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 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

This classic work on the psychology of socialism carries for this edition a slightly refurbished title. By calling it The Psychology of Marxian Socialism, the work is sharply distinguished from an earlier work of the same title (written at a much earlier time) by Gustave LeBon. This book was written in the post-Bolshevik revolutionary era, at the height of the Weimar democracy in Germany; LeBon’s represents a fin de siècle effort, reflecting earlier concerns in socialist theory. De Man’s work derives its strength from a close and hard look at how socialism operated in one country. It is probably one of the greatest such efforts in the post-World War I period.

Transgender Marxism is the first volume of its kind, offering a provocative and groundbreaking synthesis of transgender studies and Marxist theory.Reflecting on the relations between gender and labour, it shows how these linked phenomena structure antagonisms in particular social and historical situations. While no one is spared gendered conditioning, the contributors argue that transgender people nonetheless face particular pressures, oppressions and state persecution. The collection makes a particular contribution to Marxist feminism and social reproduction theory, through both personal and analytic examinations of the social activity demanded of trans people around the world.Exploring trans lives and movements through a Marxist lens, the book also assesses the particular experience of surviving as trans in light of the totality of gendered experience under capitalism. Twinning Marxism with other schools of thought - including psychoanalysis, phenomenology and Butlerian performativity - Transgender Marxism ultimately offers an insight into transgender experience, and an exciting renewal of Marxist theory itself.

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.

What is revolutionary about psychoanalysis, and why should those of us concerned with political praxis take it seriously? This manifesto is an argument for connecting social transformation with personal liberation, showing that the two aspects of profound change can be intimately linked together using psychoanalysis. This manifesto explores what lies beyond us, what we keep repeating, what pushes and pulls us to stay the same and to change, and how those phenomena are transferred into clinical space. This book is not uncritical of psychoanalysis, and transforms it so that liberation movements can transform the world. With a preface by Suryia Nayak. 'There are always complex and inevitable ties between the personal and the political, but to understand them fully we need to grasp the radical potential of psychoanalysis, despite its uses being constantly tamed and domesticated. If you want to know how to make and to keep psychoanalysis revoutionary, read this Manifesto. It will inspire you.' - Lynne Segal, Author of Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy

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 book attempts to develop a Marxist theory of the human individual. It contends that the standard description of the human as a bio-psycho-social being is fundamentally deficient as it doesn’t specify which of these attributes is the determining one. As long as this is not done, the real nature of humanity cannot be uncovered.

A short zine collecting an introduction to the concept by Matt Colquhoun that appeared in 'krisis journal for contemporary philosophy Issue 2, 2018: Marx from the Margins' and the unfinished introduction to the unfinished book on Acid Communism that Mark Fisher was working on before his death in 2017. "In this way ‘Acid’ is desire, as corrosive and denaturalising multiplicity, flowing through the multiplicities of communism itself to create alinguistic feedback loops; an ideological accelerator through which the new and previously unknown might be found in the politics we mistakenly think we already know, reinstantiating a politics to come." —Matt Colquhoun

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.