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Libido and Society sets out to show how psychoanalysis reflected the historical period of its creation. The psychoanalytic view of human nature, according to Helmut Dahmer, reflects what bourgeois society was like at the end of the nineteenth century. Freud's theoretical conceptualizations, to the extent to which they were modeled on the natural-science tradition, were a product of economic conditions. Psychoanalysis as well as idealistic German philosophy can thus be understood as mere superstructure for the prominent substructure, i.e., the means of production. What Freud observed, how he conceptualized and made inferences about human nature, depended as much on the cultural economic substructure as it did on his genius. Freud, Dahmer claims, remained unaware of the economic-cultural overdetermination of his work.
Dahmer's emphasis is on the inseparable intertwining of the fate of individuals and the structure of society at large. The origin of neurosis as well as its cure depends, then, on each person's ability to interact in a constructive manner with the society in which he lives. Man must cope with the illusion society tries to force upon him. While Dahmer states that efforts to implement political Marxism have failed to materialize, he believes that psychoanalysis must combine with a Marxist perspective in order to provide full therapeutic benefits for patients. From this radical viewpoint Dahmer critically reviews "the first generation of Marxian psychoanalysts," as they failed to comprehend psychoanalysis' potential to discern in man's soul the mirror image of the social ills besetting him.
Dahmer—the editor of the German psychoanalytic journal Psyche published by Alexander Mitscherlich—writes with a passion for studying and learning. He knows how to blend his own thoughts with interesting quotations, often from rather divergent sources, into a powerful—although to this reviewer not always convincing—argument presented in what perhaps might be