The Crisis in Psychology

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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

•

the convict to his wheelbarrow, the character in psychoanalysis is chained to child-

hood erotics. Human life is in its inner essence predetermined by childhood con-

•

flicts. It is all the overcoming of the Oedipal conflict, etc. Culture and the life of

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 psycho-

analysis 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 “psycho-

analysis 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 Marx-

ism. 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 elabo-

ration 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 con-

firmations (traumatic neurosis and the repetition of unpleasant experiences in chil-

dren’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 mathe-

matics 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