Jacques Lacan
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I am doing research and reading books written by the French philosopher Lacan and his followers.
We do know that he is anti-Marxist, and like Eduard Bernstein, he is a distorter of socialism, but he is popular within some left-wing groups and among academics
If you have any feedback or opinions, you can post them in this thread; I will note them.
We do have several articles about Freud and psychoanalysis.s
The socialist party has only published one article about one of his followers, but the Trotskyists have published several online.
I think it might be useful to distinguish between saying that Lacan was not a Marxist and describing him simply as anti-Marxist.
What interests me is whether psychoanalysis can tell us something about why people become attached to ideas and social arrangements that cannot be explained by economic interest alone.
In our recent discussion about class consciousness, we have repeatedly asked why workers can experience exploitation, insecurity and inequality without necessarily developing socialist consciousness. Material conditions clearly do not mechanically produce a particular consciousness.
Perhaps this is where a critical examination of psychoanalysis could be interesting. Not as a substitute for the materialist analysis of capitalism, but as a possible contribution to understanding ideology, identification, desire and why people can become emotionally attached to nationalism, leaders, religion or other identities.
I would therefore be interested in asking: does Lacan actually help us understand why class consciousness does not arise automatically from class position, or does his approach ultimately obscure the material social relationships that need explaining?The trouble with psychological, particularly psychoanalytical, explanations of why workers don’t want capitalism is that, if true, they prove too much — that workers’ minds have been changed to make them positively want capitalism. But if that’s the case how can they come to unwant capitalism? It would not just be a matter of changing opinion or a changing social or economic environment but of changing an ingrained psychology. The solution would have to be psychological too. For Freudians, a majority of workers would have to be psychoanalysed. Reich thought that we’d all have to be sexually liberated.
I think this identifies an important danger in psychological explanations of the absence of socialist consciousness.
If capitalism actually produces a psychological structure that makes workers positively desire capitalism, we then have to explain how anyone ever becomes a socialist. The theory risks explaining too much.
But perhaps there is a distinction between being psychologically determined to support capitalism and being socially conditioned to regard capitalism as normal. The second seems much less problematic.
Workers encounter wages, money, private property, markets, nations and competition before they have developed any systematic understanding of them. These relationships can therefore appear natural and inevitable without becoming permanently embedded psychological needs.
That would also explain why consciousness can change without requiring psychoanalysis or some prior psychological liberation. Experience, discussion and access to different explanations can lead people to reconsider what they previously took for granted.
The interesting fact is that socialists themselves emerged from capitalist society. If capitalist conditioning were psychologically irresistible, our own existence would be difficult to explain.
Perhaps capitalism’s ideological strength is therefore not that it makes workers psychologically want capitalism, but that it makes capitalism appear to be the normal background of life — until something gives us reason to question it.I used the expression anti-Marxist because several of his followers were ‘Marxist’, and now they have raised negative opinions about Marx and ‘Marxism ‘, and several of them are not so much involved in the psychoanalytic conception; Lacan himself never read Sigmund Freud, and he never read Marx either. I know people who were Castroists, and now they are Lacanian.
This is the opinion of a Trotskyist group about him ( I have more from other groups, but some of them are in Spanish, and he has influenced several intellectuals in Latin America; this is a movement for intellectuals only ). Some of his followers do not know anything about psychology and medicine
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS), an online international publication of the Trotskyist movement, approaches the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan from a perspective of strict Marxist materialist dialectics.
The WSWS views Lacan and the broader post-structuralist movement as philosophically anti-materialist and politically counter-revolutionary. Their critique focuses on several core areas:
1. The Rejection of Objective Reality and Materialism
The WSWS categorises Lacanian psychoanalysis alongside post-structuralism and postmodernism, arguing that these frameworks reject objective reality and historical materialism. In their review of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Intellectual Impostures, the World Socialist Web Site argues that Lacan and other French theorists substituted rigorous, scientific investigation of society with absolute relativism, linguistic idealism, and the misuse of mathematical concepts.
2. Critique of the “Pseudo-Left” and Slavoj Žižek
Much of the WSWS’s direct criticism of Lacanian thought comes through its extensive polemics against the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. The WSWS designates Žižek as an “intellectual charlatan masquerading as ‘left'” and details how his reliance on Lacanian concepts serves to obfuscate class struggle. According to the WSWS, mixing Lacan with Marxism replaces concrete economic analysis and the revolutionary agency of the working class with irrationalism and bourgeois concepts of desire.
3. Rejection of Revolutionary Agency
From a political standpoint, the WSWS notes that Lacan himself rejected the prospect of communist revolution. The site argues that the rise of Lacanianism and postmodern thought in France was driven by a middle-class intelligentsia disillusioned by the failures of Stalinism and the general strike of May 1968. Instead of seeking to overthrow capitalism, Lacanian-influenced philosophy is seen as retreating into “micro-politics,” single-issue resistance, and an acceptance of structural alienation as an unchangeable facet of the human condition.
The Socialist Party: Freud and Marx did they mix? Some leftists in Latin America think that both were advocating for a new, better world based on justice, which is not true ; only Marx advocated for a new society. Marx did not advocate for moral justice; he advocated for a new society
Freud and Marxism Part 1
Freud and Marxism part 2
Freud the fraud. book review
From memory of dealing with Lacan at university.
His main thrust is Freud via Hegel. the key concepts, as I recall, were that the unconscious is structured *like* a language: words have no fixed meaning but shift metonymically, ultimately anchored by arbitrary definitions the “point de capiton”, behind which lies ultimate structureless meaninglessness. I may be missing ideas, but that point de capiton becomes the object of desire, which Zizek argues is like Hitchcock’s Maguffin, the whole sense of the story, everyone wants to have it, but it is dangerous to have.
Further, is the idea of the mirror stage, we see ourselves reflected in the symbolic order, which positions us and defines us as a subject. If I recall correctly, this is what lead Althusser to his notion that ideology is lived, but we misrecognise ourselves as a subject. Zizek sort of returned to this arguing that our material world is our unconscious: the Hegel thing means that there is an advanced philosophical idealism at play.
A Lacanian reading of Hamlet is very plausible: the ghost is the Real father, the father of vengeance and castration, Claudius is the imaginary father, “your biological father who fucked you up” and Laertes is the brother, the mirror image to which Hamlet ultimately compares himself. etc.
I was peripherally aware of Julie Kristeva’s feminist readings and the notion of abjection, situating the female subject (IIRC) is the position of the object of desire; and I think some f this goes back to George Bataille, a kind of surrealist anthropologist.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/11/zize-n12.html
Zizek in Manhattan: An intellectual charlatan masquerading as “left”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_psychology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abnormal_psychology
These are much better professional fields than all those frauds about Sigmund Freud
The political left engages with French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan because his structural theories of desire, language, and the “Big Other” provide powerful tools to critique ideology, capitalism, and irrational political behaviour.
While Lacan himself was not a traditional progressive or political revolutionary, major leftist thinkers like Slavoj Žižek and Ernesto Laclau adopted his framework for several key reasons:
Critique of the Rational Subject
• Rejection of Liberal Individualism: Traditional political theory often assumes humans are rational, self-interested agents. Lacan showed that the human subject is fundamentally split and driven by an unconscious, unfulfilled desire.
• Explaining Irrationalism: Leftist analysts use Lacanian concepts to explain why people vote against their economic self-interest or get drawn into fascism, racism, and nationalism through emotional and unconscious investments.The Role of “Jouissance” (Enjoyment)
• Pleasure and Power: Lacan introduced jouissance—a complex term blending pleasure, pain, and transgression.
• Ideological Attachment: The left uses this concept to understand how individuals derive a perverse psychological “enjoyment” from political scapegoating, systemic hierarchies, or consumer capitalism, explaining why changing a political system requires shifting deep-seated psychic attachments, not just economic structures.Deconstructing Ideology and the “Big Other”
• Symbolic Orders: Lacan argued that reality is mediated by language and socially constructed symbolic systems (the “Big Other” or baseline authority structures).
• Subverting Norms: Because Lacan placed the subversion of identity and established norms at the centre of psychoanalysis, his work naturally aligns with critiques of power, state authority, and cultural hegemony.
I think there is an important distinction here. We can certainly debate whether Lacan distorted Marx or whether Lacanian theory is compatible with socialism, but I don’t think it is historically accurate to say that Lacan never read Freud or Marx.
Lacan explicitly presented a major part of his project as a “return to Freud,” and Marx appears directly in his seminars. He discussed Marx’s surplus value and used it in developing his own concept of surplus-jouissance.
That doesn’t establish that Lacan understood Marx correctly, much less that his political conclusions were Marxist. In fact, that seems to me the more interesting question.
Rather than asking whether Lacan read Marx, perhaps we should ask: What did Lacan take from Marx, what did he change, and did those changes help us understand capitalist society or lead us away from Marx’s analysis of its actual social relations?
The same applies to Freud. Reading an author and remaining faithful to that author’s theoretical framework are two very different things.These are the french philosophers who are darlings of the left
Louis Althusser (1918–1990): A leading structuralist Marxist who taught at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He wrote For Marx and Reading Capital, rethinking Marxist theory through structuralism and anti-humanism.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980): A famous existentialist who later tried to combine existentialism with historical materialism, most notably in his work Critique of Dialectical Reason.
Lucien Sève (1926–2020): A philosopher and long-time member of the French Communist Party known for his work on Marxist psychology and the theory of personality.
Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991): A Marxist sociologist and philosopher who helped introduce critique of everyday life and spatial theory into Western Marxist thought
Roberto- Many socialists inherit socialism from their parents and/or a relatively rational home life. This is where psychoanalysis has its strength in analyzing childhood. Capitalism causes a default dysfunctional family environment so those of us lucky enough to have a reasonably rational home life are much more likely to be socialists. Of course at the other end of the spectrum we have authoritarian and/or religious irrational families which generate fascism, racism and xenophobia etc. This has been exhaustively analyzed by Marcuse, Adorno and Fromm and is no longer a mystery.
It is important to distinguish between psychoanalytical approaches and psychodynamic approaches.
Psychoanalytic approaches are usually used to refer specifically to the earliest forms of psychotherapy, practiced by Freud and his immediate followers, and psychodynamic approaches are those that are informed by psychoanalytic theory, but diverges from the traditional practice model.
Although it is recognised that early childhood experiences form a huge part in the development of cognitions, emotions, physical growth, the immune system and general personality, these developments are now understood to be being far more complex, nuanced and individual that the fanciful, unscientific, poorly evidenced fairy stories that Freud came up with.
Books by Freud are probably best stored alongside those of JK Rowlings, Tolkien and CS Lewis.
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