I’m generally convinced of the fundamental incompatibility of Marxism with psychoanalysis. Thankfully the concept of overdetermination exists, which makes it possible to be a Marxist who is also into psychoanalysis (and it’s neat that it’s also a concept that was imported into the former from the latter). But I was recently thinking about some of the things they do have in common.

Firstly, I was thinking about something I half-remembered Althusser saying, which is that both Marxism and psychoanalysis are schism prone. So many sects and micro factions and furiously opposed sub-divisions that are hard to make sense of from the outside. Is that just an example of the narcissism of small differences or is it about something else?

The other thing I was thinking about isn’t really related to this. In my work I often get tangled up trying to articulate the relationship between the psychic and the social and sometimes these attempts seem to render both a bit too transparent and knowable. Capitalism shouldn’t be mistaken for the material environment; it is a social relation and something Marx makes clear is that there is something about it that is also fundamentally impersonal. Meanwhile, the unconscious isn’t just an easy to open box containing memories of easy to grasp stuff, nor is it like a lump of clay shaped by its interactions with the social world. It’s all way weirder and more entangled than that.

I was thinking, for instance, that this famous bit from the opening of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) by Marx could be read as a remark about the unconscious:

[People] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. 

Meanwhile, this little snippet from Freud’s ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923) could be talking about the experience of living under capitalism and almost sounds like bits of The German Ideology:

Rather than living our lives, we are ''lived'' by unknown and uncontrollable forces.

This all sounds pretty politically gloomy but I suppose the emphasis should shift from the nightmarish weight of the past to the actions of people - people who still make history in spite of their given circumstances, people who can still unravel and eventually change the forces that ‘live’ them (even if never completely).