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TAP0010.1177/0959354318766415Theory & PsychologyPavón-Cuéllar
Article
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
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)
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.
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
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).
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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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).