Psychoanalysis and political economy

Abstract

The authors examine the influence that psychoanalysts’ economic situation has on the current state of psychoanalysis, particularly focusing on the situation in Germany and employing a perspective afforded by Marxian commodity analysis. Their analysis brings them to conclude that, in psychoanalysis, the suspension of truth value, the tolerance shown towards contradictory concepts, the lack of conceptual criticism, and the exclusion of sociocritical issues seem to be effects of psychoanalysts’ interest in realizing the exchange value of their psychoanalytic treatment and their accompanying lesser interest towards its use value.

Key words:

• psychoanalytic praxis
• commodity analysis
• use value
• exchange value

Notes

1 Further evidence for our line of thought can be found in Conci, Erhardt, & Kächele (2013).

2 Of course, this dialectical interplay between treatment theory and treatment implies not only a common understanding and usage of the treatment concepts, but also criteria that permit a unanimous decision on whether the phenomena conceptualized in treatment theory are actually occurring in treatments.

3 Perhaps psychoanalysts would have been better advised to recall the anecdote about Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany, reported by Chargaff (1986, p. 121): “When he still was only king of Prussia, he once visited the Bonn Observatory and asked the director a jovial question: ‘Well, dear Argelander, what’s new on the starry sky?’ The answer came promptly, and it was another question. ‘Does your majesty already know the old?’” With his answer, the astronomer Argelander points the king to the relationship between the old and the new, in which both are: the new can only be discerned as different from the old.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Siegfried Zepf

AuthorsSiegfried Zepf, MD, Univ.–Prof. em (1937–2021), is a former director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy and Psycho­so­matic Me­dicine of the University of Saarland, and a training analyst (Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychoanalyse, Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik und Tiefenpsychologie).

Dietmar Seel

Dietmar Seel, Dipl. – Psych, is a psychoanalyst (Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft) in Saarbruecken.