Bio-Política & Bio-Poder

'In this intriguing book, the discipline of psychology itself is screened through the twin dynamics of Marxism and psychoanalysis. David Pavón-Cuéllar asks to what extent the terms, concerns and goals of psychology reflect, in fact, the dominant bourgeois ideology that has allowed it to flourish.

The book charts a gradual psychologization within society and culture dating from the nineteenth century, and examines how the tacit ideals within mainstream psychology – creating good citizens or productive workers – sit uneasily against Marx and Freud’s ambitions of revealing fault-lines and contradictions within individualist and consumer-oriented structures.' To find out more about the book, please click here: https://www.karnacbooks.com/product/marxism-and-psychoanalysis-in-or-against-psychology/39982/

It was Marx who was the great analyst of alienation I think, showing how capitalist economics generate alienation as part of its very fabric or structure - showing how, for instance, alienation gets ‘lost’ or ‘trapped’, embodied, in products, commodities - from the obvious examples (such as Nikes made in sweatshops, and sweatshops embodied in Nikes) - to a wider and much more pervasive sense that the whole system of production and creation is somehow alienating.

As clinical psychologist David Smail notes, 'the nineteenth-century theoretician who best understood the relation of people to their world, and what this meant … for their conscious as well as unconscious understanding of themselves, was Karl Marx.'

David Pavon Cuellar explores and develops this sense of alienation within capitalism in very interesting ways in his book, 'Marxism and Psychoanalysis' - especially the section on the 'Psychology of Alienation', where he observes that: 'Marx was the first to realise that this alienation actually gets contained and incarnated in things - in "commodities"':

'Marx paid great attention to the process by which we get lost in commodities,' he notes, 'This process of alienation makes it possible to better understand the psychological substrate of fetishism in later Marxian reflections. Fetishized commodities seem to retain and promise to return, when consumed, the subjective-social part lost by those alienated while producing them. The alienated have lost what they imagine [or hope] to find in what is fetishized.'

In this sense, as he observes, 'Marx founded a socio-psychological theory of alienation,' one rooted in the idea that 'the “social” is not external but very much internal too and penetrates the innermost being of the individual personality' - an interactive process, therefore, that of course group analyst S.H. Foulkes was much later to highlight and develop.