Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or Against Psychology?

The intellectual traditions initiated by Freud and Marx have enabled a range of scholars to critically reflect upon the ideological foundations upon which modern and now postmodern western societies rest. In this intriguing book, the discipline of Psychology itself is screened through the twin dynamics of Marxism and psychoanalysis. David Pavon-Cuellar asks to what extent the terms, concerns and ambitions 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 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 social structures. The aspiration of Psychology as positivist nature science has been the source of extensive debate, critical voices asserting the social and cultural contexts through which the human mind and behavior should be understood.

This challenging new book provides another voice that, in addressing two of the most influential intellectual traditions of the past 150 years, widens the debate still further to examine the foundations of Psychology itself.