The Crisis of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Herbert Marcuse, having written more extensively about psychoanalysis than any other philosopher, offers a good example of the particular distortion which the "philosophy of psychoanalysis" can inflict upon psychoanalytic theory. He claims that his work "moves exclusively in the field of theory, and keeps outside of the technical discipline which psychoanalysis has become." To construct a "philosophy of psychoanalysis" which ignores its empirical basis must necessarily lead to serious errors in the understanding of the psychoanalytic theory. By using the concept of repression indiscriminately, Marcuse confuses the central issue of psychoanalysis. Marcuse makes much of the "fact" that Freud attributes the same conservative nature (of returning to an earlier stage) to Eros as to the death instinct. For him psychoanalysis is not an empirical method for the uncovering of the unconscious strivings of a person, masked by rationalization, a theory ad personam , which deals with the character and demonstrates the various unconscious motivations for apparently "reasonable acts."

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