Psychoanalysis and the Crisis of Psychology: Vygotsky, Politzer and Wallon on Freud

This article discusses the psychological writings of Lev Vygotsky, Georges Politzer and Henri Wallon. It reconstructs the arguments they each made, from the 1920s to the 1940s, that psychology was in the midst of a historical crisis, characterized by a division between idealist and materialist philosophical foundations. The article focuses on the role each of these theorists thought psychoanalysis was to play in the resolution of this crisis. In a set of texts where they imagine how the philosophical basis of psychology could be reformed, they each, firstly, make several intriguing commentaries on the pathologies of dialectical materialism, and secondly, attempt to grasp how Freud's work could be applied to address these. As the article outlines, the crisis of psychology that dialectical materialism made visible to these three figures was not something any of them found a solution to. Though each of them clearly grasped that psychoanalysis offered significant and complex possibilities in this context, they were unable to articulate exactly what it might offer as an alternative. After evaluating their work on this topic, I argue here that the treatment of Freud by Vygotsky, Politzer and Wallon, and specifically their difficulties in approaching his work, points to a set of historical concerns about the status of science as a whole, and suggests a number of intriguing possibilities for future enquiries into the relationship between psychoanalysis and materialist thought.