Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1996 0:57:22 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Marx and Freud:special issue NST vol. 8, no. 1


 NATURE, SOCIETY, AND THOUGHT  vol. 8, no. 1   

       Special Issue: Marx and Freud
 
		Abstract
 
Howard L. Parsons,
pts of Human  Reality in the
Thought of Marx and  Freud"--In his mechanical,
physicalistic  diagnosis of European capitalist soci-
ety, Freud addressed problems appearing  in individual
persons of the bourgeois  classes; Marx, dialectical
and economic,  investigated class conflict and its
potential working-class resolution. Only  incompletely
accounting for the social-  ization ego, Freud stressed
the internal  tensions between id, ego, superego, and
social reality, whereas Marx described  social
communication and collective  labor as its formative
processes. The  aim of Freud was individual and social
equilibrium through acknowledging and  guiding
unconscious repressed drives  into conformity with
social demands (of  the ruling classes). But for Marx
the  goal was class consciousness, social  revolution
against ruling-class demands,  and the transformation
of a class-ruled  society into a universal human
community. 

    Antal F. Borbely, "Marx and Freud, a  Reassessment:
>From the Industrial Age to  the Information Age"--The
work of Marx  and Freud is described as the second and
third information science (the first  being Darwin's)
in the context of the  transition from the industrial
to the  information age. Marx showed that con-
sciousness (information) is dependent on  practical
activity, whereas psychoanaly-  sis shows that the
individual can escape  his or her unconscious past
determinants  through regaining lost information. Both
Marx and Freud formulated their theories  in terms of
the industrial age, where  matter meant substance and
energy, not  as yet information. The outline of a
reformulation of both theories into  information-
centered ones is given. The  demise of the socialist
regimes and  their rejection of psychoanalysis is
analyzed in close connection with their  (and Marx's)
philosophical error of not  subsuming information as
part of matter. 

  Irving J. Crain, "Philosophy, Politics,  and
Psychoanalysis"-- The theory of the  mind-body
relation, critical to psycho-  analysis, has a
philosophical history.  Following Spinoza, Hegel, and
Feuerbach,  Marx advanced the idea of the dialecti-
cal, developmental unity of thought and  the material
world. Psychoanalysis also  applied science to the
improving of  human society. Today Freud's theory has
split into many schools questioning the  concepts of
libido, id, ego, superego,  infantile sexuality,
conscious therapy  without activity, psychosexual
stages,  and unchanging needs, as well as Freud's
fixed categories (human nature, society)  and
determinism. Many early Freudians  were socialist and
Marxist, forced to  flee from Hitlerism and repressed
under  McCarthyism. Their innovative work was
paralleled by such Soviet researchers as  Vygotsky,
Luria, Leontiev, and Lomov.  Recent trends emphasize
the organism's  activity, self-regulation, goal-
seeking,  environmental conditions, systems,
interaction, and development. 

Comments by John P. Pittman and Peter Feigenbaum
 
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