1 :: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
A range of psychoanalytic concepts – including repression, the division between
the pleasure principle and the reality principle, the Oedipus complex, and the like
- have proven to be a thorn in the side of political radicals seeking to develop a
critical interpretation of Freud. Freud’s theories, many have argued, are politically
conservative. Marcuse’s genius was to demonstrate why this is not so. Marcuse
argued that political and social terms do not have to be grafted onto psychoanalysis,
since they are already present in Freud’s work. Rather social and political categories
need to be teased out from the core assumptions of Freudian theory. The core of
Marcuse’s radical recasting of Freud’s account of identity lies in his division of
repression into basic and surplus repression, as well as the connecting of the
performance principle to the reality principle. Basic repression refers to that
minimum level of psychological renunciation demanded by collective social life,
in order for the reproduction of order, security and structure. Repression that is
surplus, by contrast, refers to the intensification of self-restraint demanded by
asymmetrical relations of power. Marcuse describes the ‘monogamic-patriarchal’
family, for example, as one cultural form in which surplus repression operates.
Such a repressive surplus, he says, functions according to the ‘performance
principle’, defined essentially as the culture of capitalism. According to Marcuse,
the capitalist performance principle transforms individuals into ‘things’ or ‘objects’;
it replaces eroticism with masculinist genital sexuality; and it demands a disciplining
of the human body (what Marcuse terms ‘repressive desublimiation’) so as to prevent
desire from disrupting the established social order.
Freudianism, then, had re-established that it could be radical rather than reformist.
Politically speaking, Marcuse’s celebrity in the United States – both inside and beyond
the academy – put this radical version of the identity/repression problem at the core of
public political debate. But it was not only in the United States where psychoanalytic
notions of identity as a political force were gaining currency. Europe itself was also
awash with theoretical and political debate about the status of identity, especially in
France – where a very different version of psychoanalysis was developed. The most
influential thinker who influenced debates about identity in this connection is the
controversial French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Like Marcuse, Lacan criticized the
conformist tendencies of much psychoanalytic therapy; he was particularly scathing of
ego psychology, a school of psychoanalysis that he thought denied the powerful and
disturbing dimensions of human sexuality. Also like Marcuse, Lacan privileged the
force of the unconscious in human subjectivity and social relations. Unlike Marcuse,
however, Lacan was pessimistic about the possibilities for transforming identities and
social relations.