Psychology and economics are two disciplines in the social sciences (Miller 4) which can produce different images of human adaptive behavior. The ideas of Sigmund Freud, representing psychology, and the ideas of Karl Marx, representing economics, clash in terms of their depiction of the ways human beings adapt, or fail to adapt.
Essentially, Freud believes that human beings are helpless before their unconscious impulses--until they are made aware of those impulses and their childhood sources, at which point they can begin to adapt with some measure of freedom as they create with the analyst a new set of adaptive tools. Marx believes that human beings are victims of historical and material forces until they are turned into virtual machines by capitalism. Instead of psychoanalysis freeing the individual to adapt independently, to Marx it is only a revolution on a society-wide scale which will free human beings from the imprisonment in the alienation of capitalism.
Despite their different conclusions about human adaptive behavior, both Freud and Marx, representing the disciplines of psychology and politics, include social forces as an important feature of their theories.
Whereas Marx's belief in eventual revolution was based on the increasingly intense socioeconomic division between the capitalistic class and the working class, Freud's belief in the healing process of psychoanalysis was based on "the intense social relationship between analyst and analysand" (Berger 104). Of course, one could also argue that the Marxist revolution which "heals" the ills created by capitalism is also profoundly social (as any revolution is, requiring organization and shared values and objectives).
In addition, the traumas at the root of the individual's neuroses and psychoses in psychoanalysis are social, although on the smaller scale of the family rather than the larger scale of society as a whole in Marxism.
However, despite thi...