Critical Theory and Radical Psychoanalysis: Rethinking the Marcuse-Fromm Debate

Abstract

I explore the ways that the debate between Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm relates to the possibility of informing both a critical psychoanalysis as well as how psychoanalysis can fit into critical social theory. I argue that Fromm’s emphasis on the social nature of the mind and the self is a more attractive template that Marcuse’s more anachronistic reading of Freud and his metapsychology. Fromm grants centrality to the issue of praxis as central to the nature of critique, both in terms of one’s relation to oneself in psychoanalytic terms as well as to the dynamics and structures of the social world of which we are a part.