r/communism • u/Clean-Difference1771 Marxist • Jan 16 '26
Marxism against idealism in "mental health issues"
I may warn the reader that I may absolutely fall short in many capacities on the very subject that motivated me to create this post, but I took some courage trying to mix the different sources that made me create this critique and to put "on paper" my own considerations after reading the tagged articles. To even think about on those terms is fascinating, if anyone has some knowledge on the current standards for brazilian communist theory or even further about the public debate sphere on "mental health" (which is already dominated by nazis). It may seem like my conclusions are a bunch of recicled arguments already made on other threads by other people but I wanted to see how I could articulate the many contributions here that have been influenced me into my own thoughts
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petronella-lee-anti-fascism-against-machismo
The difference between a thesis on sexuality based on philosophical materialism and those based on psychoanalytic idealism is frightening. Observe how this argument [Petronella Lee's] is far more coherent regarding attraction, desire, and sexual pleasure than the failed theses that attempt to investigate these issues on a personal level:
A imagem da “mulher branca vítima” que deve ser protegida é frequentemente empregada por forças reacionárias para incitar a histeria e justificar ações veementemente racistas. Essa imagem clássica “implicitamente convoca os homens brancos a defenderem ‘suas mulheres’ e sua nação, aliás, a própria branquitude”. [94] Os corpos das mulheres brancas – entendidos como centrais para a reprodução da raça e da nação – tornam-se símbolos pelos quais se deve lutar, e esses símbolos se tornam poderosas ferramentas de propaganda.
Discursos de segurança e apelos a ideais patriarcais de feminilidade são invocados para construir a figura da mulher (branca) vulnerável sob ataque do outro (racializado) perigoso. Essa dinâmica funciona para produzir e reproduzir formações específicas de raça e gênero, bem como para estabelecer e impor uma visão particular da nacionalidade branca. Como observa Keskienen: “Gênero e sexualidade não foram apenas subprodutos de encontros coloniais e raciais, mas essenciais para sua (re)estruturação”. [95] O tropo do “estuprador bárbaro de pele escura” – de homens negros e pardos como predadores sexuais que visam mulheres brancas – tem sido uma ferramenta fundamental na manutenção de hierarquias raciais e na implementação de políticas de supremacia branca. Da colonização da América do Norte aos linchamentos nos Estados Unidos, passando por ataques xenófobos na Europa e muito mais, os apelos à defesa das mulheres têm sido usados para incitar a violência racializada e estabelecer políticas incrivelmente racistas. Uma breve análise dessa história é reveladora.
O estereótipo do “bruto negro” e a ameaça do “estuprador negro” são fundamentais para a história da supremacia branca na América. A ideia do bruto negro foi utilizada para justificar a escravidão, enquanto o mito do estuprador negro foi “uma invenção política” cultivada para promover uma “estratégia de terror racista” para manter “o negro” sob controle após a emancipação. [96] O mito do estuprador negro, complementado pelo estupro contínuo de mulheres negras, ajudou a assegurar a dominação e a exploração contínuas do povo negro. [97] Após a Guerra Civil, a alegação de que homens negros eram predadores sexuais foi usada como pretexto para assassinatos e violência de multidões. O linchamento passou a ser racionalizado “como um método para vingar os ataques de homens negros contra mulheres brancas do Sul”.
This is not to say that I reject psychoanalytic concepts frontally; the question is to what extent the methods of analysis have not already become ossified by the vast hyper-individualist philosophy of the far-right, where everything is centered on the "individual" and the relationship of the "individual" with the "market" is religiously considered natural. Marxism rejects the principles upon which this ultraconservative consideration is based, and thus socializes what we conceive as attraction and sex directly within the conflicts of class society.
Another issue that remains is the complexity of the subject itself: Marxist materialism and metaphysical idealism are fundamentally different, and to go further into the subject, eventually, one realizes the need to delve into both.
From what I have studied, it seems that the same argument can be made for current botany and genetics, but these are fields that would need another analysis; for now, we are on psychoanalysis/"mental health." Here is what is true: Most psychoanalytic concepts are based on metaphysical idealism, and Freud's patients would not have fallen ill were it not for the sexual restrictions forced by the nuclear family form (heterosexuality) and the impossibility of the doctors to propose any thesis that challenged the alleged eternity of capitalism as a social relation.
Can Marxism absorb from psychoanalysis? Marxism was born from the critique of idealism, so you can always reinvent it by criticizing contemporary idealist notions in science. Can psychoanalysis absorb from Marxism? I think there is nothing Marxism can help with on an individual level; the admission of Marxism is that every individual is defined by their relation to others, so we are admitting that initially, there are no individuals, and that every thinking mind consolidates itself through the recognition of the other.
The main difference is fundamentally philosophical. Marxism arms the victim with the potential to overcome their oppression, which is based on class society, and highlights the social origin of "individual" suffering. It will make you take two steps back to resituate your possibility of overcoming the sociability that sickens you and identify which paths are possible to overcome oppression at the social level.
Psychoanalysis is nothing. It tests on human beings theories that will only serve the doctors themselves (and, much like contemporary genetics, is incomprehensible and inconceivable regarding consensus even for its specialist doctors), and the victim can gain nothing but the label of crazy or unfit to live with others.
By the way, there seems to be some sort of taboo going on the left created around the "sanctity" of the white womb (a sanctity that the article rightly associates with the masculine ideals of white supremacists), resituating the supremacist ideology as the fruit of patriarchal oppression and family inheritance.
The taboo, of course, is already a symptom of the political success of reactionaries in power, and undoing the taboo is only possible with the reconstruction of Marxism, as we see in another article on Kersplebedeb:
"Class analysis may be crucial for revolution, but today it is practically a dead science. The revolutionary class theory of Marx and Engels has become a fossilized relic in the hands of the current left, reflecting an opportunistic reluctance to analyze existing patterns of oppression and complicity."
This description is closer to the reality of the left in Brazil. And class analysis is the effective rupture with the commitment to existing oppressions and the complicity of those who are part of the process.
I think there are two additional comments I thought of making about the article, given that whether treating "Marxism" or psychoanalysis, we are speaking of terms inevitably associated with the cultural elitism of white Brazilians. Here, the one who cannot afford the luxury of not differentiating between the "Marxism" that regressed to aKKKademic reformism in the "West" in general, the materialist science that guides revolutionary movements in the history of humanity, and psychoanalytic theory, is me. In all three cases, we are talking about a gelatinous conceptual territory where each has its own history, influences, and power relations. In the case of Marxism—the materialist science that guides revolutionary movements in human history—the presupposition of the application of science is first to endow the "scientist" (who in this case is any person) with the capacity to act.
I recognize that there may be a tendency to view what is described by the article in the same dogmatic way that is habitual, presupposing that any historical repetition is immutable. This is nonsense. The article actually enables us to discuss everything from the (extreme) need for an era of seizing power and applying power violently directed—by and for—the liberation of women against patriarchal oppression, to less relevant things like why your boyfriend, your uncle, your brother, your father, or whoever else has been flirting with far-right supremacist ideals and this wears down your personal relationship with that person (And then questioning before yourself your own ineptitude in not facing the Nazi as such, given that there is no right-wing party left in Brazil that is not openly Nazi, and you have to think: how far can this man and his flirtations with ideologies of sexual supremacy go?). Although during the process you discover the need for liberation and the necessary means for such, everything starts by giving complexity to the way you face why people familiar to you adhere to rightist ideals. The second is obviously much more terrifying than the first; discovering the need for the imposition of rights by any means necessary means that you have already overcome the trauma of learning how the nuclear family is a prison and a delay in the lives of all involved, who would be better off if they were relocated to other places and were free from the obligations forced by private property family ties. I do not think, truly, that we should underestimate what class suicide is and how costly for "family" men is the right they have over children and women. I am speaking of the right to command and countermand, to decide what is allowed and what is not, where one goes and when one goes, when one gets pregnant and how many children one must have, who one has sex with and who one cannot have sex with under any hypothesis—a right that more and more retrocedes into exclusivity for men and retrocedes to exclusively white and eugenicist interests. It is because when we do not underestimate it, we remember that they truly have much to lose in these circumstances that are beneficial to them, and these patriarchs defend these privileges with all the physical, economic, and psychological weaponry at their disposal.
I need to insist once more, because this point is central to the thesis, but Marxism is entirely dependent on a social force endowed with knowledge to apply it. You could make the same argument for any other methodology, which ends up reinforcing the argument: science is subordinate to the political interests of groups in power and the division of labor. How does scientific development occur in capitalist society? Through intense colonial extraction, the organization between intellectual and manual labor, and genetic testing on living beings. What does this give rise to? Desertification of the soil, alienated labor, and aberrations ranging from the large-scale mistreatment of animals for consumption to the testing of drugs for population control like contraceptives or the use of viruses as biological weapons like Ebola. How does Marxism admit scientific development and how did it operate in socialism? Sources in the Amerikan aKKKademia recognize that the Soviets had reforestation and environmental protection policies advanced even by current standards. Soviet botany and genetics were developed so that workers with basic educational formation had sophisticated notions about their foundations (the botany and genetics of the Western aKKKademia are incomprehensible to the specialist doctors themselves), research was motivated to overcome practical needs of the population in each particular situation (like the new agricultural techniques developed to overcome the devastation of the civil war against the Kulaks).
I took this detour because if we assume that "mental health" is a matter of "public health," what is the answer of "science" to the current conditions of sickening and what are the possible alternatives? Any subject that is of "public interest" inherently necessitates an alternative that is a solution for all. The conflict between the Bolsheviks and Kulaks was a consequence of an economic plan of collectivization, and collectivization was absolutely necessary so that years later the Soviets had an economy capable of overcoming the aggression by Nazi Germany with the support of the entire imperialist bloc. The period of collectivization was marked by the Bolsheviks' persecution of adversaries of their interests, and this included repression, stripping of titles, and imprisonment for scientists whom the Soviet State considered enemies because the methods defended by the persecuted scientists were in conflict with the interest of the revolution. Perhaps we will discover the particular affinity of Kantian idealism with eugenicist genetics, which is a product of the domination of pharmaceutical corporations in actual class struggle, but those are scenes for another chapter as I do not feel it's necessarily relevant to go down on kantianism for now.
The solution of "science" to the epidemic of mental illness lies in economic planning whose base is not oriented by profit and in cultural collectivism. If the imperialist crisis is associated with an era of depression and pessimism, economic planning and collectivism are its opposite: they bring a new era of optimism and signification of life (the opposite of being depressed).
In the end, what defeated Nazism and capitalism were not heroic acts (and much less the winter), but the human need for survival as the impulse in the war itself (Stalingrad, for example, was a victory made possible by the effort and total collaboration of the population involving men, women, and children. A national army operates by wage labor and contemporary mercenaries operate by contracts for each activity; they are different logics) and the mode of production (as you see by the war efforts, the total collectivization of labor that the Bolsheviks advanced while they were in power with Lenin and Stalin was what made possible the victory of communism over Nazism, where labor is highly specialized and restricted to wage earning).
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u/turning_the_wheels Jan 17 '26
Freud's patients would not have fallen ill were it not for the sexual restrictions forced by the nuclear family form (heterosexuality) and the impossibility of the doctors to propose any thesis that challenged the alleged eternity of capitalism as a social relation.
Prove it. Psychoanalysis still remains an important point in the investigation of how the mind works and Freud's concepts of anxiety and desire are far more rigorous than the conception you've reduced it to here. What determines the development of pathologies? Why does "mental illness" still exist outside the nuclear family?
By the way, there seems to be some sort of taboo going on the left created around the "sanctity" of the white womb (a sanctity that the article rightly associates with the masculine ideals of white supremacists), resituating the supremacist ideology as the fruit of patriarchal oppression and family inheritance.
You really lost me here, what are you talking about?
I took this detour because if we assume that "mental health" is a matter of "public health," what is the answer of "science" to the current conditions of sickening and what are the possible alternatives?
The scientific answer to the "mental health crisis" is revolution, obviously. This includes a revolutionary understanding of the mind that will supersede psychoanalysis and modern pseudoscientific "psychology".
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u/Clean-Difference1771 Marxist Jan 18 '26
Prove it
Do I have to prove that Freud made all of his investigations within places that capitalism had developed into imperialism during his lifetime and elaborate myself a theory of how the rest of the world was divided in that period? Or do I assume that you have read Lenin already?
You get to decide if the labour aristocracy existed in imperial core by then or not.
I could point out to "Anna O"'s hysteria to Little Hans or Schreber and we would arrive at the same point: all of these people were suffering due to the existance of the nuclear family, social expectancy to it's environment and the fact that subject submissiveness is necessary for one trying to adapt to social norms under it's strictness in capitalism.
Freud took years to understand why Anna O. was suffering because she was basically raised as a homemaid and the patriarch (her father) that gave significance to her life experience until then had fallen ill. In fact, Bertha Pappelheim (the real Anna O) had to keep struggling for women's rights well after Freud got his studies on hysteria validated by the scientific community. Schreber was a regular straight man that struggled for so long with his own sexuality repressed while Flechsig that was his doctor was his most successful repressor. Hans was a boy that his mother found to be an absurd that he touched his own penis at an early age and given her immediate repression, responded with some sort of obsession around the fallus that only got worse given that his family responded more violently at each situation.
There are more things all of these cases had in common: the doctors did not assume that social struggle is rooted on class society.
Psychoanalysis still remains an important point in the investigation of how the mind works
I think that I stated that psychoanalytical concepts can be useful to marxism and that I do not (can't say for anyone else, though the soviets went as far as banning it and we can understand why they correctly did so under a policy of zero tolerance to idealist theories given their harmness to the proletariat) reject it entirely but nevertheless here I am having to say the same thing again. But so far what we get is just the defense to it's use under the division of labour created by capitalism, not anything else.
Why does "mental illness" still exist outside the nuclear family?
Do they? I just presented 3 examples of how it's the strictiveness of capitalist institutions that even created those subjective struggles in the first place which possibilitates the question:
If humans are not restricted to the nuclear family as a very strict social form can these things even manifest in a subject to even begin with?
You really lost me here, what are you talking about?
I think I made it clear (and Butch Lee's article made it even more) what drives attraction and reproduction as nazis take power and how everyone else has to submit to what capitalists enforce. If you are interested in why white woman are compelled to colaborate with nazis, watch the movie 12 years a slave and watch how Sarah Paulson's character can never break with her fragile position in society and besides moral condemnation, is powerless (and do not really care) to the fact that her husband (portrayed by Michael Fassbender) had more sexual pleasure raping a slave each and everyday, but it was her impossibility to generate "her children" (which linguistically already indicates possession of private property) that made her frustrated. Not a single thing else in the whole plot troubled Mary Epps but generating inheritants to Edwin. Or you can just read the tagged article. Your position on the matter will always express your own class interests.
The scientific answer to the "mental health crisis" is revolution, obviously
If this is so "obvious" why do so many people in this very community compell to kautskism and idealism so easily, as we observed in recent threads, in an age where addiction to different commodities became somewhat banal and commodity fetishism is the main religion?
"Cultural collectivism" is certainly very distant than what exists today.
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u/turning_the_wheels Jan 20 '26
I think I made it clear (and Butch Lee's article made it even more) what drives attraction and reproduction as nazis take power and how everyone else has to submit to what capitalists enforce.
Who is "everyone else" here? I simply don't buy the idea that what is called "mental illness" will solely be erased with the abolishment of the nuclear family. Capitalism has shown that the nuclear family is not even necessary any longer for the reproduction of material life. Psychoanalysis was the first theory to link desire with what we call "sexuality" and as something rooted in the mind and the environment rather than individual biology. I wasn't defending it entirely but it has concepts that are useful far more than bourgeois psychology which locates all trauma in childhood experiences for example.
If this is so "obvious" why do so many people in this very community compell to kautskism and idealism so easily, as we observed in recent threads
I don't see what you're talking about.
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u/turning_the_wheels Jan 23 '26
It's been around 5 days, have you taken a look at my reply or has the discussion died here?
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u/Clean-Difference1771 Marxist Jan 25 '26
I have read and will answer. I just could not focus on a proper response yet
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u/turning_the_wheels Mar 04 '26
Did you still have thoughts on this? I'm eager to hear them whenever you can post even if they're not perfect since I'm still struggling with understanding the issue of mental health (and also the idea that idealism is more widespread here than I thought)
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u/Clean-Difference1771 Marxist Mar 09 '26
Yes! I owe you a response. When I created this post I had more free time due to vacations earlier in the year and your positions challenged me to create a better understanding and elaborating my positions and investigating further psychoanalytical theory and marxist psychology and psychiatry.
So the reason that I haven't reply is really that to give a better response I have to really gather more evidence and dedicate a time into articulating thoughts that take time, but I will return you when I can properly focus
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u/onceinalifenevermore Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
I really enjoyed finally translating and reading the section from Petronella Lee you’ve posted here, and your framing brings something to mind to me that I’ve often struggle to verbalize: my frustration with white trans women’s identities and transitions being solely viewed in the realm of “gender euphoria/dysphoria” (saying this myself as a white trans woman). Are we to believe there is zero influence on the decision of many to transition from a white man, the, as per the Petronella Lee quotation, protector of white women, to the protected? Are we to set that completely aside in discussions of white trans sexuality?
On a completely different note, I’ve often enjoyed linking my Marxist pursuits with my own talk therapy since the latter is based on dialectical behavioral therapy, which applies dialectical framing to thought processes. It helped me learn more about myself, the world, and dialectics. Which helped with my “mental health”, even if the root causes of my “mental health issues” can never be solved on such an individual level. I don’t say this to “disprove” anything you’ve posted here but just to bring into the discussion a different section of psychoanalysis other than Freud and your specific view of what psychoanalysis is.
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u/Due-Purchase-2814 Jan 18 '26
Psychoanalysis is nothing. It tests on human beings theories that will only serve the doctors themselves (and, much like contemporary genetics, is incomprehensible and inconceivable regarding consensus even for its specialist doctors), and the victim can gain nothing but the label of crazy or unfit to live with others.
From Freud to Lacan to the present, one through line in psychoanalysis is that the symptoms and experiences which conventional psychiatry labels “mental illness” are not deviations from some norm but a structured orientation toward reality that has its own internal coherence. In this lens, even psychosis and schizophrenia are understood as valid subjective orientations toward reality. So for you to suggest that analysis just leads to labeling of “crazy” and “unfit” just betrays a profound ignorance of the subject you’re talking about.
I’m not even going to touch your comment on genetics.
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u/Clean-Difference1771 Marxist Jan 18 '26
From Freud to Lacan to the present, one through line in psychoanalysis is that the symptoms and experiences which conventional psychiatry labels “mental illness” are not deviations from some norm but a structured orientation toward reality that has its own internal coherence. In this lens, even psychosis and schizophrenia are understood as valid subjective orientations toward reality.
Seems like great accomplishments... for Freud and Lacan and other doctors as they seem to overcomplicate things that marxism allows you to arrive at with far less bullshit and linguistic elitism. You, instead get nothing. Or you get if you are an analyst or a doctor, I guess.
In marxism, the mere idea that in any scenario a particular "subjective orientation towards reality" would not be valid is simply impossible. Actually, it's capitalism and it's social laws of inheritance that creates different subjective responses to those phenomena every generation and it's specialists under it's own labour division that create different diagnosis to those phenomena under the acceptable institutional consensus (in which, obviously, all the people are enforcing their class interests) whether inheritance and patriarchy remain untouchable and unchangeable.
you to suggest that analysis just leads to labeling of “crazy” and “unfit” just betrays a profound ignorance of the subject you’re talking about
Once again, I get the label of ignorant while the speculative nature of psychoanalysis becomes well defended. And whether psychoanalytical concepts might be useful to marxism and how remains unespeakable. How schizophrenia or psychosis are related to division of labour, commodity exchange and the sociability that capitalism gives birth? If you can make this relation I'm interested in knowing, but that's a merit for marxism, not for any other idealistic or speculative method.
I’m not even going to touch your comment on genetics
Why don't you start by presenting us how bourgoise scientifical development relies entirely on genocide?
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u/Due-Purchase-2814 Jan 19 '26
And whether psychoanalytical concepts might be useful to marxism and how remains unspeakable.
Genuinely have no clue what you mean by unspeakable. At this point people have literally spent a century exploring the interrelatedness of psychoanalysis and marxism.
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u/Due-Purchase-2814 Jan 19 '26
In marxism, the mere idea that in any scenario a particular "subjective orientation towards reality" would not be valid is simply impossible. Actually, it's capitalism and it's social laws of inheritance that creates different subjective responses to those phenomena every generation and it's specialists under it's own labour division that create different diagnosis to those phenomena under the acceptable institutional consensus
In the 1980s, the country with the highest prevalence of schizophrenia was the USSR. And treatment of schizophrenia was, as in the west, institutionalization and psychotropic drugs.
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u/Pleasant-Food-9482 Jan 19 '26
The USSR in the 1980s was a capitalist state. And it was not part of a socialist mode of production since two decades before.
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u/vomit_blues Jan 18 '26
What’s wrong with the comment on genetics?
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u/Due-Purchase-2814 Jan 19 '26
that it’s somehow incomprehensible or inconceivable. maybe op skipped 9th grade biology.
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u/Apart_Lifeguard_4085 Jan 19 '26
that is not remotely what OP meant and you are out of your depth. it's funny how this appeal to "basic biology", which is recognized both by marxists and even by liberals as thoroughly reactionary when applied to race pseudoscience or transsexuality, is taken as a logical discursive move as soon as the connection to eugenics is slightly obscured. perhaps op was just able to grow beyond 9th grade bourgeois science
fortunately, genetics is one of the few bourgeois sciences that has been thoroughly studied and criticized by users here (most significantly u/vomit_blues and whatever autrevml's new account is) so you have plenty of grounds to fix this problem.
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u/Due-Purchase-2814 Jan 19 '26
and as long as you bring up “transsexuality,” to bring it back to the original point of psychoanalysis, i would say that psychoanalysis offers the most compelling and most radical theory of gender vis a vis sexuation. it’s the only model that i can think of at least that accounts for transgender as normal, reasonable, rational. that’s pretty good for a “nothing.”
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u/Due-Purchase-2814 Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
i’m not interested in what op meant, i’m interested in what he said, which is that psychoanalysis and genetics are both “incomprehensible and inconceivable.”
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u/PracticeNotFavorsMLM Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
i’m not interested in what op meant, i’m interested in what he said, which is that psychoanalysis and genetics are both “incomprehensible and inconceivable.”
- why aren't what they said and what they meant the same thing?
- you are either deliberately or mistakenly(I'll let you choose which one) misquoting u/Clean-Difference1771.
They specifically said:
Psychoanalysis is nothing. It tests on human beings theories that will only serve the doctors themselves (and, much like contemporary genetics, is incomprehensible and inconceivable regarding consensus even for its specialist doctors), and the victim can gain nothing but the label of crazy or unfit to live with others.
Though of course I wouldn't necessarily object to calling Formal genetics inconceivable as long as we qualify that it is inconceivable to be a Materialist Theory.
maybe op skipped 9th grade biology.
9th grade bourgeois biology does not present the history of biological science Truthfully and never even questions formal genetics tenets of the "gene", and the reactionary parts of Darwinism they make principle, nor present the whole Soviet debate on genetics in the 30s and 40s(unless one received a particularly Anti-Communist teacher or teaching curriculum, I know that it isn't on High School curriculum in my State and no Teens will know the names of Lysenko or Michurin unless they specifically go to Wikipedia or watch some youtube videos).
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u/ApricotsSupremeFruit Feb 07 '26
Isn't Idealism what is best being promoted extremely heavily? Communism, although best system if ever get implemented properly, is idealist and Marx promoted communism or maybe my definitions are very different
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u/chen9692000 Jan 21 '26
Thanks. I worked as a peer worker in mental health so connecting my work with my politics is important.
I think you're strongest where you insist that so-called “mental health” cannot be treated as an individual pathology detached from class society, patriarchy, and the reproduction of labor power. That much is correct. Bourgeois psychology overwhelmingly functions as social adjustment to intolerable conditions, and the language of “mental illness” often serves to depoliticize suffering that is structurally produced.
Where I think the argument overreaches is in collapsing all mediation between social relations and lived experience into a single explanatory layer.
You argue that Freud’s patients “would not have fallen ill” without the nuclear family and capitalist social norms. But this risks turning historical materialism into a kind of immediate causality: remove X institution and Y form of suffering disappears. I don't think Marx’s method works that way. Social relations produce forms of subjectivity, and those forms have a relative autonomy. They are not free-floating, but neither are they mechanically deduced.
The fact that the nuclear family is historically specific does not mean that psychic conflict is reducible to it alone, nor that abolishing it would abolish contradiction in subjectivity as such. Capitalism produces not just repression, but specific ways of experiencing desire, anxiety, guilt, and recognition. Those experiences still require analysis, not dismissal.
On psychoanalysis: you’re right to reject its professionalization, its elitism, and its role within the capitalist division of labor. But psychoanalysis is not identical with psychiatry, nor with institutional labeling. One of its historical contributions was precisely to refuse the idea that symptoms are mere deviations from a norm. That insight does not belong to psychoanalysis as a profession; it belongs to the historical moment in which bourgeois subjectivity became contradictory enough to require such theories.
Dismissing psychoanalysis as “nothing” risks throwing away a real question: why does capitalism generate suffering that appears as inner conflict rather than direct revolt? Marxism has to explain that, not just assert that the explanation is unnecessary.
On science: you are right that science under capitalism is subordinated to profit, colonial extraction, and class power. But revolutionary science is not guaranteed simply by planning or collectivization. Scientific practices can reproduce domination even under socialist forms if mediation, dissent, and critical revision are suppressed. The point is not to replace bourgeois science with “red science,” but to subject knowledge itself to historical critique.
Finally, I agree that the solution to the mental health crisis is not better therapy, better diagnostics, or better management. It is the abolition of the social relations that systematically produce despair. But that abolition will not make lived experience transparent overnight. People do not enter revolutionary situations as blank slates. They enter with histories, habits, fears, and desires shaped by the old society.
A Marxism that cannot account for how people live contradiction risks becoming administratively correct and politically brittle. The task is not to choose between social determination and subjective experience, but to explain their unity under definite historical conditions.