Abstract
During the 1950s, in one of his most obstinately creative periods, Marcuse confronted the theoretical challenges posed by the pessimism of works like Sarte’s Being and Nothingness and Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. The series of defeats of the Left suffered by Marcuse since the failure of the German Revolution of 1918, the intensification of the cold war and arms race, the emergence of a form of consumer capitalism which he despised, the anti-Communist witchhunts of the McCarthy era, and his own difficult personal circumstances made Marcuse vulnerable to the pessimistic philosophical doctrines that were in the air. He did not surrender to despair, however, but set out instead to work on developing his own critical theory of contemporary society and vision of liberation through an intensive study of Freud, classical and modern literature, philosophy and aesthetics.
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Notes and References
On Marcuse’s invitation to the Washington School of Psychiatry and the organization of the school, see Katz, ‘Praxis and Poeisis’, p. 145. I might add that Marcuse was listed as a ‘Guest Lecturer’ in the school’s 1950–1 course bulletin, and his course was described as follows:
B-3 Philosophical and Political Aspects of Psychoanalysis, Marcuse, Time and dates to be announced, 4 sessions.
The course attempts to explore the underlying philosophy of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytical theory and practice imply a specific attitude toward the established forms of society, and the development of psychoanalysis indicates a change in this attitude from critical materialism to conservative idealism. This will be illustrated by a philosophical discussion of the concepts of personality, sanity, neurosis, anxiety, frustration, and repression. The course will also examine the role which psychoanalysis plays in the conflicting political philosophies of our time. It will include a discussion of the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism, and an analysis of Existentialism.
Open to all students at the discretion of the Admissions Committee. $10.
The bulletin indicates that the faculty included during the 1950–1 school year Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Ernest Schachtel, Clara Thompson and Patrick Mullahy. Thus Marcuse had the opportunity to make contact with some of the top Freudian and ‘revisionist’ psychoanalyists of the period.
Conversation with Marcuse, March 1978.
Marcuse, ‘On Hedonism’, N, p. 187.
In a conversation with me in March 1978, Marcuse stressed the continuity in his aesthetic concerns and theory between his post-1950s work and his studies in the 1920s (discussed in Chapter 1). He insisted, however, that his decisive study of Schiller began in the 1950s and that his earlier work on a Schiller bibliography was ‘just a job’ and did not have an important influence on his thought.
Conversation with Marcuse, March 1978.
It has been claimed that Adorno and Horkheimer were influenced by the Jewish prohibition on creating images of God or paradise which inhibited them from projecting political alternatives. See Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, p. 56, and Jürgen Habermas, ‘Der deutsche Idealismus der Jüdischen Philosophen’. Philosophisch-politische Profile (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971) p. 41. It seems to me that Adorno and Horkheimer simply were not as interested in politics or socialism as Marcuse, and hence were not as concerned to project social-political alternatives or to posit any specific political practice. See Chapter 9, ‘Critical theory and radical politics’ for further discussion of this issue.
EC has had a complicated and interesting history. The publication of its epilogue in Dissent sparked a bitter controversy with Erich Fromm; see Dissent, II, 4 (Fall 1955) pp. 342–9, and Dissent, III, 1 (Spring 1956) pp. 79–83. The book received a mixed reception from the psychoanalytic establishment and Freud scholars. See the favourable review by Martin Grotjahn, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XXV (1956)
the critical reviews by Herbert Fingarette, Review of Metaphysics, X (June 1957) pp. 660–5
Sidney Axelrad, ‘On Some Uses of Psychoanalysis’. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, VIII (January 1960) pp. 175–218.
Several studies have criticized Marcuse for his distortions of Freud. See Anthony Wilden, ‘Marcuse and the Freudian Model’. The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals, Salmagundi, 10/11 (Fall 1969—Winter 1969) pp. 196–245
Jean Laplanche, ‘Notes sur Marcuse et al Psychanalyse’, Marcuse Cet Inconnu, La Nef, 36 (Janvier—Mars 1969)
Erich Fromm, The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970)
Sidney Lipshires, Herbert Marcuse: From Marx to Freud and Beyond (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1974)
Schoolman, Imaginary Witness. In the 1960s, EC was seen as a major influence on the emerging counterculture. See Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1969)
Morris Dickstein, Gates of Eden (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
EC also made a deep impression on a current of Western Marxism and what would become known as Freudo-Marxism. Early translations of its chapters were published in the French journals La Table Round and Arguments (see Bibliography) and the book influenced a generation of French thinkers. See Jean-Michel Palmier, Herbert Marcuse et la Nouvelle Gauche, and Alain J. Cohen, Marcuse: Le Scenario Freudo-Marsien (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1974).
Orthodox Marxists, and those influenced by Habermas’s version of critical theory, criticized Marcuse’s too uncritical acceptance of Freud’s instinct theory. See Steigerwald, Herbert Marcuses ‘drifter Weg’, and Arnson, Von Marcuse zu Marx. New Left rebellions against orthodox Marxism found EC’s emphasis on sexuality, culture and liberation a refreshing supplement to an often overly ‘economistic’ or ‘objectivistic’ Marxian orthodoxy. See the often contradictory receptions by French FreudoMarxists like Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard and others, as well as the Freudo-Marxian syntheses in Bruce Brown, Marx, Freud, and the Critique of Everyday Life (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973)
Russell Jacoby, Social Amnesia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975)
Gad Horowitz, Repression (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). As this sketch indicates, EC has had extremely varied and contradictory effects and continues to be one of Marcuse’s most provocative and controversial works.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, The Standard Edition of the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, XXI, pp. 57–145 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–66).
See Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, where he argues that repression is necessary to check the unruly and aggressive instincts in human nature that make ‘man a wolf to man’; Standard Edition, pp. 57ff, and especially section V; and The Future of an Illusion, Standard Edition, XXI, pp. 1–56, where Freud argues that humans are lazy by nature and must be forced to work.
EC, pp. 12ff and ‘Freedom and Freud’s Theory of Instincts’, 5L, pp. 5ff. Compare Freud, ‘Formulations Concerning the Two Principles in Mental Functioning’, Collected Papers, IV (London: The Hogarth Press, 1950) pp. 14ff.
See also ‘Freedom and Freud’s Theory of Instincts’, where Marcuse writes: ‘The structure of Freud’s theory is open to and in fact encourages consideration in political terms … this theory which appears to be purely biological, is fundamentally social and historical’, p. 1.
See George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University Press, 1934) and many theories discussed in Kurt Danziger, Socialization (London and Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971). For critical remarks on dominant theories of socialization, see Marcuse, ‘Progress and Freud’s Theory of Instincts’, Five Lectures, pp. 28–43.
Marcuse cites Ernest Schachtel’s paper, ‘On Memory and Childhood Amnesia’ as an important analysis of ‘the explosive force of memory and its control and conventionalization by society’ (EC, p. 19). Marcuse’s concept of the importance of memory for liberation was shaped by the ideas of Adorno and Benjamin. See Benjamin, Illuminations, and Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, pp. 267–8.
On the emancipatory role of daydreams, phantasy and hope, see Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1959), especially Part II on ‘The Anticipatory Consciousness’.
Marcuse, ‘On Hedonism’, Negations.
Marcuse, EC and ‘Freedom and Freud’s Theory of Instincts’. Marcuse continued this defence of Freud to the end of his life. See his conversations with Habermas and others, Gespräche mit Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978).
‘Eros’ for Marcuse signifies instinctual energies that contain the creative life-affirming and social aspects of human nature. See EC, pp. 26f, 40ff, 83ff, and 204ff.
See also Paul Federn, Ego Psychology and the Psychoses (New York: Basic Books, 1952) p. 272.
For critiques of Freud’s concept of the death instinct see Wilhelm Reich, Sex-Pol, pp. 17f and 85, and The Function of the Orgasm (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973) pp. 154ff; Otto Fenichel, Collected Papers (New York: Norton, 1962) pp. 366ff
; and Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973).
Marcuse develops this theme in a later article, ‘Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society’, Negations, writing: ‘in the Freudian conception, destructive energy cannot become stronger without reducing erotic energy: the balance between the two primary impulses is a quantitative one; the instinctual energy is mechanistic, distributing an available quantum of energy between the two antagonists’, pp. 257–8. Marcuse stuck to this model of Freud’s instinct theory to the end of his life; see the discussion in Chapter 10.
R. Wollheim, Freud (New York: Viking, 1971)
For a critique of the Freudian energy-instinct model, see Wilden, ‘Marcuse and the Freudian Model’; Richard Wollheim, Freud (New York: Viking, 1971); and William Barrett and Daniel Yankelovich, Ego and Instinct (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Marcuse’s use of Freud’s instinct theory will be critically discussed in 6.4.2 below.
See section 6.1 and note 11 above. Earlier, Marcuse tried to historicize and concretize the anthropologies of Heidegger and Hegel, bringing them into the Marxian project (see discussion in Chapters 2 and 3). In a sense, he is now attempting a similar project with Freud.
Against Horowitz, Repression, I would suggest that both Freud, and what Horowitz calls ‘Marcuse’s Freud’, do not limit obstacles to a non-repressive civilization to exogenous factors, like scarcity, but also stress the internal obstacles of human instincts. Marcuse reinterprets and reconstructs Freud’s instinct theory to show that what Freud believed were insurmountable elements to a non-repressive society within human nature misunderstood the nature, function and goal of human instincts. See section 6.3 for Marcuse’s reconstruction of Freud and theory of liberation.
Max Weber’s influence of Marcuse’s theory of domination will be discussed in more detail in the next two chapters. Weber’s theory of domination was taken over by critical theory and applied in different ways, without citing Weber, in its two epics of domination, Dialectic of Enlightenment and One-Dimensional Man. The concept in turn became a central concept in contemporary critical theory. See William Leiss, Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974)
the collection of essays edited by Alkis Kontos, Domination (Toronto: University Press, 1975). I shall argue below that many of Marcuse’s interpreters misunderstand his concept of domination, and am grateful to Bob Antonio for insisting on the similarities between the critical theory concept of domination and that of Max Weber.
Marcuse, ‘Freedom and Freud’s Theory of Instincts’, SL, 1. There are conceptual problems in clarifying and relating such terms as domination, repression and alienation in Marcuse’s critical theory. He uses both ‘domination’ and ‘repression’ as broad, generic terms which include external-social oppression as well as Freudian notions of psychological repression, introjection, etc. Alkis Kontos suggests making a distinction between ‘force’ and ‘hegemony’ as instruments of social control (without noting the parallel to Gramsci), defining ‘oppression’ as ‘a condition of overt, visible, forceful restriction of another’s life-activity’. ‘Domination’, on the other hand ‘refers to a totally distinct condition. The dominated are denied the fulfilment of their ontological capacities … Unlike slaves, the dominated appear in the guise of free, self-determined agents, but it does not mean that they are so. The process of internalization of the external structures of domination can be identified and exposed’. See Alkis Kontos, ‘Through a Glass Darkly: Ontology and False Needs’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol. 3, no. 1 (Winter 1979) pp. 38ff. Although it often makes sense to make the Gramscian distinction between force and hegemony, I believe that domination and repression for Marcuse combine overt force/oppression and internal control mechanisms. This is clear in Marcuse’s definition of repression (EC, pp. 8, 276) and I believe that it is also true of domination, which I am suggesting is a comprehensive totalizing concept of social control in his theory.
Marcuse has been harshly criticized for distorting Freud’s theory of repression, which refers generally to unconscious suppression of illicit desires and painful or traumatic experiences. See Fingarette, Wilden, Laplanche, Fromm and Lipshires (bibliographical references in note 7). These criticisms, however, fail to note that Marcuse is consciously modifying the Freudian category to include external and internal phenomena, thus rejecting the — in his view — too internal-psychological theory of repression in Freud. This is clear in Marcuse’s definition of repression in EC, p. 8 (cited below) and in the index to EC, where next to the category ‘repression’ he lists ‘(suppression, oppression)’ (EC, p. 276).
See, especially, Marcuse’s essay ‘Some Implications of Modern Technology’, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, IX (1941), Soviet Marxism and One-Dimensional Man. I shall elaborate on this theme in the following chapters.
Marcuse, ‘Some Implications of Modern Technology’. For a discussion of Marcuse’s theory of the apparatus of domination which combines administration and violence, see Wolfgang Lipp, ‘Apparat und Gewalt’, Soziale Welt, Jahrg. 20, Heft 3 (1970) pp. 274–303.
Marcuse, ‘Some Implications’. Compare Fromm, The Sane Society, and Jacoby, Social Amnesia.
In an otherwise useful article, ‘Marcuse and the Problem of Happiness’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol. 2, no. 1 (Winter 1978), Charles Rachlis writes: ‘As a form of ideology, domination consists in the falsification of reality by particular social interests, and the substitution of this falsehood for reality via the surplusrepressive controls embodied in the performance principle’ (p. 73). I do not believe that domination is simply ‘a form of ideology’, but believe that domination is a much more comprehensive category which links such things as ideologies, institutions, social practice and individual behaviour. See the Lipp article cited in note 28 for a suggestive collection of quotes from Marcuse’s text which indicate that he links discussion of a social apparatus of administration, force and coercion with ideology in his theory of domination.
Marcuse’s theory of ‘Surplus repression’ has been criticized in Francois Perroux interroge Herbert Marcuse (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1969) and by many other people, for being too vague to calculate. This criticism is not entirely convincing to me for it does seem possible to be able to calculate the amount of socially necessary labour-time and to subtract that from actual labour-time, and hence to provide an estimate of the current amount of surplus repression due to socially imposed but unnecessary labour-time. It is more difficult, however, to calculate sexual repression, although one can criticize a society’s too severe sexual prohibitions, values and institutions as examples of surplus repression that impose sexual deprivation on individuals and impede sexual gratification. Horowitz, Repression, shows that Freud also makes a distinction between ‘basic’ and ‘surplus’ repression and attempts to provide a grounding of Marcuse’s concept of surplus repression in Freudian theory.
See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1958). Marcuse would argue that the ‘performance principle’ also applies to Soviet Communist societies and that its function as the dominant reality principle is an indication of domination and repression in the Soviet Union. See Soviet Marxism, discussed in the next chapter.
On the topic compare T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, ‘The Culture Industry’, Dialectic of Enlightenment, with Douglas Kellner, ‘Ideology, Marxism, and Advanced Capitalism’ and ‘TV, Ideology, and Emancipatory Popular Culture’, in Socialist Review, 42 (November–December 1978) and SR, 45 (May–June 1979).
In an essay, ‘The Realm of Freedom and the Realm of Necessity. A Reconsideration’, Praxis, V, no. 1–2 (1969) Marcuse writes: ‘I am happy and honoured to talk to you in the presence of Ernst Bloch today, whose work Geist der Utopie, published more than forty years ago, has influenced at least my generation, and has shown how realistic utopian concepts can be, how close to action, how close to practice’ (p. 20).
Marcuse, ‘Marxism and Feminism’. This lecture was delivered at Stanford on 7 March 1974 and printed in Women’s Studies, vol. 2, no. 3 (1974) and various underground newspapers, like the Austin rag where I first encountered it. Marcuse utilizes here the concepts in EC that we are discussing, and concretizes his contrast between the two reality principles in terms of current struggles for liberation in the women’s movement.
Marcuse, ‘Marxism and Feminism’.
This passage is reminiscent of the early Marx’s concept of Communism in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts. We see again the strong hold that the ideas of the early Marx exerted over Marcuse (see Chapters 1–3).
See Freud’s papers, ‘Formulations Concerning the Two Principles in Mental Functioning’, in Collected Papers, IV, and ‘The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming’, Character and Culture, Collected Papers. For a criticism of Marcuse’s use of Freud’s theory of phantasy, see Wilden, ‘Marcuse and the Freudian Model’.
It is one of the ironies of modern philosophy that Marcuse introduces his concept of the ‘Great Refusal’ with a passage by the speculative metaphysician Whitehead, who wrote in Science and the Modern World: ‘The truth that some proposition respecting an actual occasion is untrue may express the vital truth as to the aesthetic achievement. It expresses the “great refusal” which is its primary characteristic’ (quoted in EC, p. 149). The origins of the concept, however, are probably with Breton and surrealism, where there was also talk of the ‘great refusal’.
Statements that a ‘new basic experience of being would change the human existence in its entirety’ (EC, p. 158) disclose the subterranean Heideggerian influence on Marcuse. The later Heidegger opposes a ‘new experience of being’ (Seinslassen: letting Being be) to the predominant experience of a technological society that strives to dominate nature, to subject nature, humans and other beings to the will to power. See Martin Heidegger, The Question of Technology (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
I criticize Marcuse’s choice of Orpheus and Narcissus as cultural ideals in the conclusion to this chapter.
Marcuse confesses in ‘The End of Utopia’: ‘I am an absolutely incurable romantic’, SL, p. 82.
Marcuse compiled a bibliography on Schiller in 1925, and his early immersion in German literature and aesthetics often emerges in his later writings.
Friedrich Schiller, The Aesthetic Letters, Essays, and the Philosophical Letters (Boston: Little, Brown, 1845).
A constant theme in Marcuse’s writing is criticism of repressive reason — a position that links him with Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death (New York: Vintage, 1959). Marcuse’s stress on the need to develop a concept of ‘sensuous reason’ and his sharp critique of Brown’s Love’s Body (see Negations) shows that Marcuse is not proposing abandoning reason, however, as some uninformed critics charge. See Vivas; Marcuse never advocates any form of ‘irrationalism’ which rejects reason, but he does offer a rather different concept of reason than more classical rationalists, or even representatives of critical theory. See his revealing exchange with Habermas, ‘Theory and Politics’, pp. 132ff. Vis-à-vis the concept of reason, one discerns a rather sharp break from Marcuse’s Hegelian rationalism in his 1930s ‘critical theory’ essays and R&R in contrast to EC and his later writings.
MacIntyre, Marcuse, pp. 46ff. Against MacIntyre, Fromm and others, Gar Horowitz argues in Repression that Marcuse does not reject genital sexuality, but does reject a repressive genitality that suppresses all elements of sexual activity that do not contribute to genital intercourse. According to Horowitz, Marcuse maintains that renunciation of desire for gratification of non-genital zones and ‘containment’ of partial sexual impulses is repressive and totalitarian as well if it leads to limiting ‘sexual expression to heterosexual genital (procreative) intercourse between a single, dominant “husband”, and a single, subordinate “wife”, legally married for life, and to prohibit, in varying degrees, all other manifestations of sexuality’ (p. 67). In Horowitz’s view, rather than displacing genital sexuality by pre-genital sexuality, Marcuse is advocating activation and intensification of ‘all erotogenetic zones’ (EC, p. 201). Horowitz claims that this ideal of sexuality is close to Freud’s, and suggests the term ‘polymorphic genitality’ (p. 75) to describe the ideal of sexuality as at once genital and non-genital. Rather than strait-jacketing Marcuse into an either/or model of sexual advocacy (i.e. either non-genital ‘polymorphic perversity’, or straight genital sex), Horowitz sugrests that Marcuse’s ideal advocates both enlarged and intensified sexuality. Marcuse’s further point, explicated in the following pages, is that partial expressions of sexuality (i.e. ‘perversions’) will lose their neurotic or destructive traits in a liberated Eros which will, furthermore, spread erotic energies to other relations and activities, rather than to confine them to the bedroom or brothel.
Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution (New York: Vision Press, 1969) pp. 6–7.
I do not think that Marcuse fully does justice to Reich, who was one of the first to attempt to synthesize Marxian and Freudian ideas. During the 1920s and 1930s Reich made important contributions in theory and practice to both the Marxian and psychoanalytic movements, which Marcuse does not adequately appraise in his rather superficial dismissal of Reich. To be sure, after Reich was expelled from both the Marxian and psychoanalytic movements, he wasted his creative energies during a difficult exile period in the sort of occult science that Marcuse complains about. But this should not keep us from studying Reich’s important works, such as the essays collected in Sex-Pol; The Mass Psychology of Fascism, or The Function of the Orgasm. For sympathetic readings of Reich’s Freudo-Marxism, see Bertell Ollman’s introduction to the Sex-Pol essays, and ‘The Marxism of Wilhelm Reich’, in The Unknown Dimension, ed. Dick Howard and Karl Klare (New York: Basic Books, 1972). For a more critical view of Reich’s merger of Marx and Freud, see Michael Schneider, Neurosis and Class Struggle (New York: Seabury Press, 1976) and Horowitz, Repression.
Many of Marcuse’s Freudian critics are quick to point out that the notion of a ‘non-repressive sublimation’ is a logical impossibility in Freud’s theory, as sublimation is always for Freud a ‘repressive’ deflection of erotic energies. See Lipshires, Herbert Marcuse, pp. 38–47. Marcuse could answer that he is rejecting here the orthodox psychoanalytic position and is suggesting a provocative conceptual reformulation that explicates features of liberation.
See section 6.3.2 and note 45 above.
In An Essay on Liberation, Marcuse suggests ‘passing from Marx to Fourier’ (EL, p. 22). For Fourier’s ideas, see Mark Poster’s anthology, Harmonian Man (New York: Doubleday, 1970) and the discussion in Manuel, Utopia.
EC, pp. 35ff, 132ff, and 222ff. Marcuse’s ideal obviously presupposes a ‘post-scarcity’ society of abundance. Whether we are or not in such a situation is a topic of current debate. Marcuse continued to argue that we are in a post-scarcity situation already, and that it is only the capitalist mode of production and consequent unequal distribution of wealth and imposition of scarcity that prevents development of a genuine society of abundance for all. Conversation with Marcuse, La Jolla, California, 28 December 1978.
The notion of a ‘libidinal’ or erotic morality is one that tantalizes Marcuse and denotes his distance from idealist and rationalist morality which he claims is repressive. The concept is hotly debated within Freudian circles. See Lipshires, Herbert Marcuse, pp. 50ff.
Time and time again Marcuse cites the importance of the liberation of memory. See section 6.1 and the concluding paragraph of The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 73.
On Schiller’s concept of the aesthetic state, see the forthcoming book by Josef Chytry. I am indebted to Chytry’s work for insights into the relation between Schiller, German Idealism and Marcuse.
T. W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970) pp. 469–72.
Ibid.
Wilden, ‘Marcuse and the Freudian model’. See the next section for details of this criticism.
See Steigerwald, Herbert Marcuses ‘dritter Weg’, and Erich Fromm, The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (New York: Fawcett, 1970).
Marcuse’s critique of the work ethic and production here shows the groundlessness of Baudrillard’s critique discussed in 3.3.
Fromm’s books Man for Himself (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1947), The Sane Society and other writings make the ‘productive personality’ an ideal character type. Marcuse thinks that Fromm falls prey here to the capitalist work ethic and bourgeois humanism. For a discussion of the split and the continuing debate between Marcuse and Fromm, see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, chapter 3.
Marcuse, ‘The End of Utopia’, SL, p. 63.
See Chapter 10 for further discussion of this issue.
Morton Schoolman claims that Marcuse ‘disregards’ the ‘melancholic and pathological traits of Orpheus and Narcissus’; see ‘Marcuse’s “Second Dimension”’, Telos, 23 (Spring 1975) pp. 104ff. Schoolman concludes that this constitutes a ‘definitive nihilism’ in Marcuse (p.108). I would instead argue that Marcuse’s selective interpretation of the Orpheus and Narcissus myths reveals some of his deepest values; hence adequate interpretation should make clear these values and question whether Marcuse’s values are adequate to the achievement of liberation.
On the mythological sources of the Narcissus and Orpheus myths, see Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Baltimore and London: Penguin, 1965).
The myth of Narcissus was the basis for Freud’s theory of narcissism. See Freud, ‘On Narcissism’, Standard Edition, XIV, pp. 67–102 and Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism (New York: Aronson, 1975).
The popularity of Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979)
See Marcuse’s exchange with Brown in Negations, where he makes clear that he is advocating the political fight as the way to liberation.
See the references in note 7. The most extensive studies of Marcuse’s use and abuse of Freud, based on a detailed study of psychoanalytic literature, are Horowitz, Repression, and Sidney Lipshires, Herbert Marcuse: From Marx to Freud and Beyond. Lipshires’s study is valuable for his constant juxtaposition of Freudian and Marcusean positions, and their comparison with other positions in psychoanalytic literature. Lipshires is often justified in criticizing Marcuse’s use of Freud and other Freudians to support his own position, but Lipshires is generally uncritical towards Freud and believes he has refuted Marcuse’s positions merely by showing how orthodox Freudian positions are at odds with Marcuse. Schoolman takes the same tact in Imaginary Witness.
See Lipshires, Herbert Marcuse, for many examples.
For example, Marcuse makes minimal use of Freud’s theory of the unconscious, the symbolic dimension of experience, and communication stressed by Lacan, Baudrillard, Ricoeur, Habermas and others. Compare Marcuse’s use of Freud with Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 1978)
Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production; Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971)
Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). Moreover, he rejects Freud’s theory of character which is essential to Erich Fromm’s synthesis of Marx and Freud.
See the sources in note 21 above.
Marcuse himself describes these obstacles to freedom as real factors denied by idealist theories of freedom in ‘Freedom and Freud’s Theory of Instincts’.
For an early critique of Freud’s theory of civilization and concept of the primal father, see Wilhelm Reich, ‘The Imposition of Sexual Morality’. Sex-Pol. Discussions of Freud’s theory from anthropological and psychoanalytic perspectives can be found in The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, IV, ed. Warner Muensterberger and Sidney Axelrad (New York: International Universities Press, 1967).
Marcuse periodically refers to the Oedipus complex throughout his writings on Freud but neither discusses it in any detail, nor does he criticize it. Freudians maintain that he does not adequately utilize the Oedipus concept in his theory; see Laplanche, ‘Notes sur Marcuse’, pp. 131ff, and Lipshires, Herbert Marcuse, passim. Axelrad claims that Marcuse misinterprets the Oedipus concept, ‘On Some Uses of Psychoanalysis’, pp. 182ff. For a through assault on the concept of the Oedipus complex, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, AntiOedipus (New York: Viking, 1977).
Wilden, ‘Marcuse and the Freudian Model’, pp. 236ff.
Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung.
See the sources in note 21; Lipshires, Herbert Marcuse and MacIntyre, Marcuse.
Marcuse, EC, pp. 210ff. It could be argued that Marcuse’s concept of Eros is more Platonic than Freudian.
See Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.
For a discussion of Marx’s anthropology and its usefulness for contemporary theory, see my article ‘Karl Marx and Adam Smith’.
Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, and Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy.
See Jacoby, Social Amnesia, and Robinson, for defences of Marcuse’s use of Freud along these lines.
In a sense, Marcuse anticipates the critiques of the over-emphasis within Marxism of labour and productivity later argued by Habermas, Wellmer, Baudrillard and others. His reconstruction of Marxian theories of liberation and socialism will be the focus of Chapter 10, where we shall return to these themes.
See Robert Solomon, The Passions (New York: Doubleday, 1976).
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Kellner, D. (1984). Repression and Liberation: Eros and Civilization. In: Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17583-3_7
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