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Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia
English, German (translation)
109 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 1970
13 people are currently reading
214 people want to read
About the author
Herbert Marcuse
231 books624 followersGerman-Jewish philosopher, political theorist and sociologist, and a member of the Frankfurt School. Celebrated as the "Father of the New Left", his best known works are Eros and Civilization, One-Dimensional Man and The Aesthetic Dimension. Marcuse was a major intellectual influence on the New Left and student movements of the 1960s.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 20, 2014
Frankfurt School’s rockstar in the US lays out interpretation of Freud, in five movements.
Opens with a justification of his political purpose: that Freudian theory is “fundamentally social and historical” and that “psychology today is an essential part of political science,” that is, “psychology in its inner structure must reveal itself to be political” (1).
Opening problem is that “society has fallen prey to and become identified with domination,” “in effect wherever the individual’s goals and purposes and the means of striving for and attaining them are prescribed to him and performed by him as something prescribed” (id.). Assuming this to be the case generally, “freedom becomes an impossible concept, for there is nothing that is not prescribed for the individual in some way or other,” and “freedom can be defined only within the framework of domination,” even “freedom is a form of domination” (2).
The argument unfolds in terms of traditional Freudian categories, noting early that the transformation of “the overcoming of the pleasure principle through the reality principle” (5) “leaves an unhealable wound” in people, thereby making “them fit for society” (6). (Very RSB, making trauma the basis for consciousness!) Reality principle “signifies ‘reason’ as reality itself” (7). The renunciation of the pleasure principle, “the pathos of labor,” is social legislation that “becomes the individual’s own legislation” (NB: what Bakhtin means by the transformation of chuzhoi into svoi), “the necessary unfreedom appears as an act of his autonomy and thus as freedom” (10). Domination is accordingly “the internal logic of the development of civilization” (11).
After some working through the Freudian categories, author draws out the “fatal dialectic of civilization”--that “Freud’s revolutionary insight” regarding the reality of repression and the almost equally real possibility of doing away with repression--is insoluble, that as “emancipation of Eros can be more and more clearly envisaged as social wealth increases, its repression becomes harsher and harsher,” and repression weakens Eros, “it also release destructive energy from its bonds and frees aggression” (18).
Marcuse’s way out of the insoluble problem is to note that Freud’s “Eternal struggle between Eros and the death instinct” is itself based on “an internal contradiction in Freudian theory,“ which has its own solution, a solution that psychology itself has repressed: that Eros is simultaneously original and timeless but also historical eruptive (19).
Lest this become tedious, suffice it to state that the argument develops from there into a discussion of Freud’s ideas on progress and authority, and thence to utopia and violence, with some interview components. Basic argument is that the transhistorical categories of Freudian analysis must be historicized and that we can delimit their horizons within the scope of dialectical critique. Echoes Adorno’s comment that everything in psychoanalysis is false except the exaggerations with “The truth of psychoanalysis lies in its loyalty to its most provocative hypotheses” (61).
Anyway, I don’t go in for Freud very much, and this author has otherwise worked up similar ideas in the Eros and Civilization.
Recommended for individuals bound into masses by libidinal relationships, those who herald a total break with the dominant needs of repressive society, and readers who would undertake a decisive correction of Freudian theory.
Opens with a justification of his political purpose: that Freudian theory is “fundamentally social and historical” and that “psychology today is an essential part of political science,” that is, “psychology in its inner structure must reveal itself to be political” (1).
Opening problem is that “society has fallen prey to and become identified with domination,” “in effect wherever the individual’s goals and purposes and the means of striving for and attaining them are prescribed to him and performed by him as something prescribed” (id.). Assuming this to be the case generally, “freedom becomes an impossible concept, for there is nothing that is not prescribed for the individual in some way or other,” and “freedom can be defined only within the framework of domination,” even “freedom is a form of domination” (2).
The argument unfolds in terms of traditional Freudian categories, noting early that the transformation of “the overcoming of the pleasure principle through the reality principle” (5) “leaves an unhealable wound” in people, thereby making “them fit for society” (6). (Very RSB, making trauma the basis for consciousness!) Reality principle “signifies ‘reason’ as reality itself” (7). The renunciation of the pleasure principle, “the pathos of labor,” is social legislation that “becomes the individual’s own legislation” (NB: what Bakhtin means by the transformation of chuzhoi into svoi), “the necessary unfreedom appears as an act of his autonomy and thus as freedom” (10). Domination is accordingly “the internal logic of the development of civilization” (11).
After some working through the Freudian categories, author draws out the “fatal dialectic of civilization”--that “Freud’s revolutionary insight” regarding the reality of repression and the almost equally real possibility of doing away with repression--is insoluble, that as “emancipation of Eros can be more and more clearly envisaged as social wealth increases, its repression becomes harsher and harsher,” and repression weakens Eros, “it also release destructive energy from its bonds and frees aggression” (18).
Marcuse’s way out of the insoluble problem is to note that Freud’s “Eternal struggle between Eros and the death instinct” is itself based on “an internal contradiction in Freudian theory,“ which has its own solution, a solution that psychology itself has repressed: that Eros is simultaneously original and timeless but also historical eruptive (19).
Lest this become tedious, suffice it to state that the argument develops from there into a discussion of Freud’s ideas on progress and authority, and thence to utopia and violence, with some interview components. Basic argument is that the transhistorical categories of Freudian analysis must be historicized and that we can delimit their horizons within the scope of dialectical critique. Echoes Adorno’s comment that everything in psychoanalysis is false except the exaggerations with “The truth of psychoanalysis lies in its loyalty to its most provocative hypotheses” (61).
Anyway, I don’t go in for Freud very much, and this author has otherwise worked up similar ideas in the Eros and Civilization.
Recommended for individuals bound into masses by libidinal relationships, those who herald a total break with the dominant needs of repressive society, and readers who would undertake a decisive correction of Freudian theory.
October 14, 2024
FIVE LECTURES ABOUT FREUDIAN THOUGHT, AND OTHER TOPICS
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a German philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, until he moved to the United States in 1934. (He was even briefly one of the "darlings" of the Student Movement of the 1960s.) hetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, etc.
This 1970 book contains five lectures which Marcuse gave before both student and scholarly audiences in New York, Frankfurt, and Berlin. The lectures are “Freedom and Freud’s Theory of Instincts”; “Progress and Freud’s Theory of Instincts”; “The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man”; “The End of Utopia”; “The Problem of Violence and the Radical Oppositions.”
He states in the first lecture, “psychology in its inner structure must reveal itself to be political. The psyche appears more and more immediately to lie in a piece of the social totality, so that individuation is almost synonymous with apathy and even with guilt, but also with the principle of negation, of possible revolution. Moreover, the totality of which the psyche is a part becomes to an increasing extent less ‘society’ than ‘politics.’ That is, society has fallen prey to and becomes identified with domination.” (Pg. 1)
He continues, “Under these circumstances … freedom becomes an impossible concept, for there is nothing that it not prescribed for the individual in some way or another. And in fact freedom can be defined only with the framework of domination… Freedom is a FORM OF DOMINATION; the one in which the means provided satisfy the needs of the individual with a minimum of displeasure and renunciation.” (Pg. 2)
In the section lecture he proposes that “a qualitatively different reality principle … replace the repressive one… The first consequence would be that the force of the instinctual energy released by the mechanized labor would no longer have to be expended on unpleasurable activity and could be changed back into erotic energy… To the extent that erotic energy were really freed, it would cease to be mere sexuality and would become a force that determined the organism in all its modes of behavior, dimensions, and goals… Striving for gratification in a happy world would be the principle according to which human existence would develop.” (Pg. 40)
In the third lecture he suggests, “the classical psychoanalytic model, in which the father and the father-dominated family was the agent of mental socialization, is being invalidated by society’s direct management of the nascent ego through the mass media, school and sports teams, gangs, etc. … this decline in the role of the father follows the decline of the role of private and family enterprise… These changes reduce the ‘living space’ and the autonomy of the ego and prepare the ground for the formation of MASSES. The mediation between the self and the other gives way to immediate identification.” (Pg. 47)
He continues, “The insights of psychoanalysis go a long way to explaining the frightful ease with which people submit to the exigencies of total administration, which include total preparation for the fatal end. Freed from the authority of the weak father, released from the child-centered family, well equipped with the ideas and facts of life as transmitted by the mass media, the son (and to a still-lesser degree, the daughter) enter a ready-made world in which they have to find their way. Paradoxically, the freedom which they had enjoyed in the progressive, child-centered family turns out to be a liability rather than a blessing: the ego that has grown without much struggle appears as a pretty weak entity, ill equipped to become a self with and against others…” (Pg. 50)
He concludes this lecture, “To summarize, the political implications of Freudian theory as seen in the preceding discussion are: 1. The sweeping changes in advanced industrial society are accompanied by equally basic changes in the primary mental structure… The result is ego formation in and by masses, which depend on the objective, reified leadership of the technical and political administration… 2. Shrinkage of the ego, and collectivization of the ego idea signify a regression to primitive stages of the development, where the accumulated aggression had to be ‘compensated’ by periodic transgression… 3. … the activation of surplus aggressive energy releases instinctual forces which threaten to undermine the established political institutions… [and] makes for a growth of popular extremism, in the masses---a rise of irrational forces which confront the leadership with their claims for satisfaction. 4. … the masses determine continuously the policy of the leadership on which they depend, while the leadership sustains and increases its power in response and reaction to the dependent masses… 5. There are regressive tendencies. The masses are not identical with the ‘people’ on whose sovereign rationality the free society was to be established. Today, the chance of freedom depends to a great extent on the power and willingness to oppose mass opinion, to assert unpopular policies, to alter the direction of progress.” (Pg. 59-60)
In the fourth lecture, he clarifies his position: “I hope that when I speak of doing away with the horrors of capitalist industrialization it is clear I am not advocating a romantic regression behind technology. On the contrary, I believe that the potential liberating blessings of technology and industrialization will not even begin to be real and visible until capitalist industrialization and capitalist technology have been done away with.” (Pg. 68)
In the Q&A section of the final lecture, he says, “I am reproached with being so terribly pessimistic. But I must say that after hearing you I feel like an irresponsible optimist who has long left the solid substance of reality. I cannot conceive of even the nicest capitalist system lasting for eternity. The objections you have raised about automation are correct if you isolate automation from the other social trends which make of it a revolutionary force, for example: first, the enlightenment of consciousness; second, the education especially of the ‘new working class’; third, psychological-moral disintegration…and fourth… the fact that there is also a second world consisting of the Soviet bloc, which will enter into ever sharper competition with capitalism.” (Pg. 101)
These lectures are a fine explanation of Marcuse’s position on a variety of topics; it will be of great interest to anyone studying him.
Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was a German philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory, until he moved to the United States in 1934. (He was even briefly one of the "darlings" of the Student Movement of the 1960s.) hetic Dimension: Toward A Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, etc.
This 1970 book contains five lectures which Marcuse gave before both student and scholarly audiences in New York, Frankfurt, and Berlin. The lectures are “Freedom and Freud’s Theory of Instincts”; “Progress and Freud’s Theory of Instincts”; “The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man”; “The End of Utopia”; “The Problem of Violence and the Radical Oppositions.”
He states in the first lecture, “psychology in its inner structure must reveal itself to be political. The psyche appears more and more immediately to lie in a piece of the social totality, so that individuation is almost synonymous with apathy and even with guilt, but also with the principle of negation, of possible revolution. Moreover, the totality of which the psyche is a part becomes to an increasing extent less ‘society’ than ‘politics.’ That is, society has fallen prey to and becomes identified with domination.” (Pg. 1)
He continues, “Under these circumstances … freedom becomes an impossible concept, for there is nothing that it not prescribed for the individual in some way or another. And in fact freedom can be defined only with the framework of domination… Freedom is a FORM OF DOMINATION; the one in which the means provided satisfy the needs of the individual with a minimum of displeasure and renunciation.” (Pg. 2)
In the section lecture he proposes that “a qualitatively different reality principle … replace the repressive one… The first consequence would be that the force of the instinctual energy released by the mechanized labor would no longer have to be expended on unpleasurable activity and could be changed back into erotic energy… To the extent that erotic energy were really freed, it would cease to be mere sexuality and would become a force that determined the organism in all its modes of behavior, dimensions, and goals… Striving for gratification in a happy world would be the principle according to which human existence would develop.” (Pg. 40)
In the third lecture he suggests, “the classical psychoanalytic model, in which the father and the father-dominated family was the agent of mental socialization, is being invalidated by society’s direct management of the nascent ego through the mass media, school and sports teams, gangs, etc. … this decline in the role of the father follows the decline of the role of private and family enterprise… These changes reduce the ‘living space’ and the autonomy of the ego and prepare the ground for the formation of MASSES. The mediation between the self and the other gives way to immediate identification.” (Pg. 47)
He continues, “The insights of psychoanalysis go a long way to explaining the frightful ease with which people submit to the exigencies of total administration, which include total preparation for the fatal end. Freed from the authority of the weak father, released from the child-centered family, well equipped with the ideas and facts of life as transmitted by the mass media, the son (and to a still-lesser degree, the daughter) enter a ready-made world in which they have to find their way. Paradoxically, the freedom which they had enjoyed in the progressive, child-centered family turns out to be a liability rather than a blessing: the ego that has grown without much struggle appears as a pretty weak entity, ill equipped to become a self with and against others…” (Pg. 50)
He concludes this lecture, “To summarize, the political implications of Freudian theory as seen in the preceding discussion are: 1. The sweeping changes in advanced industrial society are accompanied by equally basic changes in the primary mental structure… The result is ego formation in and by masses, which depend on the objective, reified leadership of the technical and political administration… 2. Shrinkage of the ego, and collectivization of the ego idea signify a regression to primitive stages of the development, where the accumulated aggression had to be ‘compensated’ by periodic transgression… 3. … the activation of surplus aggressive energy releases instinctual forces which threaten to undermine the established political institutions… [and] makes for a growth of popular extremism, in the masses---a rise of irrational forces which confront the leadership with their claims for satisfaction. 4. … the masses determine continuously the policy of the leadership on which they depend, while the leadership sustains and increases its power in response and reaction to the dependent masses… 5. There are regressive tendencies. The masses are not identical with the ‘people’ on whose sovereign rationality the free society was to be established. Today, the chance of freedom depends to a great extent on the power and willingness to oppose mass opinion, to assert unpopular policies, to alter the direction of progress.” (Pg. 59-60)
In the fourth lecture, he clarifies his position: “I hope that when I speak of doing away with the horrors of capitalist industrialization it is clear I am not advocating a romantic regression behind technology. On the contrary, I believe that the potential liberating blessings of technology and industrialization will not even begin to be real and visible until capitalist industrialization and capitalist technology have been done away with.” (Pg. 68)
In the Q&A section of the final lecture, he says, “I am reproached with being so terribly pessimistic. But I must say that after hearing you I feel like an irresponsible optimist who has long left the solid substance of reality. I cannot conceive of even the nicest capitalist system lasting for eternity. The objections you have raised about automation are correct if you isolate automation from the other social trends which make of it a revolutionary force, for example: first, the enlightenment of consciousness; second, the education especially of the ‘new working class’; third, psychological-moral disintegration…and fourth… the fact that there is also a second world consisting of the Soviet bloc, which will enter into ever sharper competition with capitalism.” (Pg. 101)
These lectures are a fine explanation of Marcuse’s position on a variety of topics; it will be of great interest to anyone studying him.
August 5, 2025
To read these lectures is to understand why their author was such a superstar to the counterculture, and how the human operating system is at fundamental and fatal variance with the demands of civilisation.
Feel free to skip Ray Brassier’s densely obtuse and unhelpful introduction; he and Nick Land deserve each other.
Feel free to skip Ray Brassier’s densely obtuse and unhelpful introduction; he and Nick Land deserve each other.
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May 1, 2024Absolute must to read Freuds ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ before reading Marcuse.
December 21, 2024
najlepszy entry level dla Marcuse'a - skrótowa i przystępna wersja Erosa i cywilizacji i Człowieka Jednowymiarowego
December 14, 2024
Really excellent - I admire the straightforwardness, simplicity, and clarity, and though the concrete conditions he confronts here are largely superseded by current conditions, many crucial questions here are still relevant.
Overall, Marcuse's style and approach are rigorous, lucid, and serious in a way that should be emulated. (Not that obscure and difficult theory is bad - I love Agamben - we just can use some of each, in productive dialogue.)
Overall, Marcuse's style and approach are rigorous, lucid, and serious in a way that should be emulated. (Not that obscure and difficult theory is bad - I love Agamben - we just can use some of each, in productive dialogue.)
July 3, 2015
This collection was mostly okay, but I'm not one for the sort of pseudo-freudian woo that Marcuse engages in a lot, but a few of the points about violence and tolerance were alright I suppose? The student+dispossed counter-cultural alliance proposal is also really silly, especially considering recent developments in class structuration, but I suppose Marcuse had no way of knowing that.
December 11, 2022
Marcuse's lectures in this collection explore how the hegemony asserts control over the psychology of a citizenry. The prevalence of Freudian terms may create some barriers for readers not equipped with a basic foundation of his intellectual legacy, though there is much to ponder across these lectures in conversation with works like Arendt's Eichmann and Jerusalem and Fromm's Escape From Freedom.
January 7, 2013
Great intro to Marcuse's thought, but just go ahead and read "One-Dimensional Man" if you have the time.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews