Marcuse Interprets Freud

Herbert Marcuse. 1974. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Orig Pub 1955). Boston: Beacon Press.

Review by Stephen W. Hiemstra

Since the Enlightenment of the nineteenth century, the two most prominent slanderers of God have been Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Marx called faith the opioid of the masse; Freud called faith an illusion (McGrath 2004, 62-71). The work of these two pillars of atheism comes together in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization.

The cult status of this book among prominent student radicals in the 1960s, like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), makes the book a necessary reading for those trying to understand cultural changes that have occurred since then.

Introduction

In his introduction, Marcuse (7) writes: “The purpose of this essay is to contribute to the philosophy of psychoanalysis—not psychoanalysis itself.” The word, Eros, comes from Greek and it is commonly translated as erotic love. Marcuse focuses on interpreting Freud’s views on metapsychology, by which he means cultural psychology, writing to an academic audience. His particular interest is in the relationship between the id and ego (sex and conscience) as they interact and reinforce culture.

This work, like Freud’s, builds on a mythical interpretation of history and offers virtually no empirical evidence in support of assumptions and analytical speculations. This point is important because of the sweeping influence that it has had on personal lives and culture.

The ideas for this book stemmed from lectures given in 1950-51 at the Washington School of Psychiatry.

  Background and Organization

 Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) studied at Humboldt University in Berlin and received his doctorate at Freiburg. During the Second World War he worked the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (later, Central Intelligence Agency). His leftist credentials stem both from his writing and association with Frankfurt School of critical theory, now known as The New School for Social Research in New York. The Frankfurt School is the focal point of criticism described as cultural Marxism.

 Marcuse writes in eleven chapters:

The Hidden Trend in PsychoanalysisThe Origin of the Repressed Individual (Ontogenesis)The Origin of Repressive Civilization (Phylogenesis)The Dialect of CivilizationPhilosophical InterludeThe Historical Limits of the Established Reality PrinciplePhantasy and UtopiaThe Images of Orpheus and NarcissusThe Aesthetic DimensionThe Transformation of Sexuality into ErosEros and Thanatos (ix-x)

These chapters are proceeded by prefaces (1955 and 1966) and an introduction. They are followed by an epilogue and index. Marcuse writes about the notorious implications of his work openly in his 1966 preface.

The Freudian Model

Mancuse starts by presenting and augmenting the Freudian model of the family and civilization (culture). He writes: ”According to Freud, the history of man is the history of his repression…The uncontrolled Eros is just as fatal as his deadly counterpart, the death instinct.” (11) He continues: “The reality principle supersedes the pleasure principle: man learns to give up momentary, uncertain, and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but ‘assured’ pleasure.” (13) Here pleasure is defined primarily in terms of sexual urges and death presents itself in the need to spend almost every waking hour at work to earn a living. Delayed sexual activities constitute repression and freedom is an absence of repression.

Mancuse (15) uses these definitions then to develop his cultural framework with a mythical story:

“The rule of the primal father is followed, after the first rebellion, by the rule of the sons, and the brother clan develops into institutionalized social and political domination.”

The family is accordingly the source of repression, which, in turn, becomes an agent of domination. He then goes onto posit: “Domination differs from rational exercise of authority.” (36) At this point, he is able to outline a new utopia where as civilization advances productivity, repressive and dominating relationships can be minimized and individual freedom abounds (147).

A Perspective

The model that Mancuse frames based on Freud is static and he offers no empirical evidence to support it.

Presumably the reader pictures themselves as a frustrated son in a family dominated by a father who maintains a monopoly on sexual relations and obligates the son to work, perhaps a younger Sigmund Freud. The model appears static because we are not told how the father became productive enough to start the family or how the son will be educated to take his place. The focus is on the engine of repression within the family and how this evolves into a pattern of further domination. We see no education component, no technological growth to fuel the coming utopia, and no competition to force other families to adopt similar patterns.

In graduate school in the early 1980s, I had a colleague from Siberia who his ex-pat friends referred to as Uri the spy. Like any good intelligence officer during that period, Uri spent his days reading newspapers and his evenings hosting vodka parties. I was visiting beef packing plants for my dissertation work (Hiemstra 1985) so I asked Uri to describe modern packing plants in the USSR. He proceeded to describe the same slaughtering technology in Russia that Upton Sinclair (1980) pictured in 1906 in the United States. In effect, the absence of reinvestment in the USSR left their basic infrastructure what it was before the Russian Revolution, consistent with a static Marxian worldview. The Marxian proclivity to focus on distributing the surplus rather than keeping up with the completion later led to the collapse of Russian communism.

In the Mancuse model, the static nature of the model is likely to encourage adherents to adopt a less disciplined lifestyle with the consequence of a declining commitment to family life and a lower standard of living, as we now see for many people in Western countries.

Assessment

Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud is an academic book. A typical reader might not be able to follow his critique of philosophy writers, like Kant, Schiller, Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud or be able to read his frequent quotes in untranslated German, French, and Greek. I have studied all three languages and previously read some of the philosophy literature and related critiques, but I frankly could not always follow his arguments. I recommend this book primarily to researchers interested in understanding the sexual revolution since the 1960s.

 References

Hiemstra, Stephen W. 1985. Labor Relations, Technological and Structural Change in U.S. Beef Packing and Retailing. Dissertation. Michigan State University.

McGrath, Alister. 2004. The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World. New York: DoubleDay.

Sinclair, Upton. 1980. The Jungle (Orig Pub 1906). New York: New American Library.

Footnotes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfu.... https://www.NewSchool.edu.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultura....

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