Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the critique of psychological dualism: From dualist repression to the return of the repressed in hysteria and class consciousness

Abstract

This article discusses how the psychic reality is separated from everything else in modern psychology and argues that this separation may be related to capitalism. It also explores how Marx and Freud, as well as later Marxists and Marxist Freudians, have critically examined the psyche/world and psyche/soma dichotomies. Their critique uncovered a kind of groundless dualism, which was denounced as a way of exerting power over the body and world, as a consequence of the manual/intellectual division of labour, and as the dematerialization of subjectivity by repressing and sublimating-idealizing processes. These denunciations make it possible to appreciate how Marxism and psychoanalysis—by arousing class consciousness among the labourers and by making the unconscious conscious in hysteria—allowed symptomatic disclosures of the truth of monism in the faults of a psychological dualistic knowledge.