to one plane, to a “single solid uniform surface,” comprise the main mistakes of the second way of fusing two systems. To reduce personality to money; cleanliness, stubbornness and a thousand other, heterogeneous things to anal eroties (Luria, 1925), is not yet monism. And with regard to its nature and degree of reliability it is a fundamental error to mix up this thesis with the principles of materialism. The principle that follows from this thesis, the general idea behind it, its methodological meaning, the method of investigation prescribed by it, are deeply conservative: like

mankind are again brought close to primitive life. [But] it is a first indispensable condition for analysis to be able to distinguish the first apparent meaning of a fact from its real meaning. By no means do I want to say that everything in psychoanalysis contradicts Marxism. I only want to say that I am in principle not dealing with this question at all. I am only pointing out how we should (methodologically) and should not (uncritically) fuse two systems of ideas.

With an uncritical approach, everybody sees what he wants to see and not what is: the Marxist finds monism, materialism, and dialectics in psychoanalysis, which is not there; the physiologist, like Lenz (1922, p. 69), holds that “psychoanalysis is a system which is psychological in name only; in reality it is objective, physiological.” And the methodologist Binswanger remarks in his work dedicated to Freud, as the only one amongst the psychoanalysts it seems, that precisely the psychological in his conception, i.e., the anti-physiological, constitutes Freud’s merit in psychiatry. But he adds [1922, p. v] that “this knowledge does not know itself yet, i.e., it has no insight into its own conceptual foundations, its logos.”

That is why it is especially difficult to study knowledge that has not yet become aware of itself and its own logos. This does by no means imply, of course, that Marxists should not study the unconscious because Freud’s basic concepts contradict dialectical materialism. On the contrary, precisely because the area elaborated by psychoanalysis is elaborated with inadequate means it must be conquered for Marxism. It must be elaborated with the means of a genuine methodology, for otherwise, if everything in psychoanalysis would coincide with Marxism, psychologists might develop it in their quality as psychoanalysts and not as Marxists. And for this elaboration one must first take account of the methodological nature of each idea, each thesis. And under this condition the most metapsychological ideas can be interesting and instructive, for example, Freud’s doctrine of the death drive.

In the preface which I wrote for the translation of Freud’s book on this theme, I attempted to show that the fictitious construct of a death drive—despite the whole speculative nature of this thesis, the not very convincing nature of the factual confirmations (traumatic neurosis and the repetition of unpleasant experiences in children’s play), its giddy paradoxical nature and the contradiction of generally accepted biological ideas, its conclusions which obviously coincide with the philosophy of the Nirvana, despite all this and despite the whole artificial nature of the concept— satisfies the need of modern biology to master the idea of death, just like mathematics in its time needed the concept of the negative number. I adduced the thesis that the concept of life has been carried to great clarity in biology, science has mastered it, it knows how to work with it, bow to investigate and understand living matter. But it cannot yet cope with the concept of death. Instead of this concept we have a gaping hole, an empty spot. Death is merely seen as the contradictory opposite of life, as not-life, in short, as non-being. But death is a fact that has its positive sense as well, it is a special type of being and not merely non-being. It is a specific something and not absolutely nothing. [26] And biology does not know