Political Freud

A History

Eli Zaretsky

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231540148
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

In this masterful history, Eli Zaretsky reveals the power of Freudian thought to illuminate the great political conflicts of the twentieth century. Developing an original concept of "political Freudianism," he shows how twentieth-century radicals, activists, and intellectuals used psychoanalytic ideas to probe consumer capitalism, racial violence, anti-Semitism, and patriarchy. He also underscores the continuing influence and critical potential of those ideas in the transformed landscape of the present. Zaretsky's conception of political Freudianism unites the two overarching themes of the last century—totalitarianism and consumerism—in a single framework. He finds that theories of mass psychology and the unconscious were central to the study of fascism and the Holocaust; to African American radical thought, particularly the struggle to overcome the legacy of slavery; to the rebellions of the 1960s; and to the feminism and gay liberation movements of the 1970s. Nor did the influence of political Freud end when the era of Freud bashing began. Rather, Zaretsky proves that political Freudianism is alive today in cultural studies, the study of memory, theories of trauma, postcolonial thought, film, media and computer studies, evolutionary theory and even economics.

1

Psychoanalysis and the Spirit of Capitalism

Although The Interpretation of Dreams was published over a century ago, the integration of psychoanalysis into the broad matrix of modern social and cultural history has barely begun. During his lifetime, Freud’s charisma was so powerful that the historical landscape surrounding him remained in shadows. Only decades after his death did light begin to dawn. The earliest significant attempt to historicize psychoanalysis appeared in 1980. Situating Freud in the context of the decline of classical liberalism and the rise of mass politics and mass culture, Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna was an inspired beginning.¹

Schorske was right to situate psychoanalysis in a broad historical frame. The brilliant debut of psychoanalysis in 1899, its spectacular entry into American-style mass culture, the widespread fascination it inspired among youth, flappers, artists, and intellectuals, as well as among advertising writers and industrial psychologists, its critical contribution to the post–World War II welfare states, the revival of its utopian dimensions during the 1960s, the central place it occupied in the history of second-wave feminism, gay liberation, and Latin American Marxism—all this attests to the depth and pervasiveness of the connections between psychoanalysis and twentieth-century culture. In psychoanalysis, it is possible to say, one encounters the spirit of twentieth-century culture, at least until the mid 1970s.

If so, then the problem of situating psychoanalysis historically may have an affinity with the problem Max Weber faced when he made the phrase “the spirit of capitalism” famous in 1905. Whereas Adam Smith and the British school of political economy tended to take the psychology and culture of capitalism for granted, Weber and his contemporaries, faced with the late development of the German economy, viewed psychology and culture as problems requiring explanation.² Distinguishing the “form” of capitalism, especially exchange relations, from its spirit (Geist), and describing the modern economic order as a “tremendous cosmos” of meanings, Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism isolated one crucial moment in the evolution of the spirit of capitalism, namely the origins of such bourgeois virtues as thrift, discipline, and self-denial in the Protestant reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.³ According to Weber, the Calvinist idea of a rationalized, methodical life plan devoted to worldly affairs—a “calling” (Beruf)—was crucial in precipitating the spirit of capitalism. Originating in aspirations for salvation, Weber reasoned, rational, goal-directed, methodical self-organization remained integral to the emerging commercial and industrial order even after it had left its religious connotations behind.⁴

When he wrote The Protestant Ethic, Weber believed that capitalism no longer needed a transcendental justification, i.e., a Geist or spirit. “This-worldly asceticism” or Calvinism, he remarked, having successfully remodeled the world, had flown from the iron cage. In its place stood “victorious capitalism” resting on “mechanical foundations,” meaning that economic necessity and cause-and-effect relations drove the capitalism that had left the reformation behind. The truth is, however, that capitalism always requires a “spirit”; it never justifies itself purely instrumentally but the spirit changes. In this chapter, accordingly, I will show that psychoanalysis played a crucial role in bringing about the changes in the spirit of capitalism that we associate with the second industrial revolution—the rise of mass production and mass consumption—a process that was just beginning when Weber wrote his famous book.

To make this argument, I will draw on another of Weber’s ideas, one that barely appears in The Protestant Ethic, the idea of charisma.⁵ According to Weber, even social transformations as vast as the rise of capitalism cannot be explained by objective factors alone. They also involve reorientations to meaning sparked by charismatic individuals, individuals who motivate their followers by giving personal expression to new or innovative goals or ideas.⁶ Such reorientations to meaning neither reflect nor cause objective social change; having rather an “elective affinity” with such change, they serve as catalysts for them.⁷ Whether encountered still warm in individuals and sects or routinized in institutions, charisma guarantees that the aspirations and legitimations that accompany social change will be rooted at an inward and personal level, rather than remaining at the level of material interests or coercion. For Weber, then, early Calvinist or Puritan charisma helped spark the crucial inward transformations without which capitalism would not have taken off, or at least would have taken a very different form.⁸

Charisma played an important role in the rise of capitalism especially because of its effects on the family. Normally, Weber believed, charisma was directed against everyday, mundane economic life and therefore against the family. Thus Jesus and Buddha—early charismatic figures—urged their followers to leave their families to create an authentic spiritual community. By contrast, the Puritan “Saints” of the seventeenth century redefined the family as a locus of charismatic meanings, sanctifying its everyday labor and giving it a religio-ethical character. During the early centuries of capitalism, when the family was the engine of economic development, this redefinition fostered such family-based virtues as thrift, industry, and discipline. Several centuries later, Methodist revivals and awakenings served related ends. Embraced by the English and American industrial working classes, Methodism served not only as an “opiate” but also as a vehicle of personal transformation encouraging the sobriety and familial responsibility that enabled the first industrial revolution. In both cases, then, the infusion of everyday familial and economic life with charismatic or sacred meaning was crucial in precipitating a socioeconomic transformation.

The second industrial revolution—the rise of the vertically integrated, bureaucratically organized corporation with its orientation toward mass consumption—also involved a charismatic reorientation toward work and the family, one comparable to, if not as intense as, the Reformation.⁹ Just as men and women did not embark on the transition from agrarian society to industrial capitalism for merely instrumental or economic reasons, so in the twentieth century they did not become consumers in order to supply markets. Rather, they separated from traditional familial and communal morality, gave up their orientation to self-denial and thrift, and entered into the sexualized “dreamworlds” of mass consumption on behalf of a new orientation to what I will call personal life. Psychoanalysis—I will argue—was the “Calvinism” of this shift. But whereas Calvinism sanctified mundane labor in the family, Freud urged his followers to leave behind their “families”—the archaic images of early childhood—not to preach but to develop more genuine, that is, more personal, relations.¹⁰

I will make this argument in four parts, each of which focuses on a phase in the history of psychoanalysis. In the first phase, which runs from the 1890s until World War I, and which encompasses the early years of mass production, psychoanalysis was effectively a sect expressing, in an intensely charismatic form, then new aspirations for “personal life.” In a second phase, which encompasses the interwar period (1919–1939), psychoanalysis became a mass cultural phenomenon, integral to and diffused by the new mass media, such as film and radio. It thereby helped generate the utopian ideology of individuality that accompanied mass consumption. In a third phase, which runs from World War II to the mid-1960s, psychoanalysis was integrated into the Keynesian welfare states, becoming, in Weber’s phrase, a “this-worldly program of ethical rationalization,” and supplying what I will call the maturity ethic for post–World War II domesticity. Finally, in a fourth phase, running roughly from 1965–1974, the New Left and women’s movement attacked the maturity ethic and the welfare state, ushering in the post-Fordist network or communication-based spirit of capitalism that characterizes the present. In half a century, then, psychoanalysis ran through the familiar Weberian cycle of charisma, routinization, and diffusion, although even in its long period of decline it continued to spark new if transitory upheavals.

1.

Let me begin by quoting Luc Boltanski and Éve Chiapello’s description of the nineteenth–century bourgeoisie: “owning land, factories and women, rooted in possessions, obsessed with preserving their goods, endlessly concerned about reproducing, exploiting and increasing them…thereby condemned to meticulous forethought…and a quasi-obsessive pursuit of production for production’s sake.”¹¹ The essence of the description is the attempt to deepen authority by extending control and enforcing restraint. Since most property was either rooted in land or small-scale, and since the family was the center of small-scale property, the family was at the center of this system of authority. It organized not just daily life but lineage, inheritance, and marriage. Its patriarchal or paternal relations were reproduced in shops and trades as well as being at the center of communal life. The depressing devotion to duty that resulted was what Weber—who grew up among burghers—referred to when he wrote that the Puritans wore their economic responsibilities “like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment,” while for his generation the cloak “had become an iron cage”

When he wrote The Protestant Ethic, Weber believed that duty, restraint, and savings had lost the association with charismatic meaning they originally had. Writing the book during his own psychic crisis, he never abandoned hope that a new asceticism, a new turn inward, might emerge and challenge or modify capitalist rationalization. In fact, his sense of the exhaustion of the Protestant ethic and his desire to escape from the iron cage were widely shared. The coming of the market, the railroad, the steamship, new forms of communication such as mass newspapers and popular lectures, and especially wage labor, allowed “the young to emancipate themselves from local communities, from being enslaved to the land and rooted in the family, [and thus] to escape the village, the ghetto, and traditional forms of personal dependence.”¹² It was within the consciousness that resulted, which we often call modernism or modernity, that psychoanalysis—the new asceticism for which Weber longed—attained its special place. The charisma of analysis arose, I believe, because it gave voice to the aspiration to be free from the spirit of nineteenth-century capitalism. In Secrets of the Soul I called this aspiration “personal life.”¹³

By personal life I mean the experience of having an identity distinct from one’s place in the family, in society, and in the social division of labor. In one sense, the possibility of having a personal life is a universal aspect of human life, but that is not the sense I have in mind. Rather, I mean a historically specific experience of singularity and interiority sociologically grounded in industrialization and urbanization. The separation (both physical and emotional) of paid work from the household, which is to say the rise of industrial capitalism, gave rise to new forms of privacy, domesticity, and intimacy. At first—in the Victorian era—these were experienced as the gendered familial counterparts to the impersonal world of the market. Later, they became associated with the possibility and goal of a personal life distinct from and even outside of the family. Expressions of this possibility include the “new” (or independent) woman, the emergence of public homosexual identities, and the turning of young people away from a preoccupation with business and toward sexual experimentation, bohemia, and artistic modernism. Personal identity became a problem and a project for individuals as opposed to something given to them by their place in the family or the community. Psychoanalysis was a theory and practice of this new aspiration for a personal life. Its original historical telos was defamilialization, the freeing of individuals from unconscious images of authority originally rooted in the family.

That psychoanalysis was a theory and practice of personal life can be seen in the signature concepts of its formative years—the unconscious and sexuality. Neither concept was new, of course, but Freud gave them both radically innovative meanings. In the case of the unconscious, he articulated the new experience—also evoked by such figures as Baudelaire, for example, in the figures of the poet or the flaneur—of no longer being defined by one’s social relations, such as parentage, religion, nationality, or even gender. Thus, the subject of The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1899, is a sleeping individual, someone who is completely separated from the real social world. With the external world at a distance, all stimuli arise from within. No thought that comes to the individual—whether it originated in childhood or comes from the “day residues,” everyday impressions—is directly registered; rather it is first dissolved and internally reconstituted in such a way as to give it a unique and contingent meaning. The result was a new conception of the relations between the individual and the surrounding community. Traditional healers were effective because they mobilized symbols that were both internal and communal. In psychoanalysis, by contrast, there is no direct relation—no isomorphism or complementarity—between the community and the intrapsychic world. Whereas the communal world is composed of collective symbols, such as God or la République, in the intrapsychic world, symptoms replace symbols: a nervous cough, a tic, the washing of hands. In learning to interpret their private worlds, modern men and women distanced themselves from collectivities. Psychoanalysis taught individuals to withdraw from the painful tensions involved in their relation to society while encouraging them to relate “more affirmatively to their depths.”¹⁴

The same reorientation toward a uniquely personal, intrapsychic world characterized the psychoanalytic approach toward sexuality. Whereas, in the nineteenth-century world described by Boltanski and Chiapello, sexuality was largely organized through familial relations, psychoanalysis emerged in a world in which many circles were repudiating the family-centered morality of the bourgeoisie.¹⁵ These included the Männerbunden (male sects centered on a charismatic leader, such as Klimt or Marinetti); artistic bohemias, in which free love was common, and Marxist currents such as the one centered around Trotsky, who covertly supported Russian psychoanalysis until his exile. Most important, male homosexuals, such as the London gay society exemplified by Edward Carpenter, pioneered the idea of sexual life outside the family and not defined by reproduction, while “new women” promulgated Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s wish to move beyond the “incidental relations of life, such as mother, wife, sister, daughter” to focus instead on what she called the “individuality of each human soul.”¹⁶

In that context Freud, who began with an inherited schema that stressed gender difference aimed at reproduction, soon dropped it. Instead, he argued that the distinction necessary to understand psychic life was not between male and female but between libido and repression. Distinguishing the sexual object or target from the sexual aim, meaning the libidinal impulse the sexual act aimed at satisfying, Freud restricted the question of gender to the question of object choice. In contrast to the gender-based Victorian theories of psychology and sexology, he claimed that psychoanalysis recognized that every person had a “special individuality in the exercise of his capacity to love—that is, in the conditions which he sets up for loving, in the impulses he gratifies by it, and in the aims he sets out to achieve in it.”¹⁷ In spite of the masculine pronoun, psychoanalysis had implications for both sexes. Whereas earlier debates over women’s roles had pivoted on whether men and women were fundamentally the same or fundamentally different, psychoanalysis gave voice to a new sensibility whose governing norm was neither sameness nor difference, but individuality.

In its early years, then, Freudian analysis seemed to codify a set of post-Victorian intuitions that until then had been the preserve of artists, sexual and ethnic minorities, and philosophers. The result was a far-flung charisma stretching before World War I from Los Angeles to Russia (which published the largest number of Freud translations of any country) and that by the twenties extended to India, Mexico, China, and Japan. Psychoanalysis appealed to women as well as men and to homosexuals as well as heterosexuals; indeed, arguably women comprised the largest number of readers.¹⁸ Above all, its charisma was deeply felt and experienced. The emotional tone with which Freud was read and discussed in the pre–World War I period is nicely captured in Lincoln Steffens’s autobiography. In 1911 Walter Lippmann, Steffens wrote, “first introduced us to the idea that the minds of men were distorted by unconscious suppressions…. There were no warmer, quieter, more intensely thoughtful conversations at Mabel Dodge’s [a Greenwich Village salon] than those on Freud and his implications.” In this first phase of its history, then, psychoanalysis seemed to offer a way out of the iron cage by putting sexuality at the center of psychology. As Max Weber wrote, evoking the dead “skeletal grasp” of corporate-led rationalization, sexuality was the “gate into the most irrational and thereby real kernel of life…eternally inaccessible to any rational endeavour.”

In sum, then, even as capitalism was becoming more comprehensively organized, more systematic, and more integrated, it was simultaneously loosening the economic vise, making possible greater ease in the relations between the sexes and enhancing the sense of individual subjectivity, if at first primarily for certain strata. As a charismatic sect, psychoanalysis expressed the new sense of subjectivity in its most immediate, because most personal, form. As Freud admitted, its key ideas, such as instincts and the unconscious, were not original to it. What distinguished psychoanalysis, he wrote, was not the content of its ideas but i...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction—Political Freud
• 1. Psychoanalysis and the Spirit of Capitalism
• 2. Beyond the Blues: The Racial Unconscious and Collective Memory
• 3. In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Rereading Freud’s Moses
• 4. The Ego at War: From the Death Instinct to Precarious Life
• 5. From the Maturity Ethic to the Psychology of Power: The New Left, Feminism, and the Return to “Social Reality”
• Afterword—Freud in the Twenty-first Century
• Notes
• Index