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This brief book explores the bimodal impact of psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. Disregarding the title, since the book deals with Freudianism, and not Freud the man, we are presented with a scholarly history of the rise, fall, and reemergence of Freudian thinking over the course of this century.
From my perspective, both Freudianism and Marxism share a complementarity that can lead to a more totalistic picture of individuals and society. They both go beyond the manifest to explore the forces, instinctually driven or social, that propel behavior; they both investigate “false consciousness” either through defenses or ideology; and they both attempt to understand the process of internalization either through superego formation or the incorporation of the superstructure into the individual psyche. Both are grounded in a materialistic substructure: drives and classes. Both theories use conflict, the dialectic, as a way of understanding development and change. Both see phenomenology as inadequate to explain the core dynamics of society and individuals, and both are therefore “radical” in the true meaning of the word (“arising from a root or source”).
There also are some distinct differences. Marxism sees the conflict between social classes, rooted in socioeconomic conditions, as becoming reflective in the individual psyche, whereas psychoanalysis (particularly at that time) saw the underlying unconscious conflicts, universal and independent of socioeconomic factors, as the primary focus and the propellant of the psyche. As Sapir stated in positing the Marxist position, “Individual unconsciousness could therefore only be a function of the social, not the reverse” (p. 83). One looked within while the other looked outward.