León Rozitchner’s Mass Psychology

Abstract

Argentinean philosopher León Rozitchner theorized the political potential of the Peronist movement through a unique analytical matrix drawing upon Marxism, psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This essay will explore how Rozitchner’s interpretation of Freud’s theory of group psychology in Freud y los límites del individualismo burgués (Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism, 1972) approaches the figure of the mass in ethical, political and historical terms. I argue that Rozitchner articulates these three dimensions of the mass by viewing its libidinal constitution through a unique historical-materialist lens. Freud y los límites… thus asks us to consider the question of the drive’s sublimation at stake in Freud’s theory as a technique of social reproduction and, simultaneously, as a directly productive form of labour. In this sense, the organization of libidinal investment that constitutes the mass also holds the key to its potential social emancipation. Furthermore, while Rozitchner’s view of subjectivity often appears as transhistorical in scope, his approach to the productive activity of the drive in Freud y los límites… asks us to consider the ethical stakes of sublimation in relation to a specific historical moment of capitalist exploitation. Read through this tension, Freud y los límites… thus ultimately underlines the historical conditions of the ethical transformation it demands.

Keywords:

• León Rozitchner
• Freud
• Group Psychology
• Peronism
• Marxism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Freud y los límites del individualismo burgués was published in two different editions: in 1972 and, in a second, expanded and corrected edition in 1979, both by Siglo XXI Editores. The edition consulted here was published by Ediciones Biblioteca Nacional in 2013, which was a reprint of the second (1979) edition. Rozitchner also explored the relationship between the Oedipal dynamics of identification and the historical form of the horde in a series of lectures given at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Xochimilco in 1981, published as Freud y el problema del poder (Mexico, D.F.: Folio Ediciones, 1982).

2. The Spanish translation of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego as ‘La psicología de las masas y el análisis del yo’ remains closer to the original ‘Massenpsycologie und Ich-Analyse’ than its English counterpart, which substitutes the historical and social connotations of the ‘mass’ with the more abstract ‘group.’ One of Rozitchner’s assumptions in Freud y los límites… is that the historical emergence of the mass as an actor beginning in the French Revolution served as both the context and condition of Freud’s theory, just as the Peronist mass presumably does for his own.

3. The plural ‘masses,’ rather than ‘mass,’ would be a more faithful translation of Freud’s title, as one finds in the Spanish ‘La psicología de las masas y el análisis del yo’ that Rozitchner would have consulted, as well as a more historically accurate portrayal of the social subject Freud had in mind. Despite the accuracy and idiomaticity of ‘masses,’ I have used ‘mass’ throughout because this is the singular term, ‘masa,’ that Rozitchner employs throughout Freud y los límites….

4. Rozitchner’s intellectual biography has been published only fragmentarily in interviews as well as in the small but growing corpus of academic articles and book chapters devoted to his work. Among these the reader might consult ‘De te fabula narratur,’ interview by Horacio González, Eduardo Rinesi and J.H. Kang in Rozitchner 2003, 203–44; Bosteels 2012, 132–6; and Plotkin 2001, 180–4.

5. Cooke 2011, 221.

6. Scolnik 2005, 245.

7. Cabezas 2013, 166. Oscar Cabezas argues, for example, that in Rozitchner’s thought, the forgetting of the mother, that is, of the sensual immanence of being, acts as the condition for the spectral, post-sovereign articulation of advanced capitalism.

8. Rozitchner 2013, 173, 216.

9. Tronti 2001, 155, 178.

10. Aricó 1965, 55. In the same year that Rozitchner presented his call for the ethical transformation of the Peronist base in ‘La izquierda sin sujeto,’ Argentinean social theorist José Aricó prefaced a dossier in the leftist political journal Pasado y Presente on the ‘worker’s condition.’ In it he alludes to the potential necessity of introducing the factory, that is, the control and organization of labour, back into the question of class consciousness and political organization in the Peronist base: ‘If the proletariat cannot guide itself towards the objectives of revolutionary transformation by remaining outside of the factory (this is the tragedy of the Argentine left), if political action cannot begin there where the relations of production end unless the become completely divorced from class, one conclusion presents itself to us: they need to revalue the place of production, the factory, as a central node in the formation of workers’ political consciousness, as a sphere in which the most lively forms of worker participation in political struggles makes itself manifest.’

11. Mészáros 1970, 57–64.

12. I have purposely maintained gendered pronouns throughout the essay in order to underline the particularity of the sexed subject that Rozitchner implicitly references. The question of sexual difference is at once integral to Rozitchner’s theoretical apparatus and sufficiently complex to warrant a critical treatment of its own. Nonetheless, to project the universality of the desire at play in Rozitchner’s rendering of Freud would be to engage in the sort of abstraction of which Rozitchner is fundamentally critical, even if he himself ignores its consequences with respect to sexual difference.

13. Laclau 2005, 40. As Ernesto Laclau notes, Freud’s approach grew out of a tendency among late nineteenth-century social thinkers to admit the mass as a lasting social phenomenon, rather than a passing aberration, to transfer the characteristics of individual psychopathology to the collective, and to develop an increasingly complex typology of different kinds of groups.

14. Freud1955, 91.

15. Ibid., 124.

16. As Freud notes, what identification (whether in the case of the individual neurotic or the group) and the sensual love tie between adults share is a mixture of sublimated and uninhibited cathexes of the drive. What differentiates them, at least at first, is where the objects of cathexes figure on the progressive trajectory of psycho-sexual development.

17. Johnston 2005, 172. Freud first advances this teleological model of psycho-sexual development in Three Essays (1905), according to which the ‘polymorphous perversions’ of childhood – the infant’s ability to derive enjoyment in the tension of its muscles and membranes beyond the satisfaction of its biological needs – gives way ‘normal adult sexuality’ in which the libidinal economy is centred around genital stimulation.

18. Ibid., 172–3.

19. Freud 1955, 142.

20. That the inherently symptomatic nature of hysterical identification should serve as Freud’s model for group psychology should thus come as no surprise: the investment in the love object as an ideal implies, conversely, that the ideal becomes an instrument for enjoyment (Freud 1955, 106).

21. Johnston 2005, 183. Beginning with the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) the previous year, Freud posited that the persistence of the drive was ruled by a logic that pushed beyond the pleasure garnered by the release of physical tension, as he observed in the repetition compulsion of neurotics, and that the conservative or regressive, death-driven nature of the drive might subsume their purported dualism as defined by their objects: ego vs. libido or life vs. death. As Freud’s thinking on the drive evolved, he began to question the division of the drive in this sense, eventually coming to the notion of a unified drive or Todestrieb, a speculative combination of the ego and libido, love and death drives. Such a notion posits the drive as an inherently self-defeating mechanism that both generates internal sexual stimulation and inhibits its own purported aim in relieving such stimulation in the search for pleasure.

22. Rozitchner 2013, 496.

23. Ibid., 444.

24. Freud employs the examples of the Church and army in order to illustrate the logic of the purportedly irrational, libidinal attachment to the leader that binds even the most orderly of groups.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., 444–5.

29. Ibid., 448.

30. Ibid., 323.

31. Marx 1990, 166. Marx 2008, 90. In the Spanish translation: ‘Por consiguiente, el que los hombres relacionen entre sí como valores los productos de su trabajo no se debe al hecho de que tales cosas cuenten para ellos como meras envolturas materiales de trabajo homogéneamente humano. A la inversa. Al equiparar entre sí el cambio como valores sus productos heterogéneos, equiparan recíprocamente sus diversos trabajos como trabajo humano. No lo saben, pero lo hacen.’

32. Ibid., 172. One could make a similar claim with respect to Marx’s assertion, a few pages later, that ‘Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development … is the most fitting form of religion’ for a society based on the exchange of homogenized labour among individual producers. One can imagine how such an assertion might have influenced Rozitchner’s frequent references to Marx’s development on commodity fetishism. The tension in Rozitchner’s work between the social and psychic expression of labour in value and the superego nonetheless stands. In this particular section, Marx signals that liberal political economists have been blind to the historical reasons for the value form of society under capitalism. One might pose a similar question about the reasons for the form of sublimation crystallized in the superego.

33. Rozitchner 2013, 422. ‘Lo que se objetiva como común y, por lo tanto, lo que descubre su gente en el proceso de producción cultural, aparece en una experiencia imprescindible: después de renunciar a proseguir la búsqueda de satisfacción del deseo insatisfecho por los caminos individuales que la cultura decantó en cada hombre como únicos caminos posibles, pero que llevan al fracaso y a la frustración.’

34. Ibid., 437.

35. Eiff 2014. Eiff 2010, 1, 7–8. Rozitchner’s approach to Group Psychology owes much to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s political writings, Humanism and Terror and The Adventures of the Dialectic, which Rozitchner translated for the first time in 1957 while he was completing his doctorate at the Sorbonne. Among the elements that Rozitchner adopts one finds a notion of political praxis grounded in the perception of the sensuous body, as well as an understanding of history painted in Machiavellian terms of political struggle and contingency rather than class. For an earlier iteration of Rozitchner’s interpretation of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts via Merleau-Ponty, see Rozitchner 1962.

36. Rozitchner 2013, 441. All translations from Spanish are mine unless otherwise noted.

37. Marx 1967, 293. Man’s activity is ‘universal’ in the sense that it encompasses the whole of nature both ‘(1) as a direct means of life, and (2) as the matter, object and instrument of [man’s] activity.’ He makes his own species, as well as other species, the object of his activity, whereas other species only take their own physical reproduction as their end.

38. Ibid.

39. Rozitchner 2013, 422.

40. Contrast Rozitchner’s view of labour in relation to the sublimation of the drive, in this sense, with Herbert’s Marcuse’s in the chapter titled ‘The Dialectic of Civilization’ in Marcuse 1966, 81–2.

41. Rozitchner 2012, 85.

42. Marx 1990, 449.

43. Marx 1990, 450.

44. Rozitchner 2013, 567.

45. Ibid., 567–8.

46. Ibid., 420. Take, for example, the following assertion: The ‘organization of the productive system descends and organizes the head and body of the man that it needs; it is the response [of capital] before the presence of the revolutionary mass.’.

47. Karl Marx 1973, 494.

48. Rozitchner 2013, 570, 635–7.