Freudianism: A Critical Sketch

by Valentin Voloshinov, I.R. Titunik (Editor)

English, Russian (translation)

Genres: Psychology, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Theory, Nonfiction, Cultural

172 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1927

About the author

Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov was a Russian Soviet linguist, whose work has been influential in the field of literary theory and Marxist theory of ideology.

Reviews

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

All that is beautiful is defenceless, and psychoanalysis the most of all: its unscientific nature, dubious therapeutic success and multitude of quack-adherents make its acknowledgment in the twenty-first century - with the exception of that within academia - a risible matter. Usually, in this day and age the art comes under attack from Popperian positivists who bemoan its subjective and seemingly arbitrary proceedings, or common-sense middle-of-the-road .

Valentin Voloshinov, however, was a Russian marxist and a contemporary of Freud's. Frustrated with psychoanalysis's (or, as he termed the movement he deemed a cult, Freudianism) ahistoricism and focus on the individual, he sought to apply to it the blunt knife of 'scientific' orthodox marxism and - at least partly - redeem Freud's theories by subsuming them under socio-linguistics. What he ended up with, however, was an early (post)structuralist critique of psychology.

Of the book's many pages, surprisingly few are dedicated to engaging with psycho-analysis; the first half merely a faithful reproduction of the theory as it existed at the time, the last quarter a separate analysis of art as a social formula. It’s only in part III that Voloshinov fires the cannons he’s been holding levelled for a while: psychoanalysis exhibits a bias towards consciousness that makes it unable to grasp the unconscious unless as the former’s dark twin in the same way that its presentist bias causes it to analyse the past as a function of the present and its psychological bias the body as one of the mind. Instead, Voloshinov proposes that what Freud calls the id does not exist but is actually the symptom of warring ideologies; what comes from ‘below’ (from the masses, the renegades, the avant-garde) strives to conquer the established (the ruling ideology); the id, then, is not the childishly spontaneous (which in any case is a presentist hypostatization) nor the sexual (which is only a symptom of this transitory societal period; a weakening of social norms causes the inhabitants previously covered by it to crawl back to the smallest tenable ‘safe’ unit, ie the couple) but rather a budding new order. The popularity of the psychoanalytical phenomenon he analogously reads as the throes of the decaying bourgeois order, and its results are likewise historically contingent: Voloshinov perspicaciously points out that the ancient Greeks in no way faced the hangups regarding homosexuality so central to our contemporary oedipal triangle,

The places Voloshinov shines the strongest, however, is where he folds back the psychoanalytical into the linguistic, which he in turn sees as a purely social phenomenon – in other words, fitting the ‘individualist’ psychoanalysis within the framework of linguistic structuralism. This trend he continues in his treatise on the function of art; every expression is, implicitly, a nodal structure with space for three variables (the speaker, the listener and the ‘hero’, or subject) which, even when uttered in isolation, fully determine the possibilities of the utterance. Linguistics itself, taken as synchronic research, he sees as a nonsensical abstraction: language is social and only social and should be understood as such. Likewise, there is nothing beyond the language which analysands use to describe their psychological predicaments: anticipating Derrida by half a century, Voloshinov declared language and semiotics to be synonymous. Neither the unconscious, bodily functions nor dreams are ‘tethered’ signs with fixed psychoanalytical signified contents; all results derived from an analytical session amount to no more than commentary on commentary on nothing.

Precisely this hugely forward-thinking thrust of Voloshinov's critique is the unstable fuel that both grants it its insight and belches out smokescreens. Determined to fit his structuralism into a materialist mold, the author fails to apply his proto-Derridean critique to his own alternative 'objective' psychoanalysis: while the discovery of the exact chemical makeup behind psychological impulses and reactions would provide one with the structural/nodal makeup of semiosis, the 'parallel' semiotic/linguistic act accompanying it is still separated from it by an unbridgeable explanatory gap. The idea of an 'objective' material study of meaning takes one step in the direction of structuralism, but immediately falls into the clutches of its poststructuralist critics. Voloshinov's simultaneous insistence on the social/conventional nature of meaning serves to salvage the greater share of his alternative explanation of psychological phenomena, but in the absence of any re-analysis of Freud's cases it is difficult to gauge - for example - how Voloshinov's concepts of 'official and unofficial inner voice' differ from the former's 'conscious and unconscious'. Voloshinov is at his weakest when articulating his ideological reading of language-as-a-social-function: despite the valid assertion that hierarchy and standing determine language and discourse, his comments on the psychological value of intonation and gesticulation seem mired in the naive psychologization he accuses Freud of.

Finally, mention must be made of the excellent and insightful final chapter by Neal H. Bruss, in which the tally is made of Freud's legacy in the light of Voloshinov's criticisms. Coming out three years before Society and its Discontents, Freudianism could not anticipate how much Freud himself would develop a broader social theory, going beyond the solipsistically individualist. Jacques Lacan would eventually take it upon himself to rearticulate the social as a function of linguistics - the inverse of Voloshinov's project - and in doing so overruled many semiotic flaws the latter found in the former's theories. Lastly, Bruss himself stresses the Saussurean nature of the freudian mechanisms of displacement and condensation, finding in them a possible answer to the questions raised by Voloshinov's structuralist predisposition.

In summary then, Freudianism is in spite of its discursively obsolete nature a fascinating read in which linguistics infect psychology and turn it inside-out. Recommended to those interested in either.

Strangely, marxism itself scarcely features, and if it weren't for Voloshinov's linking of class ideology with 'the inner dialogue', Verso's subtitle would be quite misleading.

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Voloshinov rejects Freudianism with its concepts of the unconscious, repression, and childhood sexuality. He ties consciousness to speech, action, and historical sociology.

[Kaspars Karklins · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gives you a glimpse of post-revolution yet pre-Stalin Russia as a true place where history could have been made. A ghost of a brighter future that never came is present all through this very pointed albeit somewhat flawed (admitted to even in the notes) Marxist critique of Freud. The great content of the book aside it represents to me - like Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin or Klutsis' Constructivism - a current of truly revolutionary thought in a time where we are taught only repression and ideological dogmatism existed in the USSR.

[sologdin · Rating 1 out of 5]

i recall finding this interpretation of freud unpersuasive, years ago.

[Ira · Rating 4 out of 5]

Voloshinov is an acute thinker, writes lucidly and straightforwardly, and here he is presenting a deconstruction of Freudianism for his times. Situating Freud’s work in the 1920s and 1930s, he remarks that Freud never took an explicit stance in the debate between subjectivist and objectivist psychology. Having examined Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, Voloshinov argues that in order to summon the unconscious one always needs language, which is indisputably social, thus undermining the underlying individualism of Freud’s approach as a whole.

The fact that one could never make the psychical coincide with consciousness places Freud in a strange position when it comes to the materiality of the unconscious – for instance how can erogenous zones function? How does Freud explain psychophysical causality or parallelism – one of the main controversies of his generation? If introspection is only possible from a conscious point of view, what of it when it comes to accessing the unconscious? For Voloshinov, ‘Freud’s whole psychological construct is based fundamentally on human verbal utterances; it is nothing but a special kind of interpretation of utterances […] constructed in the conscious sphere of the psyche.’ (p. 122)

Although he mistrusts the surface motives of consciousness, Freud tries to go deeper, but he does not look for the physiological or social roots of utterances; he is always looking inside the individual, rather than around him. He never ‘relinquishes introspection as the sole method of authenticating the reality of psychical events’.

Eventually, Voloshinov resolves to relegate Freudianism to the camp of subjective psychology. The ‘rift’ between the inner-subjective and the material remains undisturbed by Freud’s innovative notion of the unconscious (p.111). So, psychology of consciousness and psychoanalysis are the same in that respect.

By contrast, Voloshinov tries to introduce this social aspect that remains neglected by both psychology of consciousness and psychoanalysis. This social aspect is expressed by means of language and it points to an externality of the utterance, which is ‘the product of the interaction between speakers and the product of the broader context of the whole complex social situation in which the utterance emerges’ (p.126).

Voloshinov here describes discourse as a ‘scenario’, one that necessarily transcends the individual psyche and within which the patient’s utterance finds its place. For Voloshinov, Freud wrongly projects the dynamics of interrelationships between two people onto the individual psyche. He writes that the unconscious ‘stands in opposition not to the individual conscious of the patient but, primarily, to the doctor, his requirements and his views. “Resistance” is likewise primarily resistance to the doctor, to the listener, to the other person generally’ (p. 128).

The fact that, at all stages, the route to human consciousness operates through language is evidence of its transindividual or social being. Voloshinov accuses Freud of exaggerating the role of the human private life, hypostatising the sexual pair as a sort of ‘social minimum’, turning the sexual into a ‘surrogate for the social’ (p. 147).

An interesting and enjoyable criticism of Freudianism from a precursor of structuralism.

[Caris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short book succeeds masterfully at what it sets out to do—not to synthesize two bodies of literature, nor to propose any radically new scientific method. Rather, it has two simple goals: summarizing the key concepts of Freudian Psychoanalysis in simple language; and critiquing those concepts from a Marxist perspective. Importantly, Voloshinov writes before Freud’s work even came to a close, and in the very shadow of the USSR’s formation. The benefit of hindsight we have today regarding both Psychoanalysis and Marxism wasn’t available to Voloshinov, and this isn’t so much a hindrance to his critique as it is a strength. Voloshinov’s historical context allows him to elucidate very clearly what he witnessed in the popularization of Freudian psychology in the early twentieth century: a pseudoscientific offshoot of subjective psychology.

The structure of the work is quite accessible. I think that despite Voloshinov’s clear (and honest) ideological position, a newcomer to the ideas herein can easily grasp an understanding of both Freudian Psychoanalysis and its historico-material shortcomings. However, the assumption is that one would come to this critique with at least a modest understanding of Marxism, which isn’t nearly as present as it should be. And this is really the only disappointing thing about this book.