The role and the meaning of work in Freud's cultural writings

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to consider the role and the meaning attributed to the concept of “work” by an analysis of Freud's cultural writings. It concludes that there are important deficiencies in Freudian theorization about this topic which have led to the naturalization of man and society and, as a result, to an ahistorical view of social processes. These deficiencies have been frequently pointed out in the criticism made of Freud's work.

Keywords:

• work
• psychoanalysis
• culture

Notes

¹In a supplementary note, the translator states that “Freud's initial depreciation of the aetiological importance of such factors as ‘excessive work’ in neuroses, is to be found in Draft A of Fleiss's documents, perhaps dated 1892” (Freud, 1937, footnote on p. 258).

²Séve (1990) shows surprise at the fact that Freud is unable to think of any objection to the idea of innate aggressiveness, other than this type of “teleological optimism” (p. 222).

³Therefore, the type of egoistic, aggressive man who is hostile to culture, identified by Freud in his day, can only be understood as a historical product, since the conditions created for his appearance reached their highest level of development under Capitalism. In other words, instead of being taken as a “naturally invariant phenomenon, this individual mode of existence should be seen as a historical variable. One is not an individual in the same way in a primitive community, in a society divided into orders or into classes or in one without classes … . The fundamental opposition between ‘individual’ and ‘society’ … is nothing more than the reflection … of a separation between men and their conditions of existence, a separation that developed with mercantile production and culminated in Capitalist alienation, where we find the ideology of the abstract individual” (Séve, L. 1989, p. 149).