Late Capitalist Freud in Literary, Cultural, and Political Theory

Maria-Daniella Dick, Robbie McLaughlan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030471934
• eBook ISBN: 9783030471941
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Late Capitalist Freud in Literary, Cultural, and Political Theory proposes that late Freudian theory has had an historical influence on the configuration of contemporary life and is central to the construction of twenty-first-century capitalism. This book investigates how we continue to live in the Freudian century, turning its attentions to specific crisis points within neoliberalism—the rise of figures like Trump, the development of social media as a new superego force, the economics that underpin the wellness and self-care industries as well as the contemporary consumption of popular culture—to maintain the continued historical importance of Freudian thought in all its dimensions. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, literary theory, cultural studies, and political theory, this book assesses the contribution that an historical and theoretical consideration of the late Freud can make to analyzing certain aspects of late capital.

© The Author(s) 2020

M.-D. Dick, R. McLaughlanLate Capitalist Freud in Literary, Cultural, and Political Theoryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47194-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Maria-Daniella Dick¹ and Robbie McLaughlan²

(1)

School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

(2)

School of English Literature Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK

Maria-Daniella Dick (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Robbie McLaughlan

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Critical Coordinates

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Sigmund Freud establishes an analogous relationship between psychoanalysis and capitalism when, in an extended metaphor, he borrows from the language of finance to explain the role of the unconscious as a site of psychic production:

A daytime thought may very well play the part of entrepreneur for a dream; but the entrepreneur, who, as people say, has the idea and the initiative to carry it out, can do nothing without capital; he needs a capitalist who can afford the outlay, and the capitalist who provides the psychical outlay for the dream is invariably and indisputably, whatever may be the thoughts of the previous day, a wish from the unconscious.¹

Here Freud imagines the dream as requiring a form of seed capital or angel investment to realize its entrepreneurial ambitions, figuring the conscious and unconscious mind respectively as actors within a psychic economy. The unconscious acts as a reserve bankrolling the conscious mind, a speculative investment from which to gain future profit. In one of his 1913 ‘Papers on Technique’, Freud again draws upon this conceptual vocabulary when he marks a symbolic association within bourgeois society between sexuality and the culture of capital:

He [the analyst] can point out that money matters are treated by civilized people in the same way as sexual matters—with the same inconsistency, prudishness and hypocrisy. The analyst is therefore determined from the first not to fall in with this attitude, but, in his dealings with his patients, to treat of money matters with the same matter-of-course frankness to which he wishes to educate them in things relating to sexual life. He shows them that he himself has cast off false shame on these topics, by voluntarily telling them the price at which he values his time.²

The logic of capitalist exchange that structures the psychoanalytic experience is further emphasized when Freud cautions against ‘gratuitous treatments’ on the basis that if money is psychically linked to repressed sexual urges, the prospect of a successful analysis is increased if the patient commits a financial investment in the process: ‘[f]ree treatment’, Freud avers, ‘enormously increases some of a neurotic’s resistances’.³ While the writing on technique and his emphasis on the expense of analysis is a marketing ploy of sorts, it also serves as a warning to any patient against undertaking a more affordable analysis at the hands of a less qualified analyst. The cost of Freudian analysis is a marker of its efficacy. Freud’s use of the language of financial markets alludes to the imaginary of the bourgeois milieu to which he also makes appeal, gesturing to the implicit expectations of speculation and investment followed by accumulation and return, within the economy of psychoanalytic treatment itself. It also implies a deeper connection between psychoanalysis and the formation of capitalism in modernity; as conceptualized by Freud, psychoanalysis has always been implicated in the capitalist project.

Our book brings the writings of the late Freud into analysis with four crisis points of late capitalism: politics, technology, the body and culture. In it, we set out to address a question posed by Eli Zaretsky in the Afterword to his book Political Freud: A History (2015): ‘[i]s Freud’s thought solely of historical interest, or is it relevant to our lives today?’.⁴ To argue for a Late Capitalist Freud not only accepts the implicit challenge in Zaretsky’s question to resist a historicizing of Freud—as if the age of Freud were over—but reveals the active influence that the late work continues to exert in understanding all aspects of our contemporary life. Contrary to the proclamations that psychoanalysis today is both an archaic and redundant science, we suggest that the scientific, clinical, therapeutic, or curative validity of psychoanalysis is irrelevant. Whether neuroscience disproves the existence of the unconscious (it hasn’t) or MRI scanners can detect some area of the brain that functions analogously to the Freudian superego (it may have) is, we contend, completely immaterial to the continued significance of the late Freud’s metapsychology in understanding contemporary late capitalist democracy. The ‘Freud Wars’ of the 1980s already proclaimed the death of psychoanalysis and the influence of Freudian theory at the turn of the previous century. H.J. Eysenck claimed that Freud’s writing had evaded rigorous critical investigation largely because the ‘camp-followers of the Freudian movement’ had been myopic in their adherence to Freud’s writing, such that works on Freud and psychoanalysis rejected all criticism as a form of ideological attack: ‘they are therefore uncritical, unaware of alternative theories, and written more as weapons in a war of propaganda than objective assessments of the present status of psychoanalysis’.⁵ More recently, the polemical findings presented in Frederick Crews’s Freud: The Making of an Illusion (2017) rehearse Eysenck’s criticisms of adherents of Freudian theory as too invested, both intellectually and financially, to realize the falsity of psychoanalysis. At the risk of interpellation into this critique, does it not gesture to the persistent vitality of Freudian thought, both in its perceived threat and its continued relevance to debate?.

Our argument has two central contentions. The first is that the ‘social’ turn by which the thought of the late Freud is critically characterized has, throughout the twentieth century and into the post-millennium, influenced how contemporary capitalist institutions understand their citizen-consumers. Our second and subsequent claim is that we might understand certain crisis points of contemporary late capitalism by examining them in parallel with the late Freudian writing, both in their formation through its influence and in how they testify to the broader sustainability of his theory on culture within democracy. There are two interrelated strands to this position. The first is the empirical claim, based on historical study, that Freud’s metapsychology has made a central contribution to what Wendy Brown describes as ‘neoliberal rationality’, the mode by which neoliberalism goes beyond the financial sphere and becomes a governing political rationality that transforms by economizing all domains of contemporary life.⁶ We examine how its adoption by the discursive practices of advertising, marketing, industrial administration and government connect Freudian cultural psychology to mid twentieth-century liberal democracy and its later formation in a contemporary late capitalist free-market economy. The second strand contends the value of the social theories of the late Freud to interpreting late capitalism, premised both on the empirical argument for the cultural influence of that theory and on a theoretical analysis of its principles as they have been realized and can be discerned within contemporary life. We are suggesting that concepts established in the late Freudian canon can be recognized in aspects of twenty-first century cultural and political institutions, and that their presence demonstrates both the afterlife of Freudian theory as it has been consciously dispersed into the cultural sphere, and the lived substantiation of Freudian thought within the late writing as it pertains to his theories on the individual within society.

We wish to distinguish between the circularity that might be inherent to using Freud to interrogate a world that we claim has been shaped by Freud and the alternative position that we are outlining here. Our argument proposes both that Freudian theory has had a historical influence on the configuration of contemporary life—in forming understandings of mass democracy, of the figure of the leader and of the role of institutions in regulating social control—and also that we can discern the broader realization of certain concepts within the late Freudian corpus as they are borne out by particular manifestations of late capitalist culture. As such, we maintain the historical importance of Freudian thought in all its dimensions: as it has been used and adapted within society; in its value as an interpretative model to understanding society thus influenced; and in the theoretical significance we claim for it to a comprehension of contemporary neoliberal existence. We assess the contribution that a historical and theoretical consideration of the late Freud might make to analyzing certain crisis points of late capital, arguing that concepts deployed within the late Freudian writing to theorize society are borne out and substantiated in the ontological shift in the human subject and democratic imaginary that Brown contends is pursuant on the socio-economic development of neoliberalism.

Contrary to the proclamations of Eysenck, Crews et al., we argue that we continue to exist in the shadow of the Freudian Empire and to live in the long Freudian century. In order to understand the so-called crisis in liberal democracy in the geopolitical west—signified across phenomena of populist revolts, financial instability, technological subsumption and an epidemic of mental health disorders—we return to the work produced by Freud in the final years of his life.⁷ This book maps how psychoanalytic theories gave shape to the system of capitalist democracy that defined the previous century; yet it is not simply an intellectual historiog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. A Politics of Freud
• 3. (Psycho)Social Media
• 4. Bodily Economies
• 5. Culture in the Age of Death Drive
• 6. Conclusion: Death Drive Ecologies
• Back Matter