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Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society 8.2 (2003) 263-272



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Psychoanalysis and Sixties Utopianism

Marianne DeKoven


The utopianism of the 1960s, perhaps the last flowering of modern utopianism, called for a total transformation that was simultaneously, even inseparably, psychic, political and cultural. I will discuss some sixties utopian texts which use psychoanalysis along with, and intermeshed with, a variety of political, philosophical, and cultural discourses in order to represent a lifeworld of utter alienation, oppression, and thwarted, stifled authenticity. Although these works are permeated with the pessimism and revulsion engendered by this alienation, their most profound impact comes from a summons to what Herbert Marcuse calls the Great Refusal: a total repudiation of actually existing life at the psychic, social, intellectual, and cultural levels simultaneously, and the institution of a truly liberatory and just alternative—a new reality principle, as Marcuse demands and prophesizes in Eros and Civilization. It is the utopian nature of these projects, I would argue, based on the assumption that only a thoroughgoing, total transformation is capable of producing any significant change whatsoever—change that is meaningful because it is not coopted—that produces the particular, sometimes almost undifferentiated juxtaposition of psychoanalytic with political, philosophical, and cultural discourses that characterizes these works. This undifferentiated juxtaposition, in the seamless form in which we find it in these texts, bespeaking a coherent, universal intellectual project, is no longer available to current psychoanalytic work on culture. Analyzing its dynamics in these Sixties texts, however, can help us retrieve its refunctioned elements in the current conjuncture.

In this essay, I will discuss two Sixties texts that were among the most influential and widely read at the time within both the new left and the counterculture, but that have subsequently all but disappeared off the intellectual map: Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, 1964, and, in a briefer discussion, R. D. Laing's The Politics of Experience, 1967. 1 Marcuse is primarily a philosopher and political theorist who, within the Frankfurt School project of linking Marx and Freud, deploys psychoanalytic discourses as indispensable to his project. Laing is a psychoanalyst who employs political, philosophical, and cultural discourses as, similarly, indispensable. There is a sense in both texts of a parallelism, almost an interchangeability among these discourses, as if each treats, in mutually reinforcing and mirroring ways, a crucial component of what is a unified whole. I will also discuss very briefly the ways in which Luce Irigaray, writing at the end of what I would call the long Sixties, produces the same sort of totalizing, utopian project in Speculum of the Other Woman, 1974. For all of these projects, it is the utopian demand for reciprocal, mutually constitutive, total psychic, social, political, intellectual, and cultural change that creates this peculiar additive parallelism or intermeshing of discourses.

Herbert Marcuse, one of the most important of the sixties intellectuals, has virtually slipped, with some notable exceptions, out of sight. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, by contrast, remain major presences. 2 Benjamin, in particular, is enjoying what amounts to a renaissance, and Adorno is also increasingly widely read. Yet Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, one of the few most influential books of the Sixties, though now rarely studied, makes essentially the same central argument as Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which has of late become required reading. Horkheimer and Adorno's "negativity" is always implicated in the affirmative, just as all resistance is subsumed by Marcuse's one-dimensional society. Horkheimer and Adorno assume the impossibility of enlightenment just as Marcuse assumes that instrumental [End Page 263] reason always adheres to domination. The difference—the reason for Horkheimer and Adorno's currency and Marcuse's near disappearance—lies in Marcuse's passionate commitment to total psychic-political-social-cultural transformation, of a sort Horkheimer and Adorno do not propose, since oppositionality for them is always partly implicated in the affirmative. Their view is much more consistent with postmodern notions of complicitous critique and resistance from within than with modernity's totalizing, utopian revolutionary...

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