Freudo-Marxism is a philosophical movement that aims to connect the works of Karl Marx and the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. This interdisciplinary field of study began to emerge in the 1920s and 1930s, and it has since influenced many generations of intellectuals.
Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian psychoanalyst and a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud, is considered the father of Freudo-Marxism. Reich's work, "Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis," was published in German and Russian in the bilingual communist theoretical journal Under the Banner of Marxism in 1929. Later, Otto Fenichel wrote an article called "Psychoanalysis as the Core of the Future Dialectical Materialist Psychology," which appeared in Wilhelm Reich's book "Zeitschrift fur Politische Psychologie und Sexualökonomie" ("Journal of Political Psychology and Sexual Economics") in 1934. Erich Fromm, one of the members of the Berlin group of Marxist psychoanalysts, later brought the ideas of Freudo-Marxism to the Frankfurt School.
The Frankfurt School, which arose out of the Institute for Social Research, took on the task of choosing which parts of Marx's thought could help clarify social conditions that Marx himself had never seen. The theories put forward by them were a fusion of Marxist criticism of bourgeois society based on the works of D. Lukács, K. Korsch, A. Gramsci and others, the dialectics of G. Hegel, psychoanalysis of Z. Freud, the concepts of culture and civilization of A. Schopenhauer, F. Nietzsche, O Spengler, the philosophy of I. Kant and others.
One of the famous representatives of Freudo-Marxism from the Frankfurt School is Herbert Marcuse, who wrote the work “Eros and Civilization” (1955). He views history not as a class struggle but as a struggle against the suppression of our instincts. He argues that capitalism prevents a person from achieving a non-repressive society "on the basis of a fundamentally different experience of being, fundamentally different relations between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations." Another well-known representative of Freudo-Marxism from the Frankfurt School is Erich Fromm, who wrote the 1955 book "The Sane Society," which talks about humanistic, democratic socialism. Based primarily on the writings of Karl Marx, Fromm concludes that today's society consists of dehumanizing and bureaucratic social structures that have led to the almost universal contemporary phenomenon of alienation.
Freudo-Marxism has also influenced French psychoanalysts such as Jacques Lacan, whose point of view began to prevail in French psychiatry and psychology. Lacan considered himself a faithful heir to Freud's ideas. Lacan's influence created a new mutual enrichment of Freudian and Marxist ideas.
Louis Althusser, widely regarded as an ideological theorist, has contributed to the development of the concept of ideology based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Althusser, whose most famous essay is "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus: Notes for Research," describes structures and systems that allow us to have a meaningful understanding of ourselves. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression and inevitable - it is impossible to avoid ideology, not to be influenced by it. The distinction between ideology and science or philosophy is not guaranteed once and for all.
In conclusion, Freudo-Marxism is an interdisciplinary field of study that aims to connect the works of Karl Marx and the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. This movement has influenced many generations of intellectuals and has had a significant impact on the fields of politics, psychology, and philosophy.
