Freudo-Marxism
In search of the roots of postmodern philosophy
Related: postmodern philosophy - Nietzsche - Freud - Marx - Norman Brown - Herbert Marcuse - Wilhelm Reich
Le Gai Savoir (1969) - Jean-Luc Godard
Definition
"Postmodernism" as a philosophical movement is not just Nietzsche rehashed; it grew out of the staged confrontations and collaborations of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud undertaken by French (mostly) intellectuals in the twentieth century. Boiling it down to Nietzsche is inaccurate (as would be boiling it down to the three of these thinkers). --csloat 01:36, 3 June 2006 (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Postmodernism#Nietzsche [Jun 2006]
Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation of several twentieth-century critical theory schools of thought that sought to synthesize the philosophy and political economy of Karl Marx with the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud.
While the movement to integrate socialist and psychoanalytic theory has taken several forms, each arose during the middle of the twentieth century in the hope of answering this question: why did Fascism have mass appeal? The fact of that appeal confounded much of orthodox Marxist thought. The gist of the answer Freudo-Marxists gave to that question is that the masses have internalized their oppression as suppression. The internalization of the upper class in the minds of the lower class is the super-ego, in the same way that crowd psychology, in particular Freud, considered the leader to work as the masses' super-ego. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudo-Marxism [Jun 2006]
On 1960-05-31, Norman O. Brown lectured at Columbia University about “Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind.” He said that mind, understood as rationality, was "at the end of its tether," (a phrase he adapted from H.G. Wells) and that the way out was also the way down, into madness and its esoteric wisdom. This was a key moment in the infusion of Freudianism into left-wing thought, by the identification of political oppression with psychological suppression.
Herbert Marcuse had written Eros and Civilization in 1955, which explicitly sought to merge Marxism with Freudianism, so that bourgeois rationality was wrong not just qua its bourgeois class origin but qua rationality as well. Marcuse, though, didn't become a force to be reckoned with in the English-speaking world until 1964, with the publication of One Dimensional Man, a popularization of much the same message. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_socialism#The_radicalization_of_psychoanalysis [Jun 2006]