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The Production of Desire
Normal wear.
- GenresPsychology
320 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1982
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August 6, 2019
Really excellent and important book that fills an important void by offering a Marxist critique of Freudian psychoanalysis rather than (as the title wrongly suggests) somehow reconciling Marxism with the fundamentally flawed framework of psychoanalysis.
My only critiques are 1. Lichtman seems to give psychoanalysis too much credit by adopting s reconstructed version of certain psychoanalytic concepts rather than wholly replacing psychoanalysis from the ground up. 2. Lichtman spends a lot of time on textual exegesis and not enough on systematically laying out his reconstructed Marxist psychology (maybe this was the plan for the later book he kept hyping but that ultimately seems to sadly have never been written). 3. Lichtman engages solely with Freudian psychoanalysis and not other strains which are equally and similarly faulty (Lacan, object relations, etc).
Ultimately, this book is worth reading because it is the only text of which I am aware that clearly and correctly lays out the fundamental incompatibility of Marxism and psychoanalysis and the superiority of Marxism for addressing the questions that psychoanalysis raises but cannot adequately answer. It also confirmed a suspicion I have long had, which is that psychoanalysis wrongly stands in for a reconstructed feminist historical materialist theory of the subject in Left theory because the latter has systematically be obscured by Stalinist/structuralist/analytical Marxisms and pervasive Left masculinism/sexism.
It still remains for such a reconstructed theory to by systematically layer out, but Lichtman has done us a huge service in clearly demonstrating the utter uselessness of psychoanalysis for radical social theory and liberation movements.
My only critiques are 1. Lichtman seems to give psychoanalysis too much credit by adopting s reconstructed version of certain psychoanalytic concepts rather than wholly replacing psychoanalysis from the ground up. 2. Lichtman spends a lot of time on textual exegesis and not enough on systematically laying out his reconstructed Marxist psychology (maybe this was the plan for the later book he kept hyping but that ultimately seems to sadly have never been written). 3. Lichtman engages solely with Freudian psychoanalysis and not other strains which are equally and similarly faulty (Lacan, object relations, etc).
Ultimately, this book is worth reading because it is the only text of which I am aware that clearly and correctly lays out the fundamental incompatibility of Marxism and psychoanalysis and the superiority of Marxism for addressing the questions that psychoanalysis raises but cannot adequately answer. It also confirmed a suspicion I have long had, which is that psychoanalysis wrongly stands in for a reconstructed feminist historical materialist theory of the subject in Left theory because the latter has systematically be obscured by Stalinist/structuralist/analytical Marxisms and pervasive Left masculinism/sexism.
It still remains for such a reconstructed theory to by systematically layer out, but Lichtman has done us a huge service in clearly demonstrating the utter uselessness of psychoanalysis for radical social theory and liberation movements.
Displaying 1 of 1 review