Freudo-Marxism
Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation for philosophical perspectives informed by both the Marxist philosophy of Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud.
Sigmund Freud engages with Marxism in his 1932 New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in which he hesitantly contests what he sees as the Marxist view of history.
One member of the Berlin group of Marxist psychoanalysts around Reich was Erich Fromm, who later brought Freudo-Marxist ideas into the exiled Frankfurt School led by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
[9] His work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves – shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Fritz Perls's Gestalt therapy, Alexander Lowen's bioenergetic analysis, and Arthur Janov's primal therapy.
Building primarily upon the works of Marx, Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal of personal freedom, missing from most Soviet Marxism, and more frequently found in the writings of classic liberals.
The French West Indian psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon drew on both psychoanalytic and Marxist theory in his critique of colonialism.
In his 1965 book Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, the French philosopher Paul Ricœur compared the two (together with Friedrich Nietzsche), characterizing their common method as the "hermeneutics of suspicion".
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek promotes a form of Marxism highly modified by Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy.
[12] Major French philosophers associated with post-structuralism, post-modernism, and/or deconstruction, including Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, engaged deeply with both Marxism and psychoanalysis.
Most notably, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari collaborated on the theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia in two volumes: Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).
