The methods developed by Freud and Marx have enabled a range of scholars to critically reflect upon the ideological underpinnings of modern and now postmodern or hypermodern western societies. In this intriguing book, the discipline of psychology itself is screened through the twin dynamics of Marxism and psychoanalysis. David Pavón-Cuéllar asks to what extent the terms, concerns and goals of psychology reflect, in fact, the dominant bourgeois ideology that has allowed it to flourish. The book charts a gradual psychologization within society and culture dating from the nineteenth century, and examines how the tacit ideals within mainstream psychology – creating good citizens or productive workers – sit uneasily against Marx and Freud’s ambitions of revealing fault-lines and contradictions within individualist and consumer-oriented structures. The positivist aspiration of psychology to become a natural science has been the source of extensive debate, critical voices asserting the social and cultural contexts through which the human mind and behaviour should be understood. This challenging new book provides another voice that, in addressing two of the most influential intellectual traditions of the past 150 years, widens the debate still further to examine the foundations of psychology.

This book assesses the untimely relevance of Marx and Freud for Latin America, thinkers alien to the region who became an inspiration to its beleaguered activists, intellectuals, writers and artists during times of political and cultural oppression. Bruno Bosteels presents ten case studies arguing that art and literature—the novel, poetry, theatre, film—more than any militant tract or theoretical essay, can give us a glimpse into Marxism and psychoanalysis, not so much as sciences of history or of the unconscious, respectively, but rather as two intricately related modes of understanding the formation of subjectivity.

In this important new work, Eugene Victor Wolfenstein rejects the reduction of psychoanalysis to conformist psychology and Marxism to Stalinist orthodoxy. Instead, he illuminates the critical and emancipatory force of both traditions. He persuasively argues for a ``binocular'' view that integrates interests rooted in work and economic production with desires based in emotional life and human reproduction. Without obscuring the obvious differences between psychoanalytic and Marxist theories, his integrative approach provides the reader with a clearer, more complete understanding of modern society. The book opens with a review of the work of Marx and Freud, the classical Freudian-Marxists (Reich, Fromm and Marcuse) and such recent thinkers as Habermas, Benjamin, Kovel, and Lichtman. Wolfenstein then develops the foundation for a psychoanalytic-marxist theory and practice. He reconceptualizes praxis and dialectics, and history and human nature, and presents a framework for social analysis. The book's final section utilizes these grounding notions for the analysis of class, gender, and race; psychoanalytic practice; and political practice (the modern state and its potential transformation). Written in a bold and unusually lucid style, PSYCHOANALYTIC- MARXISM will serve as a benchmark for all further reflection on this topic. It offers fresh insights for those with an interest in psychoanalysis, Marxism, and a broad range of related concerns: philosophy, the modernism/postmodernism debates, feminist theory, African-American studies, critical social theory, political theory, history, and sociology.

A major systematic study of the connection between Marx and Lacan’s work Finalist for the American Board and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize Despite a resurgence of interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly in terms of the light it casts on capitalist ideology—as witnessed by the work of Slavoj Žižek—there remain remarkably few systematic accounts of the role of Marx in Lacan’s work. A major, comprehensive study of the connection between their work, The Capitalist Unconscious resituates Marx in the broader context of Lacan’s teaching and insists on the capacity of psychoanalysis to reaffirm dialectical and materialist thought. Lacan’s unorthodox reading of Marx refigured such crucial concepts as alienation, jouissance and the Freudian ‘labour theory of the unconscious’. Tracing these developments, Tomšič maintains that psychoanalysis, structuralism and the critique of political economy participate in the same movement of thought; his book shows how to follow this movement through to some of its most important conclusions.

This text explores a set of key concepts in Marxist theory as developed and read by Lacan, demonstrating links and connections between Marxist thought and Lacanian practice. The book examines the complexity of these encounters through the structure of a comprehensive vocabulary which covers diverse areas, from capitalism and communism to history, ideology, politics, work, and family. Offering new perspectives on these concepts in psychoanalysis, as well as in the fields of political and critical theory, the book brings together contributions from a range of international experts to demonstrate the dynamic relationship between Marx and Lacan, as well as illuminating "untranslatable points" which may offer productive tension between the two. The entries trace the trajectory of Lacan’s appropriation of Marx’s concepts and analyses how they were questioned, criticized, and reworked by Lacan, accounting for the wide reach of two thinkers and worlds in constant homology. Each entry also discusses psychoanalytic debates relating to the concept and seeks to refine the clinical scope of Marx’s work, demonstrating its impact on the social and individual dimensions of Lacanian clinical practice. With a practical and structured approach, The Marx through Lacan Vocabulary will appeal to psychoanalysts and researchers in a range of fields, including political science, cultural studies, and philosophy.

This special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly examines the recent theoretical convergence of psychoanalysis and Marxism by posing anew the question of the relationship between these two master discourses in the era of late capitalism. Beginning with Zizek's "Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism," which both dramatizes and analyzes the discursive antinomies of psycho-Marxism, this volume comes full circle with Robert Miklitsch's "Going through the Fantasy," which seeks the "traumatic kernel" at the core of Zizekian theory. In other essays, psycho-Marxism is submitted to Foucault's analytics of power/knowledge, Derrida's spectral letter, the postcolonial theory of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, and the performative politics/poetics of Jean Genet. The theoretical perspectives of Laura Mulvey and Gayle Rubin are crosscut and spliced to take women out of commodity traffic and put feminist automobility up on the big screen. Imperialism, Nazi psychoanalytic techno-fetishism, and the strange alliance between (anti)queer Marxism and gay conservatism provide other useful lenses through which the Marxist/psychoanalytic bond is viewed. Contributors. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Teresa Brennan, Rosaria Champagne, Stathis Gourgouris, Catherine Liu, Kathleen McHugh, Robert Miklitsch, Abdul-Karim Mustapha, Laurence A. Rickels, Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, Slavoj Zizek

Post-Rationalism takes the experimental journal of psychoanalysis and philosophy, Cahiers pour l'Analyse, as its main source. Established by students of Louis Althusser in 1966, the journal has rarely figured in the literature, although it contained the first published work of authors now famous in contemporary critical thought, including Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner, Luce Irigaray, André Green and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Cahiers served as a testing ground for the combination of diverse intellectual sources indicative of the period, including the influential reinvention of Freud and Marx undertaken by Lacan and Althusser, and the earlier post-rationalist philosophy of science pioneered by Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Alexandre Koyré. This book is a wide-ranging analysis of the intellectual foundations of structuralism, re-connecting the work of young post-Lacanian and post-Althusserian theorists with their predecessors in French philosophy of science. Tom Eyers provides an important corrective to standard histories of the period, focussing on the ways in which French epistemological writing of the 1930s and 1940s - especially that of Bachelard and Canguilhem - laid the ground for the emergence of structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s, thus questioning the standard historical narrative that posits structuralism as emerging chiefly in reaction to phenomenology and existentialism.

Does critical theory still need psychoanalysis? In Critique on the Couch, Amy Allen offers a cogent and convincing defense of its ongoing relevance. Countering the overly rationalist and progressivist interpretations of psychoanalysis put forward by contemporary critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, Allen argues that the work of Melanie Klein offers an underutilized resource. She draws on Freud, Klein, and Lacan to develop a more realistic strand of psychoanalytic thinking that centers on notions of loss, negativity, ambivalence, and mourning. Far from leading to despair, such an understanding of human subjectivity functions as a foundation of creativity, productive self-transformation, and progressive social change. At a time when critical theorists are increasingly returning to psychoanalytic thought to diagnose the dysfunctions of our politics, this book opens up new ways of understanding the political implications of psychoanalysis while preserving the progressive, emancipatory aims of critique.

What can psychoanalysis, a psychological approach developed more than a century ago, offer us in an age of rapidly evolving, hard-to-categorize ideas of sexuality and the self? Should we abandon Freud's theories completely or adapt them to new findings and the new relationships taking shape in modern liberal societies? In a remarkably prescient series of lectures delivered in the early 1960s, the French philosopher Louis Althusser anticipated the challenges that psychoanalytic theory would face as politics moved away from structuralist frameworks and toward the elastic possibilities of anthropological and sociological thought. Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences translates Althusser's remarkable seminars into English for the first time, making available to a wider audience the origins and potential future of radical political theory. Althusser takes the important step in these lectures of distinguishing psychoanalysis from psychology and especially psychiatry, which long resisted Freud's analytical concepts of the unconscious and overdetermination. By freeing psychoanalysis from this bind, Althusser can then apply these analytical concepts to the social and the political, integrated with Marxist theory. The result is an enlivened methodology for comprehending social organization and change that had a profound influence on the Frankfurt School and scholars who continue to work at the forefront of radical thought today: Judith Butler, Étienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou.

Lacan and Marx: The Invention of the Symptom provides an incisive commentary on Lacan’s reading of Marx, mapping the relations between these two vastly influential thinkers. Unlike previous books, Bruno provides a detailed history of Lacan’s reading of Marx and surveys his references to Marx in both his writings and seminars. Examining Lacan’s key argument that Marx "invented the symptom", Bruno shows how Lacan went on to criticize Marx and contrasts Marx’s concept of surplus-value with Lacan’s surplus-enjoyment. Exploring the division between Marxist and psychoanalytic perspectives on social and psychological need and Lacan’s formalisation of the capitalist discourse, the book compares the positions of Althusser, Deleuze and Guattari, and Žižek on the relations between Lacan, Marx and capitalism, using a wide range of cultural examples, from Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to Brecht’s Joan Dark and Pierpont Mauler. Through these readings, Bruno also elaborates an extended commentary on Lacan’s central idea of the division of the subject. His focus is not only on showing how we can exit from capitalism but also, and just as importantly, on showing how we can make capitalism exit from us. This book will be of great interest to scholars and readers of Lacan and Marx from across the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy and political economy, and will also appeal to Lacanian psychoanalysts in clinical practice.