Introduction to Psychoanalysis and Social Freedom

Dr. Daniel Tutt

Course Description:

After Freud’s groundbreaking turn in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and later Civilization

and its Discontents (1930), he discovers a new method for historicizing the revolutionary power

of capitalism to at once erode collective social ideals while simultaneously liberating the subject

from authoritarian modes of social control. This fundamental ambiguity embedded in

capitalism—a system that is both progressive and liberating at the same time as it is

authoritarian and hierarchical—has resulted in an internal schism amongst Freudian Marxists.

How do we apply Freud’s insights for the achievement of social freedom?

In this seminar, we will study how Freud’s concepts have split Marxist and psychoanalytic

theorists. Beginning with the tradition of Freudian-Marxism in thinkers such as Norman O.

Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari we find a utopian

conception of revolutionary activity that aims to liberate pleasure by abolishing deeper modes

of authority and collective ideals. Critics of Freudian Marxism, as diverse in perspective as

Jacques Lacan, Christopher Lasch, Michel Clouscard, Philip Rieff to Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel

have proposed that Freudian Marxism proposes a faulty conception of liberation that has

misdirected the revolutionary subject away from Marxist objectives of proletarian and working-

class liberation, resulting in a new ideology for the bourgeoisie. We will read these two currents

of interpretation as opening a significant debate that remains essential for any contemporary

social critique. We will conclude with a consideration of the new discontents of civilization in

the 21 st century and ask how Freud’s method might help us solve the problem of social freedom

today.

Instructor:

Daniel Tutt, Ph.D., is a philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist whose work examines

capitalism, class and contemporary culture. Dr. Tutt is a Professor at the Global Center for

Advanced Studies, and he has lectured in philosophy at George Washington University,

Marymount University, the District of Columbia Jail and the School of Materialist Research. Tutt

is the author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation with the

Palgrave Lacan Series and How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche with

Repeater Books. His writing has been featured in Jacobin, Current Affairs, Philosophy Now and

Aeon Magazine and he hosts the Emancipations podcast and study group collective. Tutt is the

host of the Emancipations podcast and study group collective, and he has degrees in philosophy

from American University and the European Graduate School where he completed his Ph.D.

with the French philosopher Alain Badiou.

Schedule: September 20 and 21 + September 27 and 28 (Saturday and Sunday) at 11 am New York via GCAS Zoom

Format: Live online lecture and discussion. Each session will be recorded for those cannot make

the live sessions, but it is highly recommended that students attend the live sessions.

Readings and Topics

September 20

Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Historicizing Capitalism

Freud, Sigmund Civilization and its Discontents

Karatani, Kojin “Transcritique: On Kant and Freud” (Kant and Freud pp. 33 – 64)

Rozitchner, Léon “The Return to Historical Origin” and “Dialectic of Collective Forms”

(Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism pp. 435 – 476)

Optional: Freud, Sigmund Beyond the Pleasure Principle

September 21

Freudian-Marxism and Social Critique: The Aims of Utopian Liberation

Jameson, Fredric “Pleasure: A Political Problem”

Zaretsky, Eli “From the Maturity Ethic to the Psychology of Power”

Bloch, Ernst “The not-yet-conscious” (The Principle of Hope pp. 114 – 153)

Brown, Norman “Neurosis and History” (Life Against Death pp. 11 – 19)

September 27

The Critique of Freudian-Marxism as Liberal-libertarian Ideology

Micheá, Jean-Claude [Introduction to Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism]

Clouscard, Michel Neo-fascism and the Ideology of Desire

Rieff, Philip The Triumph of the Therapeutic (excerpts)

Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine The Ego Ideal: A Psychoanalytic Essay on the Malady of the

Ideal (Introduction by Christopher Lasch)

September 28

21 st Century Psychoanalysis and its Discontents

Stiegler, Bernard “The Automatization of the Super-Ego and the Passage of Desire as

Original Diversion of Libidinal Energy” (Lost Spirit of Capitalism pp 42 – 77)

Svolos, Thomas “The American Plague” and “Realist, modern and postmodern diagnosis

in the psychiatric field” Psychoanalysis in the Twenty-First Century