Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the critique of psychological dualism: From dualist repression to the return of the repressed in hysteria and class consciousness

Abstract

This article discusses how the psychic reality is separated from everything else in modern psychology and argues that this separation may be related to capitalism. It also explores how Marx and Freud, as well as later Marxists and Marxist Freudians, have critically examined the psyche/ world and psyche/soma dichotomies. Their critique uncovered a kind of groundless dualism, which was denounced as a way of exerting power over the body and world, as a consequence of the manual/intellectual division of labour, and as the dematerialization of subjectivity by repressing and sublimating-idealizing processes. These denunciations make it possible to appreciate how Marxism and psychoanalysis-by arousing class consciousness among the labourers and by making the unconscious conscious in hysteria-allowed symptomatic disclosures of the truth of monism in the faults of a psychological dualistic knowledge.

Decolonizing psychoanalysis: Anti-Blackness, coloniality, and a new premise for psychoanalytic treatment.

“…As noted, colonialism produced racial, gender, and sexual divisions that distorted the cultures of Global South peoples (Oye ˇwùmí, 1997), reflected in the dualism establishing the primacy of mind over body. Pavón-Cuéllar (2018) showed how this dichotomy establishes intellectual labor as superior to physical labor, in turn licensing those who consider themselves "superior" to force those who are "inferior" to engage in physical, motoric "body" labor. Mainstream psychoanalysis' historical preference for words over action similarly emplaces certain forms of clinical work as superior, marginalizing Global South people as not "psychologically minded" (Aron & Starr, 2013;Gaztambide, 2019).…”

Lacan and Althusser on psychology: The political ethos of serving ideals and justifying ideology

“…The dominant class had to dominate in order to obtain a psyche different from the body and the world. The psychological sphere, therefore, is a social privilege and presupposes the social domination of one class by another (Pavón‐Cuéllar, , ).…”