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The relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxist psychology is a long history of misunderstandings. In the 1920s and 30s there was a passionate discussion between Soviet psychologists and German-speaking psychoanalysts interested in linking their science with Marxism and making it acceptable in the Soviet Union. Then Hitler acceded to power in Germany and annexed Austria and the majority of psychoanalysts went into exile, so the discussion was cut off.
But I do not want to go into this long history. I would rather limit myself to three criticisms and reproaches made from the Soviet side towards psychoanalysis:
Psychoanalysis seemed to them conceivable only as a bourgeois, decadent and idealistic practice. The couch was converted into a symbol of its lack of seriousness. Now then, why did analysis develop in this way? It emerged from Sigmund Freud's private practice. He did not have a laboratory to experiment in, in the way that the Soviet psychologist F.V. Bassin required. Freud, a bourgeois, was analysing in an intimate setting the sick world of other bourgeois; besides, he had to charge fees in order to keep his family. All that is true. Castel, in his book El Psicoanalismo [Psychoanalism], criticizes psychoanalysis for excluding the external world and the class struggle from the dialogue inasmuch as both analyst and analysand belong to the same class. In saying this I am
* This article is the text of a talk given at a conference in Casa de las Americas, La Habana, Cuba, 3 December 1985.
trying to give a historical explanation, rather than uphold the scientific value of analysis.
The principal reproach in this long discussion was that Freud was biologistic. It is true that Freud was interested in the biological; he was a physician. Moreover, the biological is important, but even though Freud speaks to us about the instincts, he was not biologistic and did not conceive of man as unmodifiable. He explains psychosocially, for example, how an instinct is transformed an