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TAP0010.1177/0959354318766415Theory & PsychologyPavón-Cuéllar

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Theory & Psychology

Marxism, psychoanalysis, and

1­–21
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0959354318766415
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repression to the return of the

repressed in hysteria and class
consciousness

David Pavón-Cuéllar
Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo

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.

Keywords
dualism, Freudo-Marxism, Marxism, monism, psychoanalysis

I have recently examined a number of contradictions between the field of psychology

and the uncertain common ground of Marxism and psychoanalysis (Pavón-Cuéllar,
2017). Among the most fundamental contradictions is the one between Marxist-
psychoanalytical monism and psychological dualism. Unlike mainstream psychology,

Corresponding author:
David Pavón-Cuéllar, Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Francisco Villa 450, Morelia,
Michoacán, 58110, Mexico.
Email: davidpavoncuellar@gmail.com
2 Theory & Psychology 00(0)

Marxism and psychoanalysis cannot consider spirit/matter, mind/body, and psyche/

world dualities without problematizing, disturbing, and subverting them.
As I will show in this paper, the essential distinction of the object of psychology
through the dualist separation of the psyche from everything else, which defines and
constitutes psychology, has been thoroughly questioned by Karl Marx and Sigmund
Freud, as well as by some Marxists and Marxist-Freudians, who have offered at least
three critical descriptions of psychological dualism: as an historical effect and ideologi-
cal expression of the class division between manual labour and intellectual work (in
Marx & Engels, 1846/2014); as the result of a process of repression, sublimation, and
idealization (in Freud, 1921/1998f, and Theodor Adorno, 1966/1986); and as a form of
mental or spiritual domination, oppression, and possession of being, the truth, and the
body (in Oswald de Andrade, 1928/2006, and René Crevel, 1932/1966). After presenting
these descriptions, I will compare and link them to display how Marxism and psychoa-
nalysis allowed two correlative symptomatic disclosures of the truth of monism in the
faults of the dualistic knowledge that has been traditionally split between the dominant
and the dominated. I will demonstrate, on the one hand, how Freud’s elucidation of hys-
teria discovered the symptomatic return of the repressed soma in the bourgeois psyche,
the coming back of the corporeal element in spiritual totality, the reminding of the sexual
drive in amorous feeling; and on the other hand, how Marx’s clarification of class con-
sciousness revealed the return of the repressed psychic life, the reincorporation of the
mind and its intellectual work, and of the ideal or spiritual world, in proletarians whose
existence was completely confined to the material world and reduced to their somatic
subsistence, to their muscles and their manual labour.
I will finally explain how Marx’s and Freud’s symptomatic disclosures of monism
have been reactivated in diverse Marxist and Marxist-Freudian theoretical, practical, and
practical–theoretical strategies to overcome dualism and its psyche/world, mind/body,
and ideal/material dichotomies. These strategies include: the spontaneous prefiguring
materialist movement towards idealism and self-determination of the masses (Rosa
Luxembourg, 1918/1978); the reconceptualization of materialism as a consideration of
the ideal-material totality (György Lukács, 1923/1985; Karl Korsch, 1923/1977; and
Anton Pannekoek, 1938/1973); the recognition of the psychic basis or core of the socio-
economic world (Alfred Adler, 1909/1979; Siegfried Bernfeld, 1926/1972; Wilhelm
Reich, 1933/1973; Otto Fenichel, 1934/1972; and Jean Audard, 1933/1989); the recon-
stitution of an ontological-matriarchal communist logic of being instead of the economic-
patriarchal classist logic of having (Oswald de Andrade, 1928/2006, and Erich Fromm,
1934/1991); the destruction of walls between reality and madness or dreams (surrealism
and institutional psychotherapy); the theoretical practice of class struggle in an ideologi-
cal field that immanently presents and overdetermines its material basis (Louis Althusser,
1964/2005); the assumption of a materialism of the idea (Alain Badiou, 1988/2007); and
the confusion between form and content, appearance and essence (Slavoj Žižek, 1989).

Psychology and psychological dualism

Biology takes the existence of its object—life, bios—for granted. Likewise, the exist-
ence of demons or beliefs about demons is presupposed by their systematic study in
Pavón-Cuéllar 3

demonology. The same holds true for other sciences, including psychology, which must
assume that there is a psyche somewhere in the world.
Without a psyche, why should we have psychological discourse, a discourse about
the psyche? The need for psychology can only be justified if the reality of its object
is accepted. This psychic reality can take the form of a substance, a force (or kind of
life), a parallel world, an independent human sphere, a mechanism, a functional sys-
tem, a process (or arrangement of processes), a faculty (or set of faculties), etc. In
any case, if we need psychology, it is because we assume the psyche to be a real
thing.
Now, if the psyche is a real thing, this implies that it can be distinguished from eve-
rything else, including the body or the soma, society, and the world, as well as the
environment or the physical or physiological nature. This distinction of the psyche is
fundamental to the acceptance and recognition of a distinct psychological science.
Psychology and physiology exist as such, as two different scientific specialties, because
there are two distinct objects, the psyche and the physei, which cannot be confused with
each other. Likewise, psychology and sociology are two distinct human sciences
because they have two distinguishable objects, the psychic and the social. If the object
of psychology were confused with the objects of physiology or sociology, then one
could not pursue one science without pursuing the others, implying that a psychological
science is unnecessary.
Psychology is needed because its object is clearly and sharply distinguished from
everything else. This distinction involves a dualist representation of reality split into the
realms of the psyche and soma, spirit and matter, mind and body, res cogitans and res
extensa, cognition or behaviour and the environment, subjective experience and objec-
tive reality, the individual inner world and the social outer world, etc. Such dualisms are
inseparable from psychology and act as frameworks for the field. Psychology is therefore
fundamentally related to the dualist philosophical tradition beginning with Plato (trans.
1975) up to David Chalmers (1996) through Descartes (1637/2014) and others (e.g.,
Leibniz, 1720/1995).
Western dualism was robust and vigorous until the 17th century, but it weakened and
lost its ground during the 18th-century enlightenment (Cassirer, 1932/1993). Then, dur-
ing the 19th and 20th centuries, it was largely rejected by philosophy and science
(Wozniak, 1992). Yet, at that juncture, dualism was able to take refuge in the emerging
psychological specialty. Psychology was, from the beginning, a dualist fortress in a
rather monist moment.

Capitalism, dualism, individualism, and psychologism

As pointed out by Carlos Pérez Soto (2009), the modern psychological science was a
reaction against the spiritual consequences of history and the development of capitalism.
The professional discipline and academic scientific specialty of psychology was a defen-
sive reaction against the loss of the autonomous conscious individual sphere, which was
first promoted and later threatened by capitalism. Similarly, although the capitalist sys-
tem was closely related to the psychological dualist perspective, this perspective has
been endangered by capitalism over time.
4 Theory & Psychology 00(0)

My specific hypothesis derives from the general argument that establishes an essen-
tial and not circumstantial connection between psychology and capitalism, capitalism
conceived, not simply as the status quo (e.g., Prilleltensky, 1994), but in its specificity,
as an economic system different from any other (e.g., Parker, 2007). From a dialectical
and historical perspective, this connection is necessarily contradictory and ever-chang-
ing. It is true that the psychological realm, with its intrinsic dualism and individualism,
was clearly and constantly favoured and stimulated by capitalism from the beginning,
even before psychology emerged as an independent professional discipline and aca-
demic scientific specialty. The complicity between the psyche and the capital could be
dated to the merchant capitalism of the 16–19th centuries, when primitive accumula-
tion as well as colonization and other forms of expansion of capitalism involved a sort
of “psychologization” or “internalization of the psyche” (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2016).
However, since the 19th and 20th centuries, the vertiginous development of capitalism
triggered processes of massification, alienation, reification, deindividualization, and
annihilation of the inner world, inexorably affecting the dualist and individualist bour-
geois orientations of capitalism itself. Further, when both dualism and individualism
were in crisis, the independent professional discipline and academic scientific spe-
cialty of psychology appeared as a dualist-individualist defence against the explosion
of the individual inner world, against the ensuing monist reincorporation of the mind
into the brain, matter, mass culture, advanced society, or the all-encompassing
system.
The dissolution of the psychic reality was logically repressed by the defensive psy-
chological science of the psyche. But this repressive gesture has also been performed by
popular, social, non-scientific psychologization. Society was most “psychological” when
the psyche was most endangered. This danger has not been averted, but only forgotten,
ignored, and concealed by psychologization. Yet, what was thus repressed returned
through different symptoms, such as the subversive ones encountered in Marxism and
psychoanalysis. Before examining these returns of monism, it is important to note that
they are still common, though not necessarily subversive. A well-known example (and as
promising as it is disappointing) is the neurologization that both presupposes and neu-
tralizes psychologization by dissolving the psyche into a soma represented in the same
way as the object of psychology (De Vos, 2016).
A significantly more interesting current dissolution of the psyche, consistent with
the psychoanalytic tradition, is the British emergent field of Psychosocial Studies,
which opposes the separation of “out-there” and “in-here,” assuming that neither the
social nor the psychological have “an essence apart from the other” (Frosh, 2003, pp.
1553–1555), and engages with a “space that is neither ‘psycho’ nor ‘social,’ and is
definitely not both, but is something else again” (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008, p. 350).
Once again, there is a defensive dualist reaction against such a symptomatic monist
revelation. This psychological-psychologizing reaction can be found in the hyphenated
Psycho-Social Studies with their insistence on “the preservation of the difference
between the psycho- and the social,” between “the inner and outer, private and public,
and so on” (Hoggett, 2008, pp. 382–383). By preserving the difference, we can at least
forget the crisis that blurs the difference, the capitalist crisis of the dualist and indi-
vidualist ideologies of capitalism.
Pavón-Cuéllar 5

Marxism, psychoanalysis, and the crisis of psychological

dualism
The crisis of dualism and individualism is, at least in part, a result of the modern oblitera-
tion of the individual’s inner world. It is a consequence of the social destruction of the
psyche as a separate sphere that could be dualistically distinguished from the outer world.
This destruction may be explained by different circumstances. Many of them have to do
with capitalist production and division of labour, and have been identified by Marx and
Engels in some of their works, such as Engels’ Condition of the Working Class in England
(1845/1980), Marx’s Paris Manuscripts (1844/1997), the Grundrisse (1858/2009b), the
Manuscripts on Technology (1863/1980), and The Capital (1867/2008), including the
unpublished chapter six (1866/2009a). In these works, Marx and Engels show how sub-
jects lose their individual internal being when their existence is alienated from them;
when their life is entirely reified, commodified, and exploited as labour force; and when
they become simple appendages of the machine, links of the productive chain, variable
components of the capital, organs of the collective industrial organism, and objects of
subjectified, fetishized commodities.
Marxist thinkers—György Lukács (1923/1985) in Hungary, Joseph Gabel (1962) in
France, and José Revueltas (1976) in Mexico, among others—have explored the internal
connections between reification, alienation from the subject, and fetishism of commodi-
ties. These three processes appear to be three moments of the same process of loss of the
individual psychic inner world. What is “alienated” from the subject and ceases to be a
person and becomes a thing is not unrelated to what is “fetishized” in the commodified
object and placed outside in “personified” things (Marx, 1866/2009a, pp. 35–36). It is
not by chance that capitalism causes fetishized commodities to acquire a kind of soul, an
imaginary internal depth, something that is lacking and therefore becomes desirable for
alienated people who are—through reification—collectively turned into an external,
superficial, bi-dimensional set of things without a soul, body parts, interdependent roles,
and organized tasks. Each psyche thus explodes in the system’s functions.
Finally, instead of each person’s individual inner world, there is only the impersonal,
external, and transindividual machine of the capitalist system. This global machine
expels any remaining interiority and what was left of the individual psyche through pro-
cesses of “adaptation,” “massification,” “instrumentalization,” “mechanization,” “stand-
ardization,” and “desublimation,” which are well described by Marxist authors such as
Antonio Gramsci (1932/1986a, pp. 153–154), Wilhelm Reich (1933/1973, pp. 30–47),
Max Horkheimer (1946/2007, pp. 95–155), and Herbert Marcuse (1964/2010, pp. 41–
55, 96–108), who, revealingly, linked their descriptions in one way or another with the
Freudian representation of a torn and exploded psyche.
Among the many reasons why Marxists turned to Freud between the 1920s and 1960s
was the conviction that he gave an accurate account of what was happening with subjec-
tivity in advanced capitalism. The modern crisis of the individual psyche was realisti-
cally reflected in some of Freud’s ideas. These include the internal tearing of the psyche,
subjectivity conceived as an external knotting of masses, the alienated origin and founda-
tion of identity, the id as an alien core of the ego, the superficiality of consciousness, and
the unconscious character of any mental depth (Freud, 1921/1998f, 1923/1998c).
6 Theory & Psychology 00(0)

Freudian ideas make sense in our times as they recall common feelings of hypnotic
suggestion, incomprehension, blankness, uncanniness, unconsciousness, estrangement,
scattering, breakup, and subjective inner conflicts. There is, then, a correspondence
between a concrete modern experience and psychoanalytical discourse. This may be
explained both by the influence of psychoanalysis on modern culture (Parker, 1997) and
by the effect of modern culture on psychoanalysis, that is, by the ideological character of
psychoanalysis: its historical situation and cultural basis (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2014).
As Valentin Voloshinov (1927/1999) noted, Freud’s theory gives a faithful account of
what the inner world has become as a deployment of an “ideological struggle” in modern
capitalism (pp. 143–166). What is expressed in Freudian psychoanalysis would not be
the ahistorical universal essence of the psyche, but rather its historical crisis in the
Western world. In the context of the debates on the scope of psychoanalysis in human
culture and history, this idea converges with Malinowski’s (1927/2001) relativist particu-
larism and diverges from the absolutist universalism of Jones (1925) and Róheim (1950).

Marxism, psychoanalysis, and their discordances with

psychology
Despite Jones, Roheim, and others, psychoanalysis (which is not exactly a general psy-
chological model) coincides with Marxism by exposing, not the nature of the human
inner world, but a historical crisis of the psyche, a crisis against which psychology reacts.
It goes without saying that the psychological reactive defence against the crisis is not
associated with the Marxist-psychoanalytical revelation, clarification, and explanation of
the crisis. From this point of view, there would be no reason for psychology to cross
paths with Marxism and psychoanalysis. However, Marx, Freud, and some of their fol-
lowers were not only witnesses of their time; not only did they elucidate the crisis of both
the psyche and mind/body duality, but they also took part in this crisis by challenging
psychology and its dualism.
The dualist psychological perspective had to be challenged because it was, and still is,
deeply discordant with both Marxism and psychoanalysis, both of which have a strangely
parallel monist orientation, as first observed by Luria (1925/2002), then by the surrealists
(e.g., Crevel, 1932/1966), and finally by Lacan (1969/2006). This is just one crucial rea-
son, among others, why Marx, Freud, and their loyal and reliable followers did not develop
a system of psychology in the strict sense. Freudian and Marxist psychologies were indeed
either not really psychological or not really Marxist or Freudian (Pavón-Cuéllar, 2017).
Freudian psychological approaches, such as ego-psychology, can be regarded as a
“betrayal,” a “castration,” and a “repression” of psychoanalysis, as has been pointed out,
respectively, by Jacques Lacan (1966/1969, p. 105), Kostas Axelos (1970/1980, p. 105),
and Russell Jacoby (1983, p. 23). The same can be said of self-psychology and other
similar approaches. The psychologization of psychoanalysis entailed its erosion and
annihilation. Conversely, the emphasis on preserving the Freudian legacy was usually
accompanied by a non-psychological or anti-psychological orientation, as in the Lacanian
approach, which presented itself as “metapsychological,” that is, located “beyond psy-
chology” (Lacan, 1954/1998, p. 259).
Pavón-Cuéllar 7

As for Marxist psychologies, I have tried to demonstrate how they are unavoidably
trapped in two opposite situations (for details, see Pavón-Cuéllar, 2017, Chapter 5).
Sometimes their Marxism is questionable, as in Lev Vygotsky, Sergey Rubinstein, and
Klaus Holzkamp, who, regardless, did not pretend to offer a system of Marxist psychol-
ogy. At other times, psychological theories were undoubtedly Marxist, but were not
really “psychologies”: they were not discourses or sciences of the psyche, and did not
separate this psyche from everything else, but assimilated it to broader realities, such as
physical and physiological realities in Vladimir Bekhterev (1917/1933) and Fedor
Maiorov (see Todes, 2014), the human totality in Konstantin Kornilov (1930), activity in
Aleksei Leontiev (1978/1984), dramatic experience in Georges Politzer (1928/1974),
history in Ignace Meyerson (1948), biology and sociology in Henri Wallon (1940/1968),
and the global phenomenon of personality in Lucien Sève (1969/1989). Consequently,
Marxism transformed psychology into something else, such as physiology, reflexology,
reactology, anthropology, an articulation of biology and sociology, history, literature,
theory of personality, or theory of activity.

Critiques of psychology
By transforming psychology into something completely different from psychology,
Marxism broke with psychology without openly breaking with it. However, Marxists
also overtly and repeatedly abandoned psychology, offering non-psychologically and
even anti-psychologically oriented theories reminiscent of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
These theories frequently stated their reasons for abandoning psychology and offered an
explicit critical approach to the psychological dualist perspective.
Psychology was suspected of being an idealist doctrine and a bourgeois science in
Marxism-Leninism, especially in the Soviet-Stalinist tradition and in Trotsky’s early
works (e.g., 1925/2004). Even in Western Marxism, Lukács (1923/1985) dissolved the
psyche into total reality, Korsch (1923/1977) insisted on studying this totality and
rejected all specialized sciences, and Pannekoek (1938/1973) resituated the psyche in the
outer world and in society, not inside the individual. With regard to French structuralism,
Louis Althusser and his followers unanimously condemned psychology either as a kind
of ideology or as the connexion between the subject and ideological formations (for
details, see Pavón-Cuéllar, 2017, Chapter 7).
Marxism frequently used psychoanalysis to critique psychology, as can be observed
in the works of Althusser (1963/1996a, 1964/1996b) and Althusserians such as Michel
Pêcheux (under the pseudonym of Thomas Herbert, 1966) and Michel Tort (1970) in
France, as well as Carlos Sastre (1974) and Néstor Braunstein (Braunstein, Pasternac,
Benedito, & Saal, 1975/2006) in Argentina and Mexico, respectively, who resorted espe-
cially to the Lacanian anti-psychological reading of Freud. Before that, psychology was
also questioned by André Breton, René Crevel, and other Marxist Freudians in French
Surrealism, and by German and Soviet Freudo-Marxists such as Aleksandr Luria,
Wilhelm Reich, and Siegfried Bernfeld (for details, see Pavón-Cuéllar, 2017, Chapter 6).
In all cases, the critiques of psychology seem to express the historical crisis of the psyche
and respond to the psychological defensive reaction against this crisis.
8 Theory & Psychology 00(0)

Psychological dualism as a result of class division

It is not possible to review here the great variety of Marxist, Freudian, and Freudian-
Marxist critiques of psychology. I will focus on certain critical approaches to the dualist
psychological separation of the psyche from everything else. As previously noted, this
fundamental dualism of psychology has been critically described in at least three ways:
as an effect and expression of class division, as the outcome of repression, and as a form
of domination.
Marx and Engels were the first to describe psychological dualism as resulting from
class division. They proposed a causal chain where class division leads to a separation of
intellectual work—a privilege of the dominant class—and manual labour, which is
imposed onto the dominated class. The separation of those who work with their mind
from those who work with their body implies a differentiation of the mind from the body,
the psyche from the soma, and the object of psychology from everything else (Engels,
1876/1986a; Marx & Engels, 1846/2014). Psychological dualism would then result from
division of labour, which results, in turn, from class division.
The dominant class monopolizes the mental activities and experiences of reflection,
deliberation, motivation, will, decision giving, and planning, and thus monopolizes the
mind and its faculties, the object of psychology, the psychic sphere, which thus tends to
separate from everything else, particularly the material world and the corporeal sphere.
Therefore, this world and this sphere, to which the dominated class is condemned,
becomes the great “Other” of psychology, while the homo psychologicus with his “obses-
sional attempts at mastery” and “obsessive need for control and predictability,” the para-
digmatic obsessional who belongs to the dominant class, “becomes an Other himself, a
robot-like creature, seemingly drained of desire” (Salecl, 2006, p. 97). The desiring body
and its worldly objects vanish behind the psyche. The psychological realm—intrinsic to
the power of the dominant class—turns into a Lacanian metalanguage: Other of the
Other, a supposedly internal world that pretends to be different and separated from eve-
rything else. But this world does not exist as such. Lacan’s (1960/1999b) conviction is
that “there is no metalanguage,” no “Other of the Other” (p. 293).
There is only the Other, one language, the exteriority of the unconscious, the external
relational world, a historical and socio-economic reality, the material and corporeal
domain, which embraces its mental or psychic sphere. This is recognized by consequent
Marxists, who can therefore call themselves “monist materialists,” as they only accept
the existence of the materiality of everything from which psychology abstracts the psy-
che (Plekhanov, 1895/1956).

Psychological dualism as a result of repression

Freud (1914/1998d, 1921/1998f) conceived of the abstraction of the psychic or mental
sphere from the body and the world as a process of sublimation (of bodily drives) and
idealization (of worldly objects). In Leon Trotsky’s (1923) reading of Freud, this process
produces the psyche, which is a sublimated superstructure that rests on a material and
corporeal base. The body and the world must be abstracted, respectively sublimated, and
idealized, to be transformed into the psyche. However, according to Freud (1927/1998b),
Pavón-Cuéllar 9

this transformation also involves repression. Although repression and sublimation are
usually considered independent and mutually exclusive processes, the truth is they are
inextricably linked to each other.
Cultural work rests on the “renunciation of drive” (Freud, 1927/1998b, p. 7), while
sublimation, even allowing a satisfaction without repression, presupposes a “suffoca-
tion” of sexuality (1908/1998e, pp. 168–169) and a “subtraction” of “psychic energy”
from “sexual life” (1930/1998a, p. 101). And the most important thing: sublimation
always accompanies idealization, which demands “the repression of sensual aspirations”
(1921/1998f, p. 106), of “drives” that are incompatible with “cultural representations”
(1914/1998d, pp. 90–91).
In Freudian theory, bodily drives and their worldly objects must be repressed to some
degree for sublimation and idealization to be possible. According to Freud, there cannot
be “pure” sublimation without repression, as Freudo-Marxists such as Vera Schmidt
(1924/1979) have instead proposed. Therefore, if the psyche results from sublimation, it
presupposes repression.
There is a repressive process that underlies psychic life. There is no psyche without
the repression of the body and world. Theodor Adorno (1966/1986) emphasizes this
when he describes psychology as a product of repression. The repressed outer world
gives place to the inner world. Internalization also means the repression of externality:
the destruction of that which resists psychologization, which cannot become conscious,
and which cannot be personalized, humanized, assimilated, understood, conceived, felt,
thought, or spoken. In Lacanian terms, the fundamental negative production of the real,
which amounts to its simultaneous generation and suppression, allows both the symbolic
and imaginary to exist. The symbol or word with its imagined mental meaning is the
“death” of the signified “thing” (Lacan, 1953/1999a, p. 317). The corporeal instinct dis-
appears with the appearance of drives and signifiers, i.e., what misrepresents it in lan-
guage, in the body, and the psyche.

Psychological dualism as a result of domination

The real cannot be represented without being repressed. This can be observed at different
levels. For instance, how can an individual describe an experience without annihilating
an indescribable part of it? Is not repression of the body inseparable from its representa-
tion? Similarly, Engels (1878/1986b) and Lenin (1920/1974b) understood that the State
of the dominant class cannot represent the whole society without repressing the domi-
nated class. In fact, class domination embraces social repression by the State.
Although social repression and sexual repression are different phenomena, psychoa-
nalysis purports that the two are inextricably linked. Freud (1927/1998b) assimilated the
concepts of social and sexual repression when he stated that the popular masses, unlike
the cultivated elites, were not disposed to repress their drives on their own and therefore
needed repressive State apparatuses. Consequently, the external social repression of the
dominated class reproduces the internal sexual repression by each subject in the domi-
nant class.
According to Freud, it is as if the same repressive process both dissociates society
between the dominant and dominated classes and divides individuals between their
10 Theory & Psychology 00(0)

repressed corporeal drives and repressive mental ideal, their body and mind, the object
of physiology and of psychology. It might be said, therefore, that the object of psychol-
ogy resides in one half of the divided individual, while the object of psychoanalysis is the
division of the individual itself, which is inseparable from the dissociation of society,
indistinguishable from the subject itself (who divides the individual and dissociates soci-
ety). This has been eloquently formulated by Lacan (1953/1999a) when he explains how
the subject “introduces division into the individual, as well as into the collectivity that is
his equivalent” (p. 291).
Both society and individuality are torn by the division that constitutes the subject.
This division seems to be the same in both cases. For example, in the 19th century, the
bourgeois individual suffers internally from the same subjective difference that exter-
nally distinguishes between the bourgeoisie and proletariat in society. Even secondary/
derived social dissociations between civil society and the political state or between the
exploitative system and its oppressive institutions correspond to the individual division
between a real subjectivity and its citizenship or symbolic national identity (Marx,
1843/1982). Forms and expressions of class struggle, including the external conflict
between police officers and persecuted rebels, underlie the internal conflict between the
superego and the id. The bourgeois repression of drives cannot be easily distinguished
from the modern political repression of masses.
The clandestine social underground may correspond to the unconscious for the bour-
geoisie. This unconscious appears to be a privilege of the dominant class. Antonio
Gramsci (1935/1986b) understood this very well, stating that “the unconscious begins
only after an income of so many tens of thousands of lire” (p. 241).
If we follow Gramsci’s (1935/1986b) reflexion, the bourgeoisie may need a psycho-
analyst to deal with its repressive ideal, while the working class only needs the Party and
the Union to deal with the repressive forces of the bourgeoisie. That is, the worker is
externally repressed by the capitalist and/or the dominant class, while the capitalist is
internally repressed by himself. However, in both cases, repression is inseparable from
domination, and what represses is what dominates. The worker is both dominated and
repressed by the capitalist. In the case of the capitalist, the subject is repressed by the
same capital that dominates him, the same capital that is embodied by him (Marx,
1867/2008).
Marx (1866/2009a) was aware that capital cannot be embodied in the subject without
dominating the subject, repressing his/her body, and becoming his/her soul, his/her psy-
che or mental sphere (therefore abstracted from his/her corporeal sphere). This repres-
sive abstraction of the psyche from the body allows the domination of the body by the
psyche, which in turn accomplishes the domination of the subject by capital. This was
well understood by the French surrealist René Crevel (1932/1966) and his Brazilian
contemporary Oswald de Andrade (1928/2006), who observed that the dualist division of
mind/body obeys a logic of domination. According to them, the psyche is the presence of
the dominant power in the subject; that is, we divide ourselves in mind and body to domi-
nate ourselves as bodies; or, more precisely, the system represses our body and abstracts
our psyche from our repressed body with the aim of becoming our psyche and dominat-
ing our body.
Pavón-Cuéllar 11

The return of the repressed in hysteria and class

consciousness
The political strategy of domination governs and frames the psychological dualist divi-
sion. This division corresponds to the tactic of “divide in order to rule” (Crevel, 1932/1966,
p. 67). The system divides the individual into mind and body to possess the mind and
exploit the body: to possess feelings and thoughts, and exploit performances and activi-
ties; and to possess the object of psychology, and exploit all that remains of the human
being. Thus, in the Lacanian reading of Marx, the capital obtains a symbolic surplus value
by exploiting the material existence of those who are possessed through the loss of their
plus-de-jouir (Lacan, 1970/1991b). This also occurs on a larger social scale in which capi-
talism, for instance, possesses its spokesmen and exploits its arms; possesses the white-
collar workers and exploits the blue-collar workers; possesses the intellectuals, the
bureaucrats, the publicists, and other ideological agents, and exploits the others.
Thus, as we have seen, Marx and Marxists have understood that the logic of domination
underlies the separation between intellectual work and manual labour. This division of
labour—inseparable from the mind/body dualism—is a class division of the dominant and
dominated classes. The dominated class are the people, the popular body of society, which
is material and corporeal; while the dominant class becomes predominantly psychic, men-
tal, or spiritual, and traditionally appears as the head of the popular body. However, as
pointed out by Gramsci (1935/1986b), this head has a body of its own. The bourgeois body
is repressed, but it exists. Therefore, in Gramsci, those belonging to the dominant class
experience an internal division between their repressed body and their repressing psyche,
their corporeal drives and their mental ideals. This begs the question: why would the inter-
nal division not apply to those belonging to the dominated class? Why are the workers not
as divided as the bourgeois? After all, manual workers are not only their bodies, hands, and
arms. They also have an intellect, mind, and spirit that have been oppressed and repressed
by the capitalist system rather than supressed. Therefore, manual workers have a repressed
psyche of their own, just as the bourgeois have a repressed body of their own.
If Freud revealed how the body is repressed from the bourgeois psyche, Marx exposed
how the psyche is repressed from the proletarian body. Both discoveries of repression
prepared the terrain for the symptomatic return of the repressed. Adler (1909/1979) rec-
ognized (very early) that Marx’s rise of class consciousness represents the reincorpora-
tion of the repressed mental element into the proletarian corporeal sphere. Likewise,
Freud’s transformation of the unconscious into consciousness represents the sympto-
matic return of the repressed corporeal element into the bourgeois mental sphere. This is
how Marxism and psychoanalysis allow two correlative disclosures of monistic truth in
the faults of dualistic knowledge distributed between the dominant and dominated. On
the one hand, Freud’s elucidation of hysteria discovered the return of the repressed soma
in the bourgeois psyche, of the corporeal element in spiritual totality, and of the sexual
drive in amorous feeling. On the other hand, Marx’s clarification of class consciousness
revealed the return of repressed psychic life, and the mind and its intellectual work in
proletarians, whose existence was completely reduced to their somatic subsistence, their
muscles, and manual labour.
12 Theory & Psychology 00(0)

Marxism and psychoanalysis have an intrinsic monist predisposition. While they

often fall into different theoretical forms of dualism, their practical orientation is towards
monism. Moreover, their monist aspirations do not contradict their dualist descriptions.
This was perfectly understood by Adorno (1966/1986), who pointed out how the torn
reality demands not a monist account, but rather a necessarily dualist denunciation of
dualism, understood as the best struggle for monism.

Theoretical struggle for monism

In the Marxist tradition, the struggle for monism is fundamentally theoretical; for exam-
ple, in the reconceptualization of materialism as a consideration of ideal/material totality
in the Western Marxist approaches of Lukács (1923/1985), Korsch (1923/1977), and
Pannekoek (1938/1973). However, as judiciously noted by Plekhanov (1907/1967) and
Lenin (1916/1974a), the Marxist materialist-monist theoretical work is inseparable from
a social and political struggle for communism. This struggle also has an idealist-monist
orientation towards a dematerialized ideal space, as in Rosa Luxemburg’s (1918/1978)
reflections about a spontaneous prefiguration of idealism and self-determination of the
masses. The prefiguring movement, as conceived by Luxemburg, should move from the
old capitalist material base, with its class society, its dualist superstructure, and unavoid-
able spontaneity of the masses, to the new communist ideal base, with its classless soci-
ety, its monist superstructure, and necessary consciousness of all people.
Communism, as conceived by Rosa Luxemburg (1918/1978), represents the triumph
of idealist philosophy, as well as overcoming the division of the individual and the dis-
sociation of society. Once this is completed, there should be no need either for a psycho-
logical science of the psychic half of the divided individual or for a psychoanalytical
approach to the division itself, since the division will have been overcome. Without the
divided subject of class society, why should we need a couch? It would then be con-
firmed that psychoanalysis is inseparable from the capitalist logic that caused the spe-
cific subjective division discovered by Freud (see Lacan, 1969/2006). However,
regardless of its specific manifestations, the divided subject seems to be the general
unavoidable condition of the human being in the cultural symbolic system (see Lacan,
1963/2004). Maybe communism will get rid of this condition, but known cultures, from
antiquity to the present, have always involved class society and the division of the sub-
ject. And, while there is still this division, its treatment by something akin to psychoa-
nalysis will be needed. In fact, the psychoanalytical approach has often been articulated
in Marxist theoretical and practical strategies for dealing with this division and the
resulting dualist conceptions.
Some strategies of the Freudo-Marxists are based on the monist assumption of a psy-
chic underpinning or core of the non-psychic socioeconomic world. In the 1920s and
1930s, Siegfried Bernfeld (1926/1972) and Jean Audard (1933/1989), just like Alfred
Adler (1909/1979) before them, considered capitalism to be internally determined,
organized, and animated by our sexual and aggressive drives. By unveiling these drives,
Freud has revealed the psychic basis of the economic basis studied by Marx.
Considering that forces and relations of production rest on unconscious drives is not
necessarily a form of psychologization, as Reich (1933/1973, 1934/1989) believed. We
Pavón-Cuéllar 13

may well suppose that these drives are not inside us, but around us, behind and beyond
the facade of capitalism. We may even recognize that the capitalist system produces
them. From this perspective, it is possible to see our drives operating everywhere in the
system and not only in the narrow sphere studied by psychology. This, for me, truly cor-
responds to a real experience. We stumble upon our most intimate drives at every step;
they still push and pull us from inside, but they also appear as the most radical exteriority,
outside the psychological sphere. Therefore, psychology cannot delve into our deepest
intimacy. Paradoxically, this intimacy is the most exterior, that is, the economic structure,
the capitalist system with its drives, which are ours. Our most intimate thirst for wealth,
for instance, is the most exterior capital’s accumulation tendency (Marx, 1867/2008).
This is exactly what Lacan (1960/1986) describes as “extimacy” (pp. 65–167).
Just as Augustine’s intimum cordis or most intimate core of the believer lay in the
external place of God, so the deepest core of each subject lies in the external place of
capitalism, at least from the point of view of Audard (1933/1989) and Bernfeld
(1926/1972). This Freudo-Marxist perspective is radically monist, as it finds the interior
in the exterior and the exterior in the interior: the psyche in the heart of economy, and
economy in the centre of the psyche. However, for Bernfeld, such a psyche—which still
is the subject field of psychoanalysis—is not the object of psychology anymore: psychol-
ogy studies the superstructural thoughts and emotions produced by capitalism, while
psychoanalysis deals with the basic drives underlying capitalism. Although these drives
are not psychological objects in the strict sense, Wilhelm Reich (1933/1973, 1934/1989)
conceives them as such, and therefore imagines that Bernfeld psychologizes economy,
which would be anathema to Freudo-Marxism. Another Freudo-Marxist, Otto Fenichel
(1934/1972), tried to reconcile Reich and Bernfeld by proposing a complex monist logic
where the psyche did not necessarily correspond to the psychological sphere of the inner
world separated from everything else, but it was simultaneously outside the subject, a
superstructure based on economy, and inside the subject, the very base of economy.
Thus, for Fenichel, the inside and outside is the same side twisting itself in a kind of
Lacanian Moebius strip.

Practical struggle for monism

Instead of explaining the duality interior/exterior with a topological twist, Erich Fromm
(1934/1991), Oswald de Andrade (1950/1981), and others from the 1930s onwards have
used Marx’s and Freud’s theories of sexual distinctions and relations. Andrade’s views
are especially suggestive and provocative: the dualist separation of the inner world from
the outer world is founded on private property, the ownership of ourselves as individuals,
and the economic-patriarchal classist logic of having, while the monist continuity
between the interior and exterior is asserted on the basis of the ontological-matriarchal
communist logic of being.
Andrade understood that the struggle for communism should be a struggle for the
explosion of psychological interiority and for restoration of the continuity between the
inner and outer world. This perspective appears to have been drawn from the surrealists,
who also promoted a restoration of interior–exterior continuity, resulting in the abolition
of psychology through the destruction of walls between reality and the inner world of
14 Theory & Psychology 00(0)

dreams and madness. Such destruction was not only explicitly justified on Marxist and
Freudian grounds by André Breton (1932/1955) and René Crevel (1932/1966), but was
also tentatively accomplished in practice through various artistic experiences of surreal-
ism, such as Tristan Tzara’s (1935/1981) poetic “Daydreaming,” understood as an “activ-
ity of all” and not as “means of expression” monopolized by professional poets (pp.
156–168, 270–276).
It was under the influence of surrealism that the destruction of walls was practically
performed at the Psychiatric Hospital of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole, where Societé du
Gévaudan members, such as psychiatrist François Tosquelles, proposed institutional
therapy to treat a madness that was not situated in the psychological sphere of the inner
world of individuals suffering from mental illness, but in the outer world of institutions,
society, and history (Tosquelles, 1991, 1992). Like surrealist artistic experiences, the
practical project of institutional therapy was inspired by Marxist and Freudian theories,
and accompanied by a clearly monist theoretical reflection. Nevertheless, this split of
theory and practice involved the subsistence of a dualist division that still preserved what
was to be destroyed.

Practical–theoretical struggle for monism

Inseparable from psychological dualism, the theory/practice dichotomy was problema-
tized and challenged by Louis Althusser through monist notions such as the theoretical
practice. Here, theory is understood as a practice performed in a scientific-ideological
field that overdetermines its determining material basis of class struggle and represents
it by presenting its absence (Althusser, 1968/1998, 1964/2005). This monism derives
from Althusser’s Spinozism, Marxism, and Leninism, and is consistent with his adoption
of the psychoanalytical epistemological break with psychological ideological dualism
(1963/1996a, 1964/1996b). The struggle against psychology is part of the struggle for
communism, which must be not only a struggle for monism, but a monist struggle.
Alain Badiou critically departs from Althusserianism and reconceptualizes the practi-
cal–theoretical struggle in a radically new monist way: through the materialist concep-
tion of the material ideological forces, during his early Maoist years (Badiou, 1976/2012);
and through his materialism of an idea that subjectifies a relation between a singular
experience and a representation of history, in his mature years (1988/2007). Both mate-
rialisms de-psychologize, exteriorize, and politicize the ideal-ideological. The idea of
communism only subsists through the political, exterior, and material form of evidenced,
actual, and clearly non-psychological fidelity to an event such as La Commune, the
October Revolution, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Badiou, 2009). This material
form allows the perpetuation of its ideal content. However, the two are distinct: the idea
is understood as a hypothesis and must be distinguished from its possibility and histori-
cal realization, verification, or substantiation. This distinction is between two logical
moments, not between two realities or substances, whether psychological or not. Badiou
does not subscribe to psychological dualism: there is only one thing, which is not a psy-
chological thing, but changes in its different moments. Nevertheless, there is no psycho-
logical moment; there is only a hypothetical content different from its confirming form,
an actualizing struggle separated from its actualizable principle.
Pavón-Cuéllar 15

For Badiou, the struggle is not its principle; the form is not its content. Badiou can be
contrasted here with Slavoj Žižek (1989), whose Hegelian essential appearance leads to
confusion between form and content, and appearance and essence. In any case, for both
Žižek and Badiou, there is no psychological essence beyond the actual appearance. For
Žižek, there is nothing beyond this appearance: there is no object of psychology. For
Badiou, there is an event and a subject faithful to this event: a subject that cannot be
approached by a psychological theory, but only by a theory of the subject that is, by defi-
nition, fundamentally non-psychological (Badiou, 1982).

Conclusion
Neither Badiou nor Žižek restore psychological dualism. They both share the Marxist and
Freudian heritage that imposes a monist perspective by excluding the existence of a meta-
language. From this perspective, there is no interiority understood as a psychological
exteriority of the non-psychological exterior, that is, as a psyche dualistically separated
from everything else. In Lacanian terms, this implies that there is no Other of the Other,
but only the Other. This corresponds to the exteriority of Žižek’s essential appearance and
to Badiou’s confirmation of the hypothesis by itself. This pure exteriority without interior-
ity tends to exhaust the logical universe of reflection in Althusser, Tosquelles, the surreal-
ists, and the Freudo-Marxists, whose orientation towards monism is beyond doubt.
There must be only one thing after the return of the repressed half. After the hysterical
reappearance of the feminine body and revolutionary comeback of the proletarian psy-
che, we cannot unilaterally retain spiritualism or economism, psychologism or physical-
ism, and romantic idealism or mechanistic materialism, without regressing into a
pre-Freudian and pre-Marxist state of reflection. The problem with this state of reflection
is not only its unilaterality and platitude, but its reconstitution of the psychological and
sociological and/or economic dualist knowledge that has been subverted by the truth of
psychoanalysis and scientific socialism, hysteria and the proletariat, and the unconscious
and class consciousness.
Without the truth, knowledge can be absolute, but only by absolutizing its part of the
whole, that is, by conceiving this part as a metalanguage accounting for itself and the
other part. This is the case in psychology that assimilates itself to its object—the psycho-
logical sphere of the inner world—and then pretends to distinguish itself from everything
else, distinguishing the inner world from the outer world and what is psychological from
what is not. This is dualism, and is not serious. A serious theory must be monist, as dis-
cerningly recognized by both Plekhanov (1895/1956) and Lacan (1961/1991a).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
16 Theory & Psychology 00(0)

ORCID iD
David Pavón-Cuéllar https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1610-6531

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Author biography
David Pavón-Cuéllar is Professor of Social Psychology and Marxism in the Faculties of Psychology
and Philosophy at the State University of Michoacán (Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de
Hidalgo, Morelia, Mexico). He works in the fields of discourse analysis, critical psychology,
Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Marxist theory. He is the author of the books Marxism and
Psychoanalysis: In or Against Psychology? (London, Routledge, 2017), and From the Conscious
Interior to an Exterior Unconscious: Lacan, Discourse Analysis and Social Psychology (London,
Karnac, 2010). He co-edited, with Ian Parker, Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic
Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy (London & New York, Routledge, 2013).