Pleasure And Pain: At The Crossroads Of Psychoanalysis And The Political Economy

Abstract

Freud's writings offer very few explicit contact points with the notions of political economy. When he speaks of spending, savings or investments, borrowing expressions that are also used by economists, the point of view might be strictly 'economic' (in terms of the quantity of energy required) but the analysis is entirely located within the domain of psychology and does not pertain to production, exchange and consumption in social life. The same is true when he speaks of satisfaction, needs and desires. It is perhaps the notions of 'labour' or 'work' as Freud conceived them that are the least estranged from political economy. I am not speaking of 'dream work' or the 'work of mourning', but of labour in the sense of a daily effort, of a day's labour-activity, necessary to one's life and to survival. Freud conceives of human society as relying on an economic motive--that is to say, the necessity of working for provisions--that entails an obligation to divert energy from the search for sexual pleasure toward the hard constraints of labour. (1) In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud tackles once again the question of labour and underlines its value as remedy to most of the ills affecting the individual in contemporary society. Nevertheless, aside from this narrow point of contact (along with a few others regarding the libidinal signification of money), the notions found in Freud that are common to his analysis and to political economy (savings, investments, spending, needs, satisfaction) are not sufficient to elaborate an economic doctrine, a theory of production, circulation and consumption of commodities, or a theory of the relationships between labour and capital in the society of his time, deeply structured by decisive advances in industrial and finance capitalism. Apparently, psychoanalysis is located on another level. And yet, if we consider Freud's work from an historical and epistemological point of view, it is striking what it reveals. When he was at the beginning of his long career as a courageous and persistent researcher (at the end of the 1870s), political economy had just gone through a great revolution. I do not mean to assert that Freud may have been influenced directly by this revolution in economic theories. None of the references that he quotes allows us to think so. Nevertheless, I don't consider it too anecdotal to recall that Freud as a student translated into German a volume of the works of John Stuart Mill, (2) a major thinker of utilitarianism (in the precise philosophical sense of this word, which situates it closer to hedonism than utility in the usual sense). It was precisely utilitarianism (that of Condillac or Bentham) that was the main philosophical source of the new current of economic theories at this time. And if, beyond all the influences that can be spotted, one might speak in terms of a paradigm shift or of an epistemological rupture, it is striking that psychoanalysis, in many ways, showed a certain affinity of view with what is called the neoclassical current, a configuration of economic theories that independently, and nearly simultaneously, appeared in England, France and Austria, indicating its historical necessity at that time. And yet economists or historians of economics compare the 'psychological, individual and subjective explanation' (3) of neoclassical economists, in particular those belonging to the Austrian psychological school of Karl Menger and his colleagues--the Vienna School--which focused on the question of individual choices, to the so-called objective conception of the classical economists (Smith, Ricardo, Marx). The fundamental notion of neoclassical economics is that of a desiring subjectivity that seeks enjoyment as the starting-point for all value: there are no things, objects, that have an objective, fixed, well-determined value and that are desirable. Rather, it is subjective desire and hence desirability that confer value on an object--a value that is in no way absolute, but that is always subjective, individual, and temporary. …