Marx & Freud on the Human Condition

The history of western culture in the twentieth century cannot be understood apart from the work of Marx and Freud. It is perhaps not too much to say that, taken together, Marx's analysis of culture and society as fundamentally social processes that imply certain social necessities and imperatives, and Freud's analysis of personality and culture as mutually interpenetrating and mutually determining processes, constitute an account of the whole of human experience. The views of Marx and Freud intersect in certain ways, although the emphasis of argument in each case is different. Marx's emphasis is on culture, or more exactly society, while Freud's ultimate emphasis is on human psychology and the social and cultural realities that derive from its reality; however, they each make philosophical claims for their treatments of the vicissitudes of human experience. In the case of Marx, there is also a moral clai

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may be neurotic, but that is a matter apart. It is the tension, or in fact the contradiction, between the impulse for stable experience and the impulse to escape the trap of such experience that is Freud's emphasis. Freud goes so far as to connect what could be called the life's blood of civilized social structure to a death instinct that is very much a function of personal, and specifically psychosexual structure. To this extent, whereas Marx is dealing with historical processes that visit intense, real-world consequences upon the great mass of humanity, Freud is dealing with primordial processes that do not so much visit themselves on humanity as form the very boundaries of human consciousness. Marx declares bourgeois and ruling-class culpability in the consequences to the proletariat of the stratification of society according to the division of labor, owing to the self-possessed strength of the higher classes as against the difficulty that the proletariat has of even thinking of itself as a class or as a body of humanity that could experience itself as socially oppressed. For Marx, the experience is more psychologically fundamental precisely because it is social and not personal: alienation of the individual from both self and
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Approximate Word count = 4435
Approximate Pages = 18 (250 words per page)

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