Psychoanalysis and Sixties Utopianism

The utopianism of the 1960s, perhaps the last flowering of modern utopianism, called for a total transformation that was simultaneously, even inseparably, psychic, political and cultural. I will discuss some sixties Utopian texts which use psychoanalysis along with, and intermeshed with, a variety of political, philosophical, and cultural discourses in order to represent a lifeworld of utter alienation, oppression, and thwarted, stifled authenticity. Although these works are permeated with the pessimism and revulsion engendered by this alienation, their most profound impact comes from a summons to what Herbert Marcuse calls the Great Refusal: a total repudiation of actually existing life at the psychic, social, intellectual, and cultural levels simultaneously, and the institution of a truly liberatory and just alternative—a new reality principle, as Marcuse demands and prophesizes in Eros and Civilization. It is the Utopian nature of these projects, I would argue, based on the assumption that only a thoroughgoing, total transformation is capable of producing any significant change whatsoever—change that is meaningful because it is not coopted—that produces the particular, sometimes almost undifferentiated juxtaposition of psychoanalytic with political, philosophical, and cultural discourses that characterizes these works. This undifferentiated juxtaposition, in the seamless form in which we find it in these texts, bespeaking a coherent, universal intellectual project, is no longer available to current psychoanalytic work on culture. Analyzing its dynamics in these Sixties texts, however, can help us retrieve its refunctioned elements in the current conjuncture.

In this essay, I will discuss two Sixties texts that were among the most influential and widely read at the time within both the new left and the counterculture, but that have subsequently all but disappeared off the intellectual map: Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, 1964, and, in a briefer discussion, R