It was obvious from the beginnings of psychoanalysis that it had radical implications, not only for theories of the mind, the unconscious and sexuality but also for fundamental questions about the very nature of society and of ‘civilization’ itself. Psychoanalysis was potentially highly political. Freud, as Ernest Jones wrote, referring to the 1908 paper on ‘Civilized Sexual Ethics and Modern Nervousness’, was ‘in favour of revolutionary changes in society’ (Jones 1955: 294). The picture Freud drew in that paper of a clash between the drives and the then existing ‘civilized morality’ confirmed the story of the Three Essays (1905), that Freud was in the vanguard of sexual theorists and reformers, critical of the restrictions of bourgeois morality and its unnecessary limitations on sexual activity. The achievements of civilization, he argued, were bought at the expense of instinctual repression, but he clearly believed that the stick had been bent too far in the direction of societal restrictions on sexual and emotional life—but how far should or could we go in lightening the burden?
The difficulty of reconciling the demands of the psyche and desire with the demands of culture was a recurring theme throughout Freud's work. It is not surprising, therefore, that this conflict was to be a constant preoccupation of later theorists of radical social change and class politics, especially Freudo-Marxists. More specifically, it raised still unresolved, probably unresolvable questions about the links between class analysis, psychic processes, sexuality and the very nature of the social. Freud may have been the Founding Father but many of his epigones readily saw his own historic limitations. It was always easy for critics on the left to portray psychoanalysis as the creature of a specific, upper middle class, and Viennese milieu, dealing with the problems of affluent
neurotics. The ambitions of Freud for a theory of psychic processes that had universal meaning, across class, national and cultural boundaries was soon challenged by a host of social critics, not least from social anthropology. Malinowski famously argued that the Oedipus complex did not exist in its classic form in the Trobriand Islands. In this matrilineal society, the focus of a young boy's hostility is not the father but his mother's brother. Arguments raged, from Ernest Jones's response onwards, about the incest taboo, the meanings of the Oedipus complex, the nature of repression, and the relevance of western notions of individualism in societies which emphasised the role of the group in ego formation. Of course, similar arguments could be used about western societies themselves, where class, culture, ethnic and generational differences gave rise to a variety of different notions of the self, identity and subjectivity (Moore 2007: 139).
The challenge for Freud was of pinpointing the universal pro-cesses at work without falling prey to the sort of mythopaeic universalism of a Jung, for whom cultures seem little more than emanations of archetypal forms, or the sociological relativism of post-Freudian dissidents like Erich Fromm or Karen Horney, for whom Oedipus, repression and libido theories are little more than cultural emanations. For Freud, the relationship between dynamic instinctual forces and the demands of civilization was always complex, unfinished, never fully resolved, and yet structured by necessity. This is encapsulated for me by his famous letter to the American mother of a young homosexual cited in Jones's biography, ‘Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development’. (Jones, 1961: 208). Here we have the tensions in his work clearly articulated. On the one hand, we have the demythologising effects of Freud's theory of psycho-sexual mechanisms, and, for the time, a humane liberalism. On the other we can see a clear and irreducible normative stance in that little word ‘arrest’. For an arrest presupposes a normal development, a norm (Laplanche & Pontalis 1980: 308). Freud in the end does believe that civilization requires a normal progression to a heterosexual object-choice, and any failure to achieve that is a problem—for the individual and the culture.
Freud offered a meta theory to justify such a position in his ‘Just-so’ story in Totem and Taboo (1914), where he produced what he admitted was a ‘fantastic’ hypothesis about the ‘primal horde’. We all, Freud suggested, carry within us a phylogenetic memory trace of the ‘real event’ in which the sons killed the Father, but continued to honour his memory in the knowledge that they were heirs of his place and power. The individual micro-dramas of infantile progress through the Oedipus complex are little more than recapitulations of this foundling moment. In our biology we bear marks of history, and our history is a working through of this heritage (Weeks 1985: 158-9).
This is a drama of renunciation, sacrifice, and non-satisfaction, based on the realisation that civilization and the fulfilment of all drives are antagonistic. Subordination to the law of this murdered primal father is a guarantee of civilised life. Freud held tenaciously to this ‘scientific myth’, in order to bolster his fundamental belief that desire is necessarily tightly constrained right from the start. Restrictive moralities may be eased. Society may become more tolerant of sexual aberrations. History does change. But ultimately, civilization requires repression, renunciation and sacrifice. In his most comprehensive account of his socio-political views, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Freud wrote that ‘civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration … Culture has to call up every possible reinforcement in order to erect barriers against the aggressive instincts of men’ (quoted in Jones 1957: 341). It is this belief that gives Freud's work its tragic majesty. It also, inevitably, implies an underlying conservatism about the possibilities of escaping or transforming culture and civilization. Unlike some of his revolutionary adherents he never believed in the ‘perfectibility’ of man, or of society.
This did not stop others engaged with the developing psychoanalytic tradition from trying to escape the limitations imposed by the Founding Father. The main attempt to provide a more radical social and historical account of the organisation of desire came in the middle years of the twentieth century from Marxist writers. However, a synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism proved notoriously difficult to achieve.1 Classical Marxism had as its major concerns the analysis of social formations,
economic dynamics, the crisis of capitalism and class action; its dominating interest could never be psychic processes and gender and sexual differences. Freud on the other hand, unsurprisingly, looked unfavourably on attempts to link psychoanalysis with radical political positions and class politics, especially as outlined in the Marxist tradition. Ernest Jones records a conversation Freud had with an ardent Communist, in which the great man had been informed that the advent of Bolshevism would result in some years of misery and chaos, and these would then be followed by universal peace, prosperity and happiness. Freud said, ‘I told him I believed the first half’. For Freud, Marxism was built on an ‘untenable illusion’ (Jones 1957: 370).
Although class differences clearly existed, class was not an operative category in Freud's own work; nor does it appear as a central preoccupation within the mainstream psychoanalytic tradition. This opens two potential spaces where a more pointed class analysis could readily enter: one is the classed nature of unconscious processes; the other is the significance of class action in not only overturning capitalism but in helping to relieve the personal and social problems that psychoanalysis claims to understand. On the first issue one could perhaps argue that there was no necessary incompatibility between classic Freudianism and further sociological analysis. On the second, Freud was clearly more than a sceptic—he was a firm non-believer.
Nevertheless, from the early part of the twentieth century many soidisant Marxists saw in Freudianism a powerful contribution to radical critique, if not always a clear-cut class analysis or politics. Even if Freud in the end had justified civilization, he had said enough in the interim about its antagonistic and repressive essence to put it in question. Alfred Adler made an early attempt to relate Marx and Freud even before his break with the latter. In 1909 he delivered a paper ‘On the Psychology of Marxism’ to the Vienna Psychoan-alytic Society, which did not, it seems, arouse overwhelming enthusiasm. From 1919 Paul Federn was writing as a socialist Freudian, and was to be a major influence on Wilhelm Reich (Weeks 1985 160-1). By the 1930s there were a number of ‘Freudo-Marxists’ in Central Europe and they produced echoes in Britain, even in or around the intellectually and politically orthodox Communist Party. Alec Craig published a book with the title, Sex and Revolution in 1934, endorsing Freud (and Stalin) and describing
favourably the post-revolutionary sex reforms (already being reversed) in the Soviet Union. Reuben Osborn published Freud and Marx in 1937, and The Psychology of Reaction in 1938. The latter is particularly revealing for its attack on the ‘narcissistic character’ of Trotsky compared to the remarkable ‘stability of character’ of Stalin.
These attempts at a Freudo-Marxism grew in the first place out of theoretical efforts to understand the failure of the revo-lution in the west in the early 1920s. Psychoanalysis in general, and in particular the theory of repression, was viewed as a powerful analytical tool in understanding the perpetuation of passive and/or authoritarian values, and the failure of the working class to lead the revolution expected of them. What became known as ‘the Frankfurt School’ was, from its inception in the early 1920s, concerned to explore the possibilities of a Marxism more sensitive to ideology and values. The rise of authoritarian and fascist politics, especially in the social conditions of economic depression in the 1930s, which saw the crushing of working class resistance, made the task yet more urgent. It propelled someone like Wilhelm Reich away from orthodox Freudianism towards a new psychology which could explain sexual and social misery. Marcuse's movement towards Freudo-Marxism was slower. It was not until the 1940s that he began seriously to explore Freud. But as with Reich, the motivating force was the need to explain reaction—though this time as much the continuation of Stalinism as the efficacy of the unconscious appeal of Fascism. Reich and Marcuse represent opposite movements: the first moving from Freud towards revolutionary socialism, the second moving from Frankfurt School Marxism towards a rendez-vous with Freud. Yet they were both in different ways enormously influential in the development of radical sexual theory in the post-war world, particularly in the 1960s.
The focus of Reich's work was the theory of the orgasm. For Reich, people fell ill owing to a failure to achieve satis-factory release. The true orgasm had to be heterosexual, accompanied by an appro-priate fantasy, of the correct duration; it should lead to a com-plete release of dammed-up libido. The libido for Reich was a biological force, and the key to individual and social health was its full release and orgastic potency. As Reich wrote, ‘Not a single neurotic individual possesses orgastic potency’ (1972: 114). Such an approach necessitated several major breaks with Freudian orthodoxy. Firstly, it aban-doned Freud's view of
the complex structuration of the drive in favour of a straightforward biologism, which saw the libido as a concrete force—later called Cosmic Orgone Energy—which was both measurable and visible. By the 1940s Reich was able to detect the colour (‘bluish’—ironically the same blue as today's magic bullet, Viagra), and to measure orgonic energy with the aid of the Orgone Energy Field Meter. This libidinal force, moreover, was inherently genital and heterosexual in its nature, so that there was a natural progression, rather than as in Freud, a conflict-ridden struggle though various phases of human development. For Reich the resolution of the Oedipus complex into genital heterosexuality was a natural develop-ment, unless repressive social forces blocked its healthy efflorescence and resolution.
Secondly, according to Reich, what caused neurosis was a dis-turbance of this natural genitality. Freud believed that it was the repression of desires attached to polymorphous sexuality that caused neuroses in the conflict between sexuality and ne-cessity. For Reich it was the survival or encouragement of these partial sexual activities, that is the failure to achieve genitality, which was the central feature; thus neurosis was caused by a direct disturbance of healthy sexuality.
Thirdly, Reich saw the main aim of therapy as the restoration of orgastic potency, a view that ran counter to Freud's specific injunctions that the aim of psychoanalysis was not to be a mentor for sexual release. In Freud's view, precisely because sexuality was only one of the forces in mental conflict, ‘A recommendation to the patient to “live a full life” sexually could not possibly play a part in analytic therapy’ (Freud 1916-17: 432-3). To emphasise the sexual at the expense of other forces might merely lead to the appearance of opposite symptoms—but would not cure the neurosis.
Finally, while for Freudian orthodoxy repression was a complex mental process, for Reich it was a social and political phenomenon, of social-economic and not of biological origin. The factors which inhibited genitality had economic and social sources in poverty, inequality and authoritarianism. The implication was that if repressive social institutions were destroyed, man's natural and spontaneous sociality (and sexuality) would lay the basis of a better society.
Both Freudianism and Marxism were deficient, Reich argued, the one because of its acceptance of bourgeois morality, the other because it
ignored the ideological basis of capitalist rule. According to Reich, bourgeois morality was inernalised and anchored in the character structure of the masses. Character-analysis demonstrated above all that the family was a factory for the production of submissive personalities. Thus Nazism was grounded in the character structure of the German masses and especially in those of the German petite bourgeoisie. Economic and social forces produced a family pattern which encouraged the authority of the father, discouraged sexuality, and created an ambivalent authoritarian fixation (Reich 1975). If the bourgeois family produced submissiveness through sexual repression, it followed that communism necessitated sexual liberation. In his book The Sexual Revolution he traced the failure of the social revolution in Russia directly to its unwillingness to go further in the direction of radical sex reform; its negative stance made Stalinism inevitable (Reich 1970).
Reich's writings have been influential in many directions. The Mass Psychology of Fascism was a forerunner of a number of works that sought an explanation of fascism in psychic structuring through the family, and its influence continued in sexual politics (as in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1977). His analysis of the failure of the Russian Revolution similarly influenced early feminist critiques (Kate Millett's Sexual Politics is a good example). Perhaps even more influential has been the emphasis on the family as a factory for the reproduction of submissive personalities; its influence is traceable both in cultural theory and in the more personalist and libertarian critiques of the 1960s (Ronald Laing and David Cooper especially). However, the real focus of this theory, the theory of the orgasm, has had more ambivalent political effects. In the 1940s Reich saw in organic energy a uni-versal life force, which if collected in his Orgone Energy Accumulator could be utilised to cure numerous psychic ills from hysteria to cancer. Viewed from another perspective, Reich's orgasm theory, the focus of his radicalism, was also the expression of his repressive emphasis on full, heterosexual genitality as the only normative form of sexuality. Some 1970s radicals adopted these views when they ignored or became critical of the emerging gay movement (Weeks 1985: 164).
Although Marcuse followed Reich in many of his contemporary con-cerns, in his major intervention in Freudo-Marxism, Eros and Civilization (1969), he carefully distinguished himself from his predecessor,
challenging what he saw as the naturalism and primitivism of Reich. In a postscript to Eros and Civilization Marcuse criticised Reich's inability to distinguish between different types of repression, as a result of which, he claimed, Reich was led to a simplistic advocacy of sexual freedom as an end in itself. Marcuse's critique of Erich Fromm ended up with the same point. He praised Fromm's early work, especially his opposition to patriarchal (or ‘patricentric-acquisitive’) society, which he saw as parallel to his own rejection of the ‘performance principle’. However, he argued that Fromm, like the other neo-Freudians, had succumbed to the idea that true happiness could be achieved in twentieth century society. In a repressive society, individual happiness and productive development were in contradiction to society; if they became defined as values to be realised within contemporary society, they in turn became repressive. The pain and alienation at the heart of civilization was thereby ignored.
Marcuse took a different Marxist approach disagreeing with both Reich and Fromm. He proposed a radical redefinition of Freud, which began by highlighting his most controversial theories—his latent biologism, the con-flict of Eros and Thanatos, the primal horde and the necessity of sexual repression. Ironically, by selectively interpreting Freud, Marcuse reached a far more Utopian conclusion than either Reich or Fromm. Where Reich put a conflict between orgastic potency and repression at the heart of his approach, Marcuse saw a conflict between a false or distorted sexuality and a true sexuality. His theory was no less essentialist than Reich's but the moral position that resulted pointed to a dif-ferent type of sexual liberation, a flourishing of polymorphous pleasures.
Marcuse accepted in Eros and Civilization that some form of restriction on the free flow of sexuality is a ‘prerequisite’ of civilization (the basic repression posited by Freud). Repression depends upon the internalisation of restrictions on desire; it is the basis of the attainment of individual autonomy and subjectivity. Beyond this initial repression, different societies have imposed a surplus repression, often as a result of the economic necessities and social ordering resulting from class exploitation. In contemporary societies the larger part of repression is in the service of domination—and unlike Freud's critique of civilization,
it is surplus, not basic, repression that is the primary cause of dis-content.
According to Marcuse, capitalist society inevitably induced sexual repression since its continued existence depended on the postpone-ment of gratification in the work process, since most work under capitalism is unpleasurable and routine. He further argued that the performance principle took the form of the repression of a particular type of sexuality—the secondary or partial sex drives—which led to the complete desexualisation of pre-genital sexual zones. This enforced total genitality, resulting in a radical reduction of man's potentiality for pleasure, and a simultaneous harnessing of the body to the demands of exploitative labour.
Re-sexualisation can therefore be a major goal of human history. Marcuse argued that the repression of sexuality in all its varied forms was one of the factors leading to the sig-nificance of the death instinct. Only if Eros was given a freer reign could the effect of Thanatos be minimised. One of the major provocative elements was his argument that the ‘perversions’ express a rebellion against the hegemony of procreative, genital sexuality, demonstrating a ‘great refusal’ of enforced normality harnessed to the performance principle.
For Marcuse the so-called ‘perversions’ upheld sexuality as an end in itself against the demands of surplus repression They were upholders of the pleasure principle against the performance principle, for the perversions pointed to a polymorphous sexuality which was not limited by space and time, object choice or organ, and hence threatened the partially desexualised in-dividuals necessary to contemporary civilization Marcuse did not suggest that ‘anything goes’, because he clearly believed that some form of instinctual renunciation would always be necessary. With this qualification, Marcuse endorsed the ‘perversions’ as offering the possibility of a new community of humans, based on spontaneity and the release of hitherto repressed human possibilities. Such phenomena as narcissism and homosexuality (taboos in bourgeois societies), and ‘perversions’ in Freud contained a revolutionary potential. The perverse sexualities were a revolt against the procreative norm.
This argument offers an image of a transformed sexuality, which had a major influence in post-1960s sexual politics. It is a clearly Utopian vision, though one which in Eros and Civilization Marcuse believed to be
on the road to achievement. Tendencies in automation, the elimination of unnecessary expenditure of human labour through reduction of working hours and the fading away of the family as a factory of repression, seemed in the 1950s to offer the possibility of the liberating human potential. By the 1960s the optimism had dimmed. One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1972) is a famously more pessimistic tract: technological rationality seemed destined to bind individuals, perhaps especially in the working class, ever more closely to the status quo, stifling any oppositional possibilities. The conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle had been repressively negotiated so that ‘pleasure’ generated submission. Partial or ‘repressive desublimation’, far from being an advance, is now an illusory form of sexual freedom that binds people to their oppressions. The vision of Eros and Civilization does not disappear from Marcuse's work; it now operates as a moral counterpart, an ‘educational Utopia’ and not simply a free-floating vision. Marcuse came to see this vision as embodied not in the mass ranks of the proletariat, now corrupted by repressive desublimation, but in the ideals of the new counter-cultural radicalism of the late 1960s, the revolt of the marginals.
Freudo-Marxism in its various forms—and I have just concentrated on Reich and Marcuse here, ignoring for example anarcho-Freudian writers like Norman O Brown (1968)—appealed to the romanticism and utopianism of the 1960s. However, it soon became obvious that it posed a number of problems which in the end took it no further than the Freudianism it claimed to supplant. It depended in the first place on a theory of sexuality which, because of its rigid biologism, is irrecoverably ahistorical to a degree which Freud's arguably is not, and it was soon subject to sharp critiques from the emerging feminist and gay ‘social constructionists’ who were usually highly sceptical of psychoanalysis (Foucault 1979, Weeks 1977). Reich and Marcuse had different views about the nature of the sexual drive, but they agreed on the existence of a common instinctual structure across all cultures. Sexuality is not shaped within history, but outside and beyond it, whatever its contingent forms.
Following on from this, Freudo-Marxism has led secondly and inevitably to an identification of social and sexual liberation. The release of sexual energy is seen as beneficent and liberating in a way that is
strongly reminiscent of pre-Freudian romantics. It was an important emphasis against a socialist tradition which ended to ignore issues of sexuality and sexual difference, but it also led to a moral position which was as normative and restrictive in its implications as the more traditional forms it aimed to challenge. Reich's emphasis on heterosexual normality referred to above is an obvious example.
There is a further danger: that in posing the opposition as one between an undifferentiated sexual force and society, the differentiation along lines of gender are totally lost. Unlike the later Freud, none of the Freudo-Marxists are particularly con-cerned with the shaping of female sexuality. The Frank-furt School as a whole had shown little interest in gender. The result, inevitably, was to replicate traditional biological assumptions about male and female sexualities.
The final problem implied is this: the reduction of the contradictions of sexuality and of capitalism to one polar opposition—sex and repression, with ‘liberation’ as the point of transformation. Sexuality itself is seen as a critical opponent of power, resistant to its workings, representing the refusal of repression and the possibility of its transcendence. What is missing from this view is any notion of the sheer complexity of the historical shaping and cultural organization of human sexuality, in which the biological, the psychic and the social are intertwined. As a result, Freudo-Marxism concentrates to an overwhelming extent on the dream of ‘liberation’ rather than on the diverse forms of struggle which all the time shift the definitions and relation of sexuality. The overemphasis on ‘liberation’ either has the effect of postponing sexual change to the never never of the moment of revolution, or of breaking the link between social and sexual change. It becomes all too easy to slip from an awareness of the necessary links between the two to a concentration on personal liberation (a danger illustrated in Reich's later work).
The crucial contribution of Freudo-Marxism was to reassert the centrality of sexual transformation to a wider social transformation. Its moral energy and vigour had allowed the regeneration of a largely abandoned nineteenth-century tra-dition, as embodied for example in the work of Charles Fourier or Edward Carpenter. Yet the forms of that revival were no less ahistorical than Freud's ‘just so’ story. In seeking a totalising theory in which the social and the sexual are seen as differentiated manifestations of a single process of repression, the specifics of
sex regulation and resistance on the one hand, or of wider social conflicts, whether of class, race, ethnicity or religion, are irreparably lost. Within this discourse Freud and Marx make uneasy bedfellows: to the detriment of both.
It was the perceived inadequacy of this approach that directed many sexual radicals in the 1970s and beyond in new directions. Marcuse had already presaged a move away from the automatic association of class and revolutionary politics, by looking to the counter culture and marginals of society. The rise of second wave feminism and gay liberation from the late 1960s offered a whole set of new political subjects, with different preoccupations from earlier radicals. Renewed concerns with identity and subjectivity were linked to fresh insights into the structures of power and oppression that went beyond earlier Marxist analyses, especially through the elaboration of ideas of patriarchy, sexism, heterosexism and heteronormativity. The links with conventional class analysis were not transparent, nor was Marxism the inevitable or necessary accompaniment of the new social movements. Although often seeing themselves as part of a wider revolutionary mobilization, the new social movements offered a critique of traditional leftist concerns, and were often strikingly hostile to psychoanalysis, especially its ragged history around female sexuality and homosexuality.
When, against this trend, some feminists moved towards a re-engagement with Freud it was through the framework offered by the Lacanian school of psychoanalysis rather than the versions offered by Reich or Marcuse. Lacan offered a ‘re-covery’ of Freud from the biological encrustation of both the im-mediate post-Freudians and the Freudo-Marxists. He also produced a cri-tique of the dominance of the psychoanalytic institution, particularly in the form of institutionalised ego psychology as it had developed in the United States. The most telling aspect of Lacan's work related to his account of the complexity of subjectivity and the fragility of sexed identities. Such an approach seemed to offer a way of theorising the relationship be-tween the individual and society which the biologism of Reich and Marcuse could not deliver. ‘Natural man’, whether in the form of the healthy heterosexual à la Reich, or the
polymorphously perverse subject of Marcuse, disappeared in the La-canian discourse. Subjectivity was now seen to be formed when individulas start to recognise their alienation from themselves, in the pre-Oedipal imaginary realm which always remains with them. Subsequently, through the Oedipal process, individuals become aware of the structures of human sexuality acquired through language. What this implied in regard to sexuality is that there was no insistent sexual desire which pre-existed the entry into the structures of language and culture. Desire' is constituted in the very process of that induction, predicated upon absence or lack (Weeks 1985: 170-71).
Juliet Mitchell's Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) became the main conduit for this approach in the Anglo-Saxon world, and was especially important in offering an account of the patriarchal construction of femininity under the reign of the Law of the Father. Mitchell added to the power structures of capitalism, ex-plained in fairly orthodox terms, another set of relationships—those of patriarchy. This proved enormously influential. The problem remained of how to theorise the relation-ship between desire and the social, between the ideological categories which address and construct a particular subject, and the processes, real historical processes, by which individual meanings and identities are shaped. This has proved a productive, if frustrating space for subsequent feminist theorising.
A more radical approach, in effect abandoning any obvious flirtation with classical Marxism (though not anti-capitalism), saw the questioning, against Lacan, of the category of ‘the Symbolic’—the world of language itself. For a Marxist like Althusser, who explored the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the understanding of ideology, the entry of the individual into the order of language was an entry into the human; but for some critics, such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977), it was precisely this human (and patriarchal) order that was an imposition. For the latter, leaving the world of flux that preceded ‘Oedipalisation’ and acculturation is the real human tragedy, since in that flux, desire was polymorphous and hence ‘revolutionary’. Out of this stance grew a philosophy, not a million miles from Marcuse's, which urged a return to ‘man's’ freedom, spontaneity, and un-mediated desire, represented by the pre-symbolic. Drawing on a range of writers and movements from Hegel and Nietzsche, to Dadaism and Sartre—but above all
Nietzsche—this politics of desire rebelled against a linked set of targets: left puritanism as much as right-wing authoritarianism, the ‘fascism of the mind’ as much as of the streets.
This philosophy of desire distanced itself from that of the Frankfurt and American Schools by its acceptance of Lacanian linguistic theories of how ‘the individual’ becomes social. Now, however, society itself is condemned, along with Lacan's phallocentrism, the family, the ‘Oedipalisation of society’—and psychoanalysis itself. The latter is crucially seen as the agent for the imposition of Oedipus and the control of desire. The main outlines of this position were developed by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, first published in French in 1972, and in subsequent writings.
For them, any acceptance of Oedipus im-plied an artificial restriction on the unconscious, where everything is, in fact, infinitely open. There is in this flux no given self, only the cacophony of ‘desiring machines’, desiring production. This flux is like the early stages of sexual develop-ment as described by Freud, with a child as a blob of partial drives seeking satisfaction through part objects. For Deleuze and Guattari the fragmentary partial drives are the core of human reality. Desire is not a striving for the lost unity of the womb, but the core of a reality which is a state of constant flux. In this world fragmentation is universal, and is not the peculiar fate of what society conventionally defines as ‘schizophrenic’. But this flux is too much for capitalist society to endure, for it simultaneously encourages and abhors this chaos, and cannot live with the infinite variety of potential interconnections and relationships. It needs to impose con-straints regulating those desires which are to be allowed, in other words, those centrally relating to reproduction in the family.
Psychoanalysis, through accepting the familial framework, is trapped within capitalist concepts of sexuality, concepts which distort the production of desire. Since it concentrates on an Oedipal triangulation of parents and child, it accepts the social, politi-cal and religious forms of domination in modern society, and is complicit with how capitalism has constructed social order. Thus the Oedipus complex, instead of being, as in Lacan, a necessary state of the development of a human individual, is seen by Deleuze and Guattari as the only effective means of controlling the libido in capitalist societies. Freudianism plays a key role
under capitalism: it is both the discoverer of the mechanisms of desire and the organiser of its control.
Guy Hocquenghem, in Homosexual Desire (1978), applies this approach more specifically to homosexuality,2 Capitalist society manufactures homosexuals just as it manufactures proletarians by imposing a psychologically repressive category, that of homosexuality, on the polyvocal nature of deske. Psychiatry has classified what is marginal, and in doing so placed it in a central position, and given it social salience. Yet simultaneously it reveals the arbitrariness of social classifications and the power of desire, which cannot so easily be restricted. In the end the perpetual play of desire shows that it is civilization itself that is mortal—the very antithesis of Freud's tragic vision.
I have attempted to do two things in this paper. First of all I have tried to show how the conflicts, antagonisms and necessary renunciations that are at the heart of Freud's work have offered a challenge to psychoanalytical and political radicals. The challenge was broadly seen from the 1920s onwards in terms of an attempt to marry Freud and Marx. The uneasy syntheses offered most clearly by Reich and Marcuse, however, were at the expense of endorsing an essentialist view of sexuality and gender that Freud, at his most radical, implicitly rejected. They attempted a more nuanced understanding of repression and oppression than Freudian orthodoxy offered, but not in ways that have been readily integrated into more traditional Marxist approaches. Thus Freudo-Marxism has in effect been rejected by both traditions. Post-Lacanian insights have emphasised a radical recovery, or ‘return’, to Freud, as is evident in the questioning of the unitary subject that is so crucial for recent feminist, queer and post-structuralist writings. Only in the Althusserian project is there any clear attempt at reworking Marxism. The main effort has been in reworking (when not rejecting) Freud. Secondly, I hope I have indicated how the post 1960s cultural challenge, represented here by Deleuze and Guattari, led to a fundamental rejection of the psychoanalytical institution itself as it had developed historically, seeing it indeed as a crucial tool in the perpetuation of capitalist values. This tended to leave the unconscious and desire floating free.
The anti-essentialism and the critique of psychoanalysis, seen most clearly in the late work of Michel Foucault (1979), has been enormously influential in contemporary theorisations of sexuality and gender. Foucault's chief concern in writing his ‘history of sexuality’ was with the very processes of subjectification by which we today can claim to know ourselves by knowing our sex. It is this which enabled Foucault to argue, on lines parallel to Deleuze, that the psychoanalytic institution itself has become a site of power, a form of power/knowledge which simultaneously organises and controls, where the techniques of psychoanalysis are at one with the confessional techniques of a Christian tradition which seeks the (sinful) truth of an individual through his (or her) most minute manifestation of desire. Subjectivity for Foucault is thus a function of the operation of particular discursive practices, not the constituting elements in them. In the later volumes of his History of Sexuality he takes this to a logical conclusion by shifting his focus away from the discourses and practices which have shaped the modern domain of sexuality to the genealogy of the ‘man of desire in pre-Christian Greece and Rome. The key problem now becomes that of understanding how the question of desire becomes the central object of moral concern in the Christian era, and how this contributes to the construction of self. In that process, inevitably, the question of unconscious processes and of drives is displaced in favour of the intricate discursive practices which organise the subject of desire. By a curious para-dox, a theoretical approach which had one source at least in the revolution within psychoanalysis has ended by tracing the emergence of the preconditions of that very discourse.3
This is not, of course the end of the dialogue between psychoanalysis and radical political thought and practice. It continues, for example, in much feminist thinking, and in queer theory, especially the work of Judith Butler. If the earlier debates were framed around the meanings and conflicts of two major forces, the instincts/drives and the nature of the social/civilization, encapsulated in part at least in the attempted marriage of Freud and Marx, today they are much more concerned with the relationship of desire and discourse. Discourses shape, delimit and attempt to constrain desire in a variety of ways, but they cannot finally control desire, fantasy and unconscious motivations. This recognition provides the space where the relationship of the psychic and the social,
including class, can be rethought. It also returns us to Freud himself. In Civilization and its Discontents he wrote:
We may expect that in the course of time changes will be carried out in our civilization so that it becomes more satisfying to our needs and no longer open to the reproaches we have made against it. But perhaps we shall also accustom ourselves to the idea that there are certain difficulties inherent in the very nature of culture which will not yield to any efforts at reform. (in Jones 1957: 372).
Our civilization has indeed become more satisfying to many of our needs, not least in relation to sexual toleration. But sexuality and gender remain the focus of intense controversy on a global scale, with sexual violence, homophobia and oppression part of the intricate forms of inequality and injustice. The challenge posed by Freud, of whether there is something inherent in culture, which inhibits real transformation, remains pertinent. The ultimate challenge of radical appropriations of Freud is to prove him wrong. Whether class analysis has any part to play in this speculation remains an open question.
In what follows I have drawn heavily on my discussion in Weeks 1985, Chapter 7. Full references and a more detailed account can be found there.
For a discussion of the implications of Hocquenghem's work for gay theory and politics, especially with regard to same sex desire, see Weeks, 1978, and Derbyshire, 2008.
For an overview of my views on Foucault's contribution to the theorisation of sexuality see Weeks 2005.