5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
HERBERT MARCUSE
Marcuse, like Fromm, views psychological and political repression as deeply
interwoven. For Marcuse, Freudian psychoanalysis is relevant for tracing the exercise
of domination upon the inner world of the subject, for understanding how capitalism
and mass culture shape personal desires, and for analysing the possibilities of
human emancipation. Unlike Fromm, however, Marcuse rejects the view that
sociological and historical factors must be added to Freudian theory. Instead,
Marcuse seeks to unfold the liberative potential in Freud’s work from the inside out,
in order to reveal its radical political edge.
Marcuse’s reconceptualization of psychoanalysis seeks to develop the ‘political and
sociological substance’ of Freud’s work (Marcuse, 1956: xii). His analysis proceeds
from an acceptance of some of the core claims of psychoanalysis. These include the
theory of the unconscious, the conflict between the pleasure and reality principles,
the life and death drives, and the view that civilization entails sexual repression.
Marcuse contends, however, that Freud was wrong about the permanent cultural
necessity of psychological repression. Marcuse agrees that all social reproduction
demands a certain level of repression. Yet what Freud did not see, Marcuse argues,
is that capitalism creates a crippling (though impermanent) burden of repression.
From this angle, individuals are in fact adapting to the destructive forces of capitalist
domination, forces that masquerade as the ‘reality principle’.
These provocative ideas are developed by Marcuse in his classic Eros and Civilization
(1956) and Five Lectures (1970). The key to Marcuse’s interpretation of Freud is the
division of repression into ‘basic’ and ‘surplus’. Basic repression refers to that minimum
level of libidinal renunciation deemed necessary for facing social life. What this means, in
short, is that a certain amount of repression underlies the constitution of the ‘socialized
subject’, a subject capable of sustaining the business of social and sexual reproduction.
By contrast, surplus repression refers to the intensification of restraint created in and
through asymmetrical relations of power. Marcuse points to patriarchy (especially in
terms of family relationships) and to the workplace as socio-symbolic fields containing
a surplus of repression. This repressive surplus, says Marcuse, operates through the
‘performance principle’, a culturally specific form of reality structured by the economic
order of capitalism. For Marcuse, the destructive psychological effects of this principle
are highly consequential. ‘Performance’ recasts individuals as mere ‘things’ or ‘objects’,
replaces eroticism with genital sexuality, and fashions a disciplining of the human body
(what Marcuse terms ‘repressive desublimation’) in order to prevent repressed desire
from interfering with capitalist exchange values.