[from Marxists.org ]
Socialist Reproduction are to be congratulated for popularizing this little-known text of Wilhelm Reich's which appeared simultaneously, in 1929, in Unter dem Banner des Marxismus (the theoretical journal of the German Communist Party) and in its Russian equivalent Pod Znameniem Marxisma.[1] It is a symptom of the void in both psychoanalytic and meaningful radical literature today that we have to thread our way back for more than four decades to find a sensible discussion of these interesting matters.
Unlike previous texts of Reich's to which we have referred in either the review of What is Class Consciousness? or the pamphlet The Irrational in Politics, "Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis" is of no immediate relevance to an understanding of human needs or of the founts of human action. It is something very an attempt by Reich to reply to some of his critics (in both the psychoanalytic and Marxist movements).
It is important to situate the text in the Germany of the late twenties. In 1929 Reich's break with Freud was on the horizon, its roots clearly understood. Personal relations with Freud, however were not as yet embittered. The break with the Stalinists was also in the offing. Relations were bitter but had not as yet been traced back to their ideological source. In 1929 Reich is walking two tightropes. He uses Freud to argue against Freud and the Freudians - and Marx to argue against the Marxists. It is a difficult endeavour, as we have learned from our own experience.
Reich starts by pointing out (rightly in my opinion) that most of those on the left who were criticizing Freudian psychoanalysis or Marxism were doing so on the basis of an inadequate knowledge of either - or both. He sought to define the proper object of psychoanalysis as "the study of the psychological life of man in society", an "auxiliary to sociology", "a form of social psychology". He defined limits for the discipline. He freely admits that the Marxists are right when they reproach certain representatives of the psychoanalytic school with attempting to explain what cannot be explained by that method. But, he points out "they are wrong when they identity the method with those who apply it ... and blame the method for their mistakes".
Both psychoanalysis and Marxism are seen by Reich as "science" (psychoanalysis as the science of psychological phenomena and Marxism of social phenomena) and by implication as unarguably valid. That the categories and values of science might themselves be products of historical evolution is barely envisaged. In this whole approach Reich is echoing the "scientific" ethos of the epoch, which had its roots in the rise of the bourgeoisie and its drive to control and dominate nature, rather than to live in harmony with it.
Reich vigorously defends psychoanalysis against the charge of being idealist. To the indictment that it arose "during the decadence of a decaying bourgeoisie" he retorts that Marxism did too. "So what?", he rightly asks. He dismisses those who crudely attack all knowledge as "bourgeois knowledge". "A culture", he points out, "is not uniform like a bushel of peas ... the beginnings of a new social order germinate in the womb of the old ... by no means everything that has been created by bourgeois hands in the bourgeois period is of inferior value and useless to the society of the future". Reich attacks the simplistic mechanical materialism of those who would claim that psychological phenomena as such do not exist, that "only objective facts which can be measured and weighed are true, not the subjective ones". He sees this as an understandable but nevertheless misguided reaction against the Platonic idealism still dominating bourgeois philosophy. He demolishes Vogt's once popular thesis that "thought is a secretion of the brain, in the same way that urine is a secretion of the kidney". To dispose of this nonsense Reich calls Marx to his rescue, the Marx of the Theses on Feuerbach, the Marx who wrote that it was not good enough to say that "changed men were the products of ... changed upbringing" because this forgot "that it is men that change circumstances". Psychological activity, Reich correctly insists, has a material reality and is a force in history that only the most short-sighted would deny.
There is no reason, Reich argues, why psychoanalysis should not have a materialist basis. He boldly plunges the Freudian categories and concepts into the reality of the class society around them. "The reality principle as it exists today", he writes, "is a principle of our society". Adaptation to this reality is a conservative demand. "The reality principle of the capitalist era imposes upon the proletarian a maximum limitation of his needs, while appealing to religious values such as modesty and humility ... the ruling class has a reality principle which serves the perpetuation...
