1 :: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
conceptual terms (repression, unconscious desire, the Oedipus complex and the like)
by which society and politics are evaluated; (2) as a form of thought to be challenged,
deconstructed and analyzed, primarily in terms of its suspect gender, social and
cultural assumptions; and, (3) as a form of thought that contains both insight and
blindness, so that the tensions and paradoxes of psychoanalysis are brought to the fore.
While I cannot do justice here to the full range of psychoanalytic-inspired social
theories of identity, I shall in what follows develop some remarks which focus on the
affective contours of identity when considered through a Freudian lens.
In what sense might Freudianism be said to radicalize our understanding of identity?
In what exact sense does Freud trouble the inherited political terrain of identity
studies? In the aftermath of the Second World War in the United States, during a
period of high consumer affluence, economic self-interest and political cynicism,
Freudianism did not seem an especially promising force for progressive politics.
Indeed, a version of Freudianism had developed in the United States – termed
‘ego-psychology’ – emphasizing the harmony of relations (both descriptive and
normative) between identity and society writ large. This seemed an unlikely
development for a tradition of thought that had uncovered the repressed unconscious,
and fortunately the ideological recasting of Freud at the hands of ego-psychology
was to receive a sustained critique in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1956).
A member of the Frankfurt School who fled Nazi Germany for the United States,
Marcuse developed a radical political interpretation of Freud that had a significant
impact upon those working in the social sciences and humanities, as well as student
activists and sexual liberationists. Marcuse added a novel twist to Freud’s theory of
sexual repression, primarily because he insisted that the so-called sexual revolution
of the 1960s did not seriously threaten the established social order, but was rather
another form of power and domination. Instead of offering true liberation, the sexual
revolution of the 1960s was, in fact, an upshot of the advanced capitalist order.
According to Marcuse, claims for sexual freedom and the liberation of identity
involved, scandalously, the rechanneling of repressed desire into alternative, more
commercial outlets. The demand for freedom had been seduced, indeed transfigured,
by the lure of advertising and glossy commodities, the upshot of which was a
defensive and narcissistic adaptation to the wider world. For Marcuse, this
formulaically commercialism was evident in everything from identity to intimacy, and
also explained the creeping conservatism of psychoanalysis itself. The narcissistic
veneer characterizing contemporary social relations, Marcuse argued, had resulted
in the conservative recasting of Freudian psychoanalysis as ego psychology in the
United States – a brand of therapy in which self-mastery and self-control were
elevated over and above the unconscious and repressed sexuality.