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There have been numerous attempts to hammer out a systematic accommodation between psychoanalysis and Marxism. We have long been familiar with the dilemmas and strategies characteristic of this negotiation. But serious discussions of what Freud means for intellectuals proud to live in liberal capitalist democracies are relatively rare.
The most brilliant exception, and in some ways the most treacherous, is Philip Rieff's Freud: The Mind of the Morale. Associating Freud's popularity in America with the discrediting of political radicalism (1961, 267), Rieff understands psychoanalysis as a quiescent, prudent, inward-turned mutation of reforming liberalism, disillusioned about external authority to the point that the self becomes the sole sphere of ambition: “Psychoanalysis sponsors a rational alienation from public enthusiasm…. However much Freudianism may itself function as an ideology, it inculcates—as I have tried to show—skepticism about all ideologies except those of the private life” (278). Political man, religious man, and economic man have had their day. Reading Freud receptively has changed the old liberal character types into “psychological man.”
A brilliant chapter on “Politics and the Individual” reveals, with extraordinary breadth of allusion, the strengths and partialities of Freud's social writings. Though he exposed the authoritarian father behind the figure of the leader and recognized the mixture of love and guilt in social solidarity, Freud grossly overestimated the cohesion of political groups, feared and even loathed the masses, saw the main social problem of his day as a trade-off between the happiness of the individual and the moral tyranny of society, stressed individual health at the expense of social perfection, and took no notice of real political processes: