The Problem with Freud & Fromm: A Marxist Critique

Dr. Rey Ty

Northern Illinois University

Mind over Matter?

OutlineI. Introduction

II. Freud & Fromm

III. Marxist Critique

Introduction

Problem1. Mind over matter?

2. Freud & Fromm focus on psychology (mind)

Objectives1. Describe approach

of Freud & Fromm

2. Present Marxist critique

Methods

• Direct quotations

• Freud, Fromm, Marx, Engels, & Lenin in their own words

Findings

Freud & Fromm

• Marx’s writings aroused Fromm’s interest in socio-political problems.

“…without Marx… my thinking would have been deprived of its most important stimuli.” Source: Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, p. 11

However, Fromm misinterpreted & misrepresented

Marx.

Fromm correctly observed: “Freud was a liberal reformer, Marx, a radical revolutionist.”

Source: Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, p. 26

Fromm wrongly said that “Marx’s philosophy is neither idealism nor materialism but a synthesis: humanism & naturalism.”

Source: Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, p. 11.

Dobrenkov (1976): “Thus Fromm achieved this synthesis of Freudian & Marxist theory by first of all turning Marx into an existentialist

thinker of a neo-Freudian slant & thus presenting Marxism in a distorted light.”

Source: V. I. Dobrenkov, Neo-Freudians in Search of “Truths,” p. 34.

Dobrenkov: “Fromm’s work demonstrated time & again the obvious & indisputable truth that any

attempt to ‘fertilize’ Marxism with principles contradictory to it or to link it to philosophical

theories whose very essence & methodological principles are diametrically opposed to it, is impossible without distorting

& misrepresenting the content of Marxist theory.”

Source: V. I. Dobrenkov, Neo-Freudians in Search of “Truths,” p. 34.

Marx, Engels, & LeninCritique of

Marx wrote: Our “humanized” nature came into existence in the course of social history. Hence, the process of the rise and development of human society is “man’s real nature.” Source: Marx. (1974). Economic & Philosophic Manuscript of 1844. Moscow, p. 98.

Marx is not interest in the idealist, abstract, non-historical view of “human nature in general.” The weakness of such arguments is that they upheld “not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.”Source: Marx & Engels. (1973). Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow, p. 131.

Marx wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach

that “the human essence is no

abstraction inherent in each single

individual. In its reality it is the

ensemble of the social relations.” Source: Marx & Engels.

(1973). Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow, p. 14.

Marx argued that human development went hand in hand

with social changes & there is no such

thin as “human nature in general”

but only a historically determined human

nature which is changed in each

new epoch, as history develops.

Marx wrote: “Just as society itself produces man and man, so is

society produced by him.”

Source: Marx. (1974). Economic

& Philosophic Manuscript of

1844, p. 91.

Marx wrote that the “human condition is not outside historical conditions, as “the social character is the general character

of the whole movement.”

Source: Marx. (1974). Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, p. 91.

The dialectical & materialist

theory of Marx & Engels “set out from real, active men.”

Source: Marx. (1974). Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 37-38.

In their Germany Ideology, Marx & Engels wrote: “The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary

ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity an the material conditions under which they live, both

those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus

be verified in a purely empirical way.”

Source: Marx & Engels. (1968). The German Ideology. Moscow, p. 31.

Marx asked: “What is life

but activity?”Source: Marx. Economic & Philosophic

Manuscripts of 1844, p. 67.

Marx & Engels wrote: The dialectics of the socio-historical activity of humans is

expressed as “revolutionary critical activity” where “the changing of oneself coincides

with the changing of circumstances.”

Source: Marx & Engels. (1968). The German Ideology. Moscow, p. 234.

Marx wrote: “the whole character of

a species—its species character—is contained in the character of its life activity; and free, conscious activity is man’s species-

character.”

Source: Marx, Economic & Philosophic

Manuscript of 1844, p. 68.

Marx wrote: “above all we must avoid

postulating ‘society’… as an abstraction vis-à-vis the individual.”

Source: Marx, Economic & Philosophic Manuscript

of 1844, p. 92.

Fromm does not appreciate that “individuals in their self-liberation

satisfy a definite need actually experienced by them” and not some

abstract need of a generalized nature.”

Source: Marx & Engels. (1968). The German Ideology.

Moscow, p. 338.

Marx said that the working class has “no ideals to realize, but to set free

the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois

society itself is pregnant.”

Source: Marx & Engels. (1973). Selected Works, Vol. 2, Moscow, p. 224.

Marxism does not deny the importance of ideals in history but “argues

exclusively about the construction of these ideals and their realization.”

Source: Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 416.

Lenin wrote: Subjectivists “based their arguments on ‘ideals’, without bothering about the fact that these

ideals can only be a certain reflection of reality, and,

consequently, must be verified by facts, and must be based on facts.”Source: Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 1,

pp. 416-417.

The Marxist “proceeds from the same ideal; he does not compare it with ‘modern science & modern moral ideas, however’, but with the existing class contradictions, &

therefore does not formulate it as a demand put forward by ‘science’, but by such & such a class, a demand engendered by such & such social relations (which are to be objectively

investigated), & achievable only in such & such a way in consequence of such & such properties of these relations. If

ideals are not based on facts in this way, they will only remain pious wishes, with no chance of being accepted by

the masses &, hence, of being realized.”

Source: Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 1, pp. 416-417.

Marx & Engels wrote: “The individuals … have been conceived by the

philosophers as an ideal, under the name of “Man’. They have conceived the whole

process which we have outlined as the evolutionary process of ‘Man’, so that at

every historical stage ‘Man’ was substituted for the individuals and shown as the motive force of history. The whole

process was thus conceived as a process of self-estrangement of ‘Man’…. Through this inversion, which from the first is an abstract image of the actual

conditions, it was possible to transform the whole history into an evolutionary process of consciousness.” Source: Marx & Engels. (1968). The German

Ideology, p. 86.

Engels wrote that “history is not a person apart, using man as a means for its own particular aims; history is

nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.” Source: Marx & Engels. (1975). The Holy Family.

Moscow, p. 110.

Marx & Engels wrote that “society has hitherto always developed within the framework of the contradiction—

in antiquity the contradiction between free men & slaves, in the Middle Ages that between nobility &

serfs, in modern times that between the bourgeoisie & the proletariat.”

Source: Marx & Engels. (1968). The German Ideology. Moscow, p. 487.

The significance of Marx’s class theory lay in the fact that firstly “it

worked out the concept of the social-economic formation…. The

subjectivists’ arguments about ‘society’ in general, meaningless

arguments that did not go beyond petty-bourgeois utopias… were replaced by an investigation of

definite forms of the structure of society.” Source: Lenin. Collected

Works, Vol. 1, pp. 410-411.

“Secondly, the actions of ‘living individuals’ within the bounds of each such socio-economic formation … were generalized and reduced to the actions of groups of individuals … to the actions of classes,

the struggle between which determined the development of society.”

Source: Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 1, pp. 410-411.

“Of course, there are & always will be individual exceptions from group & class

types. But social types remain.”

.” Source: Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 2. Moscow, p. 276.

Marx & Engels wrote: “This subsuming of individuals under definite classes cannot be abolished until a class has taken shape, which has no longer any

particular class interest to assert against the ruling class.”

Source: Marx & Engels. (1968). The German Ideology, p. 94.

Fromm wrongly attributed the whole historical development

to actions of select individuals.

Pinpointing the motive force of history, “it is not a question so much of the motives of single individuals, however eminent, as of those motives which set in motion great masses, whole peoples, & again whole classes of the people in each people.”

Source: Marx & Engels. (1973). Selected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow, p. 367.

Marx & Engels wrote: “The ideas of this ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class

which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force…. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of

the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.”

Source: Marx & Engels. (1968). The German Ideology. Moscow, p. 61.

Marx & Engels wrote: “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal,

has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally

speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it…. The individuals comprising the ruling class… regulate the production & distribution of the

ideas of their age…”

Source: Marx & Engels. (1968). The German Ideology. Moscow, p. 61.

Engels wrote that “in the history of society… the actors are all endowed with

consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working towards definite goals; nothing happens without a

conscious purpose, without an intended aim.”Source: Marx & Engels. (1973).

Selected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow, p. 366.

“But is instinct alone sufficient? You would not get far if you rely on instinct

alone. This instinct must be transformed into political awareness.”

Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 268.

“One must be able to point out the dangers & defects of spontaneity & to elevate it to the

level of consciousness.”

Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 316.

“Only struggle discloses to [the exploited class] the magnitude of its own power, widen its horizon, enhances its

abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.”

Lenin. Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 241.

Neo-Freudian criticism of capitalist society from the viewpoint of abstract naturalistic humanism ranks

with bourgeois social criticism which, to use Marx’s words, “knows how to judge and condemn the

present, but not how to comprehend it.”

Marx. (1974). Capital, Vol. 1, Moscow, p. 474.

Reference:• V. I. Dobrenkov. (1976). Neo-Freudians in

Search of “Truth”. Moscow: Progress.

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The Problem with Freud & Fromm: A Marxist Critique

Dr. Rey Ty

Northern Illinois University

Mind over Matter?