You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
“V. N. Vološinov,” the author of Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, was most probably M. M. Bakhtin, whose Dialogic Imagination () has proved so influential in the study of literature and language.1 However, because the book under review has an avowed and implemented Marxist orientation absent from the works of Bakhtin, it seems preferable to honor the pseudonym “Vološinov.” Freudianism appeared in Russia in 1927, in the midst of the ferment in culture following the October Revolution and before the Stalinist repression began in the 1930s. During this period the interest in psychoanalysis was exemplified by A. R. Luria, the great Russian psychologist who saw psychoanalysis as affording the opportunity to study the human personality as it functioned in history, and by Trotsky (1925), who, in his Literature and Revolution, remarked that Freud's thought might prove compatible with dialectical materialism. Notwithstanding these sympathetic positions, Vološinov sees the “basic ideological motif of Freudianism” as maintaining that a “person's consciousness is shaped not by his historical existence but by his biological being, the main facet of which is sexuality” (p. 10). The basic incompatibility of Marxist and Freudian thought that Vološinov found 60 years ago is similar to Wallerstein's (1988) comment on drive theory, which he sees as
linked philosophically to the positions of Hobbes and Locke, that man is an essentially individual animal and that human satisfaction and goals are fundamentally personal and individual; the role of the state adds nothing essential to individual satisfaction as such, but just ensures the possibility of personal fulfillment, (p. 18)