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Eugene Wolfenstein’s Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork is a massive, thorough, impassioned work. Though ‘Marxism’ is the title’s noun, and ‘psychoanalytic’ its adjective, Wolfenstein even-
handedly addresses both the powers and the limitations of each. His book is profoundly and ambitiously theoretical, but there is nothing airy or disengaged about it. Rather, its theoretical abstractions are consistently tethered to a ground which Wolfenstein quickly and effectively defines by way of a concrete and practical question: ‘What theory or theories facilitate the interpretation and transformation of situations characterized by human suffering?’ (p. 3).
This question, because Wolfenstein poses it so quickly and bluntly and proceeds to address it so systematically and seriously, might serve as a refreshing, if daunting, reminder to many psychoanalysts that our demanding practices have the unwanted side effect of walling us off from much of the human suffering which our clinicallygrounded theories might well have the power to address.
The word ‘reminder’ here refers to a second register of Wolfenstein’s text as well. He devotes two particularly illuminating chapters to the history of ‘Freudian-Marxism’, reminding us of their burgeoning conceptual and political interconnectedness, particularly between the two world wars.
In these chapters, he adroitly works his way through Reich, Fromm and Marcuse, and then moves on to the phenomenological turns of Sartre and Fanon. He summarises the work of Kovel and Lichtman, of Habermas and of the influence of the New Left, of feminist developments such as those of Gayle Rubin and Jessica Benjamin, and finally of post-structuralists such as Foucault. For each thinker, Wolfenstein seeks and finds his/her theory’s central contradictions and insufficiencies. Wolfenstein looks both within the theories and at their supporting social milieux. He makes a particularly persuasive argument that,