What's up with Freud?
What's up with Freud?
Looking for a general Marxist view on Freud.
At first glance, to me everything relating to Freud sounds like pseudoscientific, idealist garbage ... everything that Marx's scientific socialism should be opposed to in principle. Nevertheless there was a Freudo-Marxist school that overlapped with the Frankfurt School, who thought the ideas of Freud and Marx could be married to some extent.
So,
- What was Freud about?
- Was Freud full of shit?
- Is Marxism compatible with psychoanalysis?
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a Freudo-Marxist school that overlapped with the Frankfurt School
The only reason i'm not already smelling the revisionism of that approach is that i just made a very strong and delicious coffee.
Psychology nowadays is an empirical, clinical science that has very little regard for the works of Freud (and Jung as well, who is even more openly esoteric and full of quackery), and i'm glad about them discarding such holdovers. Understanding Freud is still useful in the humanities due to his outsized cultural impact, but that should be understood as an analysis of a deeply unscientific branch of pop culture, not as something that allows you to analyze the workings of the human mind, let alone other people's mental illnesses. When you understand Marxism as a scientific approach towards economic and political theory that changes and adapts with new evidence, it is advisable to disregard Freud's writings, as his theories are not replicable, and have a marked tendency to produce a mysogynist, homophobic and transphobic bias that has led to all kinds of stigmatizing, persecutory concepts like paraphilia theory, a general openness to conversion "therapy" and later outcroppings of academic transphobia like the AGP and tr*nsvestitic fetishism discourses. While Freud himself wasn't outstandingly homophobic for his time and for the psychiatric community back then, he still developed a treatment approach that relies heavily on the therapist enforcing their own biases on their patients, openly encouraging to question and disregard their accounts whenever possible, and this makes Freudian psychotherapy inherently gaslighty and risky for queer, especially trans patients. From first- and especially ample second hand experience within the queer communities i'm active in, i've just heard too many accounts of boundary-violating, invalidating and traumatizing sessions. Psychoanalysis is not up to today's standards of clinical care, and from a philosophocal standpoint is deeply rooted in a universalist liberal idealism, which is inherently at odds with a genuine Marxist approach.
IIRC they are all freudians btw