Subjectivity, Psychology, Marxism and Critical Realism: Eleven Theses

Abstract

This paper traces through the fraught relationship between psychology and Marxism through a reading of current critical debates in the discipline through Marx’s 1845 eleven ‘Theses on Feuerbach’. These theses enable us to grasp how Marxism tackles questions ranging from the relation between the individual and the social to social constructionism and discourse and then, crucially, to ‘critical realism’ in relation to psychology. Questions of behaviour, cognition and biology, as well as the radical status of psychoanalysis in relation to psychology are explored. These eleven theses radically rework human agency, providing an innovative basis for working inside psychology, but also, most importantly, for appreciating how necessary it is to work against psychology. Psychology as a discipline interprets the world, and we learn through Marx that is necessary to change it, in the process dispensing with psychology as such. We must remember that psychology is not a scientific discipline, and cannot become so. It is, as Fernando González Rey reminds us, a discipline concerned with the nature of subjectivity. What is clear is that any realist approach to human action should be undertaken outside the discipline, not inside it. We approach the task of taking subjectivity seriously through Marx’s eleven theses.