectical- Materialist Psychology,” 294–96, 311; Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 132–33. 139 the drive of capital: freudo-marxism’s dialectical materialism Marxist construal of Freud as a spontaneous dialectical materialist of sorts (as do Luria and Vygotsky too in places I reference above). In a related vein, Luria, Vygotsky, Reich, Fenichel, and Marcuse all agree on the central role of psychoanalytic drive theory in a synthesis of psychoanalysis and dialectical/historical materialism. 95 They interpret the interplay of somatic and psychical dimensions and components within each and every analytic Trieb as permitting the attribution to Freudian metapsychology of a materialist dialec- tics bringing Freud-the-psychoanalyst into proximity with Marx-the-historical- materialist. For them, Freud’s Trieb is the pineal gland between psychoanalysis and Marxism. However, Marx and Freud can be brought together along these lines coming from the other direction too, namely, through reinterpreting pivotal portions of Marx’s corpus so as to close the gap with Freud’s oeuvre. Specifically, and as I will go on to show, rereading Marx with the benefit of psychoanalytic hind- sight reveals the presence in Marx’s writings of an already highly sophisticated conceptualization of Triebe strikingly foreshadowing the Freudian account of drives. Maybe Marx ought to be credited not only with inventing the psychoan- alytic concept of the symptom avant la lettre, as Lacan proposes, 96 but also with inventing the analytic idea of the drive prior to Freud. References Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. London: Continu- um, 1973. Althusser, Louis. “Freud and Lacan.” In Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, edited by Oliver Corpet and François Matheron, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, 7–32. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. . “The Discovery of Dr. Freud.” In Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, ed- ited by Oliver Corpet and François Matheron, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, 85–105. 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