Historical Materialism 17 (2009) 183208

brill.nl/hima

Review Articles
Revolution in Psychology: Alienation to Emancipation, Ian Parker, London: Pluto Press,
2007
The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, and Politics, Yannis Stavrakakis, New York: State
University of New York Press, 2007
Abstract
This review essay analyses the proposed synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism,
which often presents itself as a critique of the kind of utopianism associated with FreudoMarxism. In Yannis Stavrakakiss The Lacanian Left (2007) this anti-utopianism slides towards a
left reformism, in which the emphasis on constitutive lack prevents any thinking of transformation.
Ian Parkers Revolution in Psychology (2007) presents a bracing but reductive polemic, in which
psychology and psychoanalysis seem to function as mere reections of capitalist ideology. What
goes missing in both accounts is the possibility of a re-thinking of subjectivity, both individual
and collective, posed between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism.
Keywords
psychoanalysis; Marxism; Lacan; ideology; subjectivity

Writing the preface to Deleuze and Guattaris Anti-Oedipus, itself perhaps the last instance
of high Freudo-Marxism, Michel Foucault argued that the dream of the 1930s placing
Marx and Freud in the same incandescent light had returned and set re to reality
itself .1 The dream of the possibility of the abolition of repression,2 to use Norman O.
Browns formulation in Life Against Death, was to nd reality rather more impervious than
Foucault supposed. His poetic formulation, however, perfectly captures the ecstatic and
quasi-mystical, if not millennial, tone of much of Freudo-Marxism. What is obvious, if
strange, is that this tone runs against the sobriety and scepticism regarding utopianism
to be found in both Marx and Freud. Therefore, it is appropriate that the thinker who had
done most to argue for a delity to the original Freudian discovery Jacques Lacan should
be the one to douse the re of this utopian dream. During his infamous impromptu at the
red University of Vincennes on 3 December 1969, in the face of the usual student provocations
of the period, Lacan would reply with asperity that What you, as revolutionaries, aspire to
is a Master. You will have one.3 Willingly adopting the title of someone who is anti-progressive,

1. Foucault 1983, p. xii.

2. Brown 1959, p. xii.
3. Lacan 1987, p. 126.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2009

DOI: 10.1163/156920609X399263

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Lacan pinioned the nascent discourse of sexual liberation: The regime puts you on display;
it says Watch them fuck . . ..4
In his 195960 seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, delivered four years after the
publication of Marcuses Eros and Civilisation, Lacan had argued that the point of alliance
between Marx and Freud was their shared critique of progressivism. So, when Lacan
later characterised himself as anti-progressive, this signalled his fundamental agreement
with the cynicism of Marx and Freud towards the ameliorative work of the good-hearted,
or towards what Lacan called bourgeois prejudice.5 While the students of 68 put their
faith in the slogan enjoy without shackles, Lacan was already suggesting that such
enjoyment [ jouissance] was all too congruent with the rgimes it was supposed to be
disrupting. Lacan remained far more faithful to Freuds often-noted pessimism and
scepticism, most problematically put for the Marxist reader in Freuds mordant witticism
reported by Ernest Jones.
[H]e [Freud] had recently had an interview with an ardent communist and had
been half converted to Bolshevism he had been informed that the advent of
Bolshevism would result in some years of misery and chaos, and that these would
be followed by universal peace, prosperity, and happiness. Freud said: I told him
I believed the rst half .6
Not surprisingly this haut anti-utopian strain in Freud and Lacan gives rise to doubts as to
the ecacy of any conjunction of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism. While FreudoMarxism may have bent the stick too far towards utopianism, the alternative of LacanoMarxism appears to be a stark realism that seems to rule out any revolutionary or political
change whatsoever, except as a change for the worse.
It is on such seemingly unpromising ground that Yannis Stavrakakiss The Lacanian Left
is based. Consisting of a collection of previously published essays that have been expanded
and revised, the book is divided into two parts: the rst dealing with the major gures
of the contemporary revival of Lacanianism from the Left, in particular Ernesto Laclau,
Slavoj iek, and Alain Badiou; the second composed of a series of analyses deploying the
Lacanian category of jouissance to grasp the ideological functions of contemporary culture.
Stavrakakis willingly embraces Lacans anti-utopian radicalism as crucial in sustaining the
truly subversive edge (p. 2) of psychoanalysis for political theory. This is not, however,
simply a delity to Lacan, but shaped by Stavrakakiss own intellectual formation as a onetime postgraduate student in Ernesto Laclaus Ideology and Discourse Analysis Programme
at the University of Essex. More than one wag has remarked of his previous book Lacan and
the Political that it might better have been titled Laclau and the Political. Therefore, to use
a Freudian term introduced into Marxism by Althusser, we might say that Stavrakakiss
putative Lacanian anti-utopian rejection of fantasies of fullness is overdetermined by a
Laclauian insistence on the necessity to keep open the constitutive gap that ssures any
and every social formation. The result is a highly unstable amalgam in which the anti-

4. Lacan 1987, p. 127.

5. Lacan 1992, p. 208.
6. Quoted in Jones 1964, p. 489.

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progressivism identied by Lacan slides inexorably towards revisionist liberalism cloaked in

the rhetoric of the Left.7
This is all the more disappointing in that Stavrakakis appears initially to be on the right
path in his highlighting of the fact that contemporary left theory pivots around the problem
of negativity. If negativity is essential to provide a point of resistance and disruption to the
extensive and intensive unfolding of capitalism then the issue becomes how this negativity
can be alchemically transmuted into a new positivity to be blunt, into a new functioning
communism. In the dispersion or absence of identiable agents to produce this passage
the disorientation of theory is unsurprising. The solution of Stavrakakis to this problem
partakes of what we might call the Goldilocks and the Three Bears eect: his readings
attempt to balance negativity and positivity so they are just right. Therefore, his rst
gure, Castoriadis, is too positive in his romantic emphasis on creativity; he then moves to
Ernesto Laclau, who is too negative in his lack of a thinking of aect. Then we come to
iek, again too positive in his belief in the miracle of the act that would change everything,
while, nally, Badiou is nearly there in his recognition of the dialectic of the negative and
positive, but not quite.
The problem is that Stavrakakiss own conception of negativity and positivity remains
simplistic. One the hand, negativity is assimilated to the eect of the constitutive gap or
lack, in which Lacans concept of the Real as what resists symbolisation is misread as the
inadequacy of symbolisation to cover empirical reality. On the other hand, positivity is an
excess when conceived of under the sign of Lacanian jouissance that excessive aect in
which pleasure is indistinguishable from pain as the glue that never completely binds the
gap of negativity.8 Stavrakakiss version of this dialectic is simply to balance these two
eects, and we can only agree with the footnote to this introduction where he remarks that
his recourse to the language of dialectics to describe this seesawing balancing act hardly
matches the technical use of dialectics in either Hegel or Freud (p. 33, fn. 26). Instead, to
quote ieks stinging rebuke to Stavrakakiss book, we have here an ersatz political analysis
in which the Lacanian discourse of jouissance is itself simply tacked on to an existing
Laclauian framework to produce Freudo-radical democracy.9 Once again, psychoanalysis
nds itself reduced to the supplementary role of making good an existent theoretical
framework and the hope for the Lacanian Left as a new theoretico-political horizon (p. 3)
recedes.
The result is not so much the Lacanian Left as a psychoanalytic reformism. The emphasis
on constitutive lack as such, the model of the Lacanian Real as an ever-receding outside,
and the assimilation of this to an impoverished version of Laclaus radical democracy cuts
o the possible transformative links between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism. The
closing injunction of the work, that we settle down and be able to really enjoy our partial
enjoyment, without subordinating it to the cataclysmic desire of fantasy (p. 282), not only
misses Lacans point that all enjoyment is, precisely, partial,10 but also leaves us in a position

7. This point has already been made by Philip Derbyshire (2008), in his excellent review.
8. As iek notes, this is exactly the reverse of Lacans own conception and also hardly
corresponds even to Laclaus model. See iek 2008, p. 319.
9. iek 2008, p. 331.
10. See Chiesa 2007 for an account.

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that is hardly recognisably left at all. We are not far from the Voltarian cultivation of our
garden, but very distant from the moment when Freudo-Marxism seemed capable of setting
re to reality itself.
The rejoinder is obvious, however. Those utopian hopes were dashed, and why should we
put our faith in a millennial and ecstatic Freudo-Marxism if it proved disastrously unable
to come to terms with the capitalist capture of jouissance? To repeat the nostrums of sexual
liberation as the road to revolution ignores the fact that, at least in certain countries and
in certain forms, capitalism is no longer driven by a Weberian ethic of asceticism but a new
ethic of licensed excess. Rather than holding up Stavrakakis as the disheartened realist in
comparison to a previous utopian revolutionary moment, we might be better o reading
his book as a more honest recognition of the political impasses of the present. While
certainly not endorsing his solution, or retracting my previous criticisms, I would argue
that his book speaks to the moment of an apparent lack of political agency for the Left.
Also, to put the question of negativity back on the table, especially in the light of the
sometime desperate and unconvincing turn to armation in contemporary theory (I am
thinking here of Badiou, Negri, and iek), locates an essential problem around this agency.
What remains to be decided is the role, if any, of Lacanian psychoanalysis in guiding any
future left politics; The Lacanian Left, against its intentions, suggests scepticism on that
score.
That scepticism is only compounded by a reading of Ian Parkers Revolution in Psychology.
The book is structured as a critical manual for prospective students of psychology, especially
those approaching the discipline from the Left. To provide a spoiler, the conclusion such a
reader is encouraged to draw is that psychology has nothing to oer left, feminist, and antiracist politics. Despite borrowing from Trotsky the concept of transitional demands that
need to be directed at psychology and psychologists, these are merely transitional to the
liquidation of psychology: [t]he best, most progressive psychologists are those who do
something else with their time than practice, teach and research psychology (p. 185). To
borrow John Boyds conclusion on Labours 1983 election manifesto, we could say this is
the longest suicide note in history.
Of course the reviewer can only heed Perry Andersons warning that we have to recognise
the exact nature of polemic as a literary form:
Polemic is a discourse of conict, whose eect depends on a delicate balance between
the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the
zest to iname. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain gurative licence. Like
epitaphs in Johnsons adage, it is not under oath.11
The diculty is the degree to which Parker exploits this gurative licence in his prosecution
of psychology. Certainly there is material enough to criticise, and Parker does not waste his
ire when dealing with such instances as the American Psychological Association allowing
and supporting its members participation in interrogations at the Guantnamo Bay camp.
What is more troubling, and buried within the polemical style, are questions concerning
the exact ideological status of psychology and its privilege as a target of attack.

11. Anderson 2005, pp. 1789.

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In fact, if we try to track its various senses through the text, Parker seems to deploy the
concept of ideology in a remarkably loose fashion. At dierent points, psychology is
dened as a component of ideology, as an ideological system in itself, as the crystallisation
of capitalist ideology, and as a necessary and essential ideological element of capitalism. The
result, at times, veers dangerously close to a conspiratorial and instrumental conception of
ideology, which runs against the more interesting (if sketchy) sections of the book that try
to account for the historical genesis of psychology as ideology. At other points, we nd a
seeming endorsement of a vulgarised quasi-Althusserian opposition between science and
ideology, such as in the statement that [p]sychology is indeed a fake science that abuses the
public (p. 7). This is exacerbated by the tendency to oppose psychology to the other human
sciences, such as anthropology, on the grounds that psychology is less reective about its
own ideological function and that its methodological individualism and scientism leaves it
completely unable to grasp social relations.
While there is a case to single out psychology for its ideological function, especially in its
spread into popular discourses in contemporary capitalism, we might well wonder whether
it is the major or worst oender in this respect. It is easily possible to multiply alternative
bogey discourses: economics, management science, business studies, and so on. Even if we
were to accept Parkers point, we could note that, lurking between the lines of many of his
own examples of psychologisation, is the use of biology to underpin psychology. Biology
would not respond so well to being characterised as fake science, but nonetheless has selfevidently ideological eects which are not the sole province of hard-line neo-Darwinism.
Granted that Parkers target is psychology, and that this book is aimed at the lay reader or
prospective student entering psychology, the reductive presentation does not serve the aim
of grasping psychology as ideology. It puts aside the lengthy and hardly resolved debates
within the Marxist tradition concerning ideology and, linked to this, the supposed status
of Marxism itself as a discourse. Considering that one of the ideological eects of
contemporary capitalism is to produce intellectual de-skilling, I wonder if this plumpes
Denken approach is really the most subversive. To use an old but worthwhile formulation,
a more dialectical approach would, to my mind, be better and more instructive.
These issues return in Parkers considerations of alternative forms of psychology that
might resist its ideological functioning (however that is conceived). What is gratifying is
that Parker refuses to endorse a simple-minded opposition between bad scientistic
psychology and good humanistic and spiritual psychology. Wishing a plague on both
their houses, Parker carries out a slash-and-burn operation on the various internal
oppositions to psychology, noting how the supposedly spiritual or holistic alternatives
themselves function ideologically as a form of licensed irrationalism. A kind of symmetry
emerges here between scientism and spiritualism, which may be one of the key ideological
features of the contemporary conjuncture. What is surprising to the reader who, like me,
has encountered Parker previously through his reections on psychoanalysis (he is a
practising analyst), especially his book Slavoj iek: A Critical Introduction (2004), is his
very low opinion of psychoanalysis as an alternative. For Parker, left psychoanalysis circles
around the opposition that I sketched above: between a Reichian romanticising [of ] the
unconscious (p. 177) and a Lacanian emphasis on lack which leads to a resigned acceptance
of the failure of political commitment.
Parkers criticisms are well made, and his analogy between the romantic unconscious of
Freudo-Marxism and the supposed liberatory powers of Hardt and Negris multitude is

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highly suggestive. What remains more debatable is the tendency to reduce psychoanalysis
and psychology to reections of capitalist ideology. To compound the sense of surprise and
disappointment in a recent laudatory but also critical review of Stavrakakiss The Lacanian
Left, Parker has noted the tension confronted by those trying to build bridges from Lacan
to the Left and those on the Left critical of the anti-utopianism of psychoanalysis nding
himself torn between one side of the bridge and the other.12 In Revolution in Psychology, this
tension, which I would agree with Parker is both necessary and productive, is abandoned
or dissolved. In one striking passage, Parker argues that psychoanalysis came into existence
to address the alienations of capitalism, and so, it seems to be implied, will disappear with
the abolition of capitalism. Pending conrmation of that eventuality could we not at a
minimum take the point made by Trotsky and re-iterated by Isaac Deutscher: if the three
great tragedies facing human existence are hunger, sex, and death, then Marxism presumes
to deal primarily with the rst and psychoanalysis may have a role still in dealing with the
second (and perhaps even the third).13
Parkers polemical verve threatens to dissolve the whole question, and leaves us with a
curiously undialectical and unhistorical image of psychoanalysis as simply the twin of
capitalism. The danger of a new Zdhanovism lurks here. This is all the more disappointing
in that Lacan oered the most thoroughgoing reection on the ideological recuperation of
Freuds discovery from within psychoanalysis. Lacans condemnation of American ego
psychology as a buttress for the American way of life and of ethics as mere servicing of the
good(s) running together the ethical good with market goods and his historicisation
of Freudian concepts, including the Oedipus complex, all suggest powerful points of
intersection with Marxism. In particular the last point, although only sketched in Lacans
later work, suggests a possible bridge over the key problem for Marxists with Freud; in
Deutschers words, his tendency to deal only with bourgeois man . . . present[ed] as man at
large.14 We could also note Deutschers honesty, in that, while he criticises the ahistoricism
of psychoanalysis, he also notes that Freud (and, I would add, Lacan) have lessons for
Marxism concerning the reality and possible persistence of destructiveness and aggression
that may not simply end with the advent of socialist man.
If we take these two books as evidence, then we could well conclude that to build bridges
from Lacanian psychoanalysis to Marxism leads to reformism, while moving from Marxism
to Lacanian psychoanalysis leads to the liquidation of psychoanalysis as an obstacle to
the revolution. A sense of dj vu may come over readers familiar with the debates of the
1970s concerning Lacano-Althusserianism. Althussers attempted integration of Lacanian
psychoanalysis to make good what he saw as the decit in Marxs concept of ideology was
widely taken to result in a functionalism that left the subject as consonant with subjection
and the question of agency moot. In the fallout from that moment it appeared that two
paths were possible: further into Lacanian psychoanalysis at the expense of Marxism or vice
versa. The irony is that the more recent conjunction of Lacan and Marx, particularly in the
work of Slavoj iek (and, in a dierent fashion, Alain Badiou), is the direct result of taking
the detour into Lacans concept of the subject as divided and ssured, using it as the wedge

12. Parker 2007, p. 117.

13. Deutscher 1972, p. 238.
14. Deutscher 1972, p. 234.

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to disrupt the ideological capture of the subject thereby playing o one sense of the word
subject against the other.15
It is the core absence of any adequate consideration of this reformulation of the concept
of the subject that vitiates The Lacanian Left and Revolution in Psychology. In the case of
Stavrakakiss book, the subsumption of Marxism to one particular construal of Lacanian
psychoanalysis leaves the subject as the placeholder for keeping open lack in the absence
of the Lacanian insistence on the potential for the transformative relation of the subject to
this lack (we could also add, in the absence of the same sense of such a transformative
relation in Marxist accounts of negativity). Parkers work takes matters from the opposite
direction, and leaves psychology and psychoanalysis not so much subsumed as replaced by
Marxism. Here, Marxisms own diculties over the subject, and in particular the subject of
ideology, are glossed over. What emerges is a tension between shorter-term recommendations
for forming networks of activists in mental health and a rather hopeful and quasi-voluntarist
sense of potential future revolutionary agency; as usual with such transitional programmes,
much depends on how we should pass from the rst to the second. Here, Parker runs
the risk of neglecting the powerful arguments of Lacanian psychoanalysis in relation to the
reformulation of ideology and concerning certain eects of alienation that are irreducible
to capitalism and which suggest a friction of the subject against ideological subjection.
To conclude we could say that both these books oer salutary warnings against the
collapsing together of Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. What they lack is a truly
productive sense of the tension between these two paradigms as the site of a thinking of
agency. Contrary to the appearance of crisis in Lacano-Marxism, we could argue, pace the
old Chinese proverb, that crisis is an indication that the situation is excellent.
Reviewed by Benjamin Noys
University of Chichester
b.noys@chi.ac.uk

References
Anderson, Perry 2005, Spectrum: From Right to Left in the History of Ideas, London: Verso.
Brown, Norman O. 1970 [1959], Life Against Death, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.
Chiesa, Lorenzo 2007, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, Cambridge,
MA.: MIT Press.
Derbyshire, Phillip 2008, Enjoyment in the Required Fashion, Radical Philosophy, 148: 413.
Deutscher, Isaac 1972, On Socialist Man, in Marxism in our Time, edited by Tamara Deutscher,
London: Jonathan Cape.
Foucault, Michel 1983, Preface, in Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Jones, Ernest 1964, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, edited and abridged by Lionel Trilling
and Steven Marcus, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Lacan, Jacques 1987, Impromptu at Vincennes, trans. Jerey Mehlman, October, 40: 11627.

15. iek 1989; see also Chiesa 2007 for an internal reconstruction of Lacans concept of the
subject.

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1992, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 19591960, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Denis
Porter, London: Routledge.
Marcuse, Herbert 1969 [1955], Eros and Civilization, London: Allen Lane.
Parker, Ian 2004, Slavoj iek: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto Press.
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Imagination, 2, 2: 11721.
iek, Slavoj 1989, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso.
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