Capitalism is mental (2025)

From the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Blair emerged from his coffin recently to declare ‘We’ve got to get the younger generation back to work’ and ominously warned against ‘medicalising the ups and downs of life. You’ve got to be careful of encouraging people to think they’ve got some sort of condition other than simply confronting the challenges of life’.

Anyone who’s been through a challenging period knows that of course it can impact your mental health. Yet Blair insists that too many young people are ‘choosing not to work,’ and calls for benefits reform. Now, Labour wants to cut Personal Independence Payments and has signalled it’ll tighten eligibility rules, with shadow ministers suggesting PIP ‘is not working as it should.’

Starmer’s proposed reforms to cut disability benefits provoked a rebellion by well over 100 Labour MPs who argued the plan would strip support from up to 800,000 people, deepen poverty for 300,000–700,000 more (including 50,000 children), and create a two-tier welfare system that abandons the most vulnerable. Critics, including grassroots movements like Disabled People Against Cuts and disabled constituents, warn this is a continuation of austerity, with MPs likening it to ‘the biggest attack on the welfare state since George Osborne’. Charities insisted cuts wouldn’t boost employment and demanded a pause, transparency, and genuine consultation with disabled people. Labour MPs were pledging to vote against and calling for alternative reforms like taxing the super rich instead of penalising those in need.

Since then, following public backlash and intervention by the UN, Parliament voted on 1 July to remove the clauses tightening PIP (formerly Disability Living Allowance) eligibility. These measures are now to be deferred pending a review led by ‘Sir’ Stephen Timms, expected in autumn 2026. Existing PIP claimants are said not to be affected by the current legislation. However, changes to Universal Credit remain in place: from April 2026, new claimants of the Limited Capability for Work Related Activity element will receive reduced support. Existing recipients will continue receiving full payments, adjusted for inflation through 2029.

The Rosenhan experiment

The Rosenhan experiment (1973) exposed flaws in psychiatric diagnosis. Psychologist David Rosenhan and seven others feigned auditory hallucinations to gain admission to psychiatric hospitals. Once admitted, they acted normally, but doctors still diagnosed them with serious mental illnesses and kept them institutionalised for weeks.

The study highlighted the subjectivity and unreliability of psychiatric labels, showing that once someone was labelled as mentally ill, even ‘normal’ behaviour was interpreted as pathological. In a follow-up challenge, a hospital claimed it could spot fake patients and identified several, only for Rosenhan to reveal he had sent none.

Colonisation of the mind

This is not just about a few misguided doctors. The Western medical model has long been, in part, a tool of oppression. Colonisers have always arrived with missionaries, medics, mercenaries, and merchants. Psychiatry was part of that arsenal, often pathologising indigenous cultures, crushing resistance, and justifying forced assimilation. Traditional beliefs and ways of life were conveniently labelled as madness.

Psychiatry helped run residential schools, enforced sterilisation, and packed institutions, all aimed at breaking indigenous communities. On occasion, psychiatric diagnosis was used to pathologise cultural difference, frame indigenous resistance as insanity and justify colonial policies of confinement and re-education. The same logic still operates today. Psychiatric labels are often used to control people rather than help them.

‘Mad bints’

Women have always been prime targets for psychiatry’s controlling hand. Those who refused to fit into patriarchal roles were labelled hysterical or locked away in asylums. Psychiatry became a handy tool to silence women who challenged capitalism, patriarchy, or both.

Colonisation made this worse for indigenous women who were branded insane for practising traditional healing or resisting colonial authority. Today, women—especially those who are neurodivergent or marginalised—are still dismissed, misdiagnosed, and overmedicated. Psychiatry continues to treat women’s distress as personal pathology rather than a response to social and economic oppression.

A true alternative would focus on community care, autonomy, and dismantling the structures that create suffering in the first place. But when the profit motive comes into play it stops being about helping and about making people useful.

Adaptive response to capitalism?

Humans are nothing if not adaptive; that’s how we’ve survived this long. Under capitalism’s relentless pressure, people, especially those who are marginalised, develop ways of thinking and acting that do not fit into narrow boxes labelled normal.

Neurodivergence is not purely created by capitalism; it has always existed and would exist under other systems. But the way it manifests today is shaped by the demands and pressures of this system.

Traits like hyperfocus, pattern recognition, and creative thinking can help people resist the nonsense of capitalism. Yet capitalism only values these traits when they increase productivity. Difficulties with executive function or sensory processing become disabling because of rigid, noisy, and punishing environments.

If we lived in a society structured differently—one that prioritised people instead of profit—neurodivergence might look very different, both in how common it is and how it is understood.

Class war in our minds

Capitalism is not just a class war; it is a war of the mind. It demands conformity, punishes difference, and uses trauma as a tool of control. Still, resistance keeps bubbling up. Neurodivergent people often develop ways of thinking that refuse to follow capitalist logic, question authority, and imagine new ways of living.

The pushback against capitalism is in many ways also a neurodivergent pushback—one that questions authority, re-imagines community, and refuses the dehumanisation that capitalism enforces.

Capitalism will always find new ways to divide us, control us and blame us for the suffering it creates. The only real cure is to get rid of the system making us sick in the first place.

The fight against capitalism must also be a fight for neurodivergent liberation. We need to see the links between capitalism, trauma, and neurodivergence if we want a world where all minds are valued, not just those that keep the profit machine running.

A.T.

Obituary: Julius Merry (2003)

Obituary from the October 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to have report the death at the end of August of our comrade Julius Merry at the age of 80. The son of immigrants from Tsarist Russia and brought up in the East End of London, he joined the party in 1941 after listening, as a young medical student, to Party speakers in Hyde Park. Medical students were exempt from conscription until they qualified, so it was not until after the war that he was called up and became a conscientious objector to the process of being trained to fight and kill fellow workers from other parts of the world. At first this resulted in some difficulty for him in finding a job, but he eventually rose to the top of his profession as Professor of Psychiatry at St Thomas's Hospital in London and at the University of Surrey. He was one of the pioneers of group therapy in Britain and also argued for the legalisation rather than the prohibition of drugs.

Being an eminent professor did not alter his socialist views, and he continued to engage in the unprofessorial activity of handing out leaflets at meetings and leaving back copies of the Socialist Standard on trains or sending them to all his friends and acquaintances. Among these was the anglophile multi-millionaire Sir Paul Getty whose entry in the book of famous last words could apparently read "Julius, do please come and visit me again - just don't bring me another Socialist Standard". One of comrade Merry's last wishes was that copies of the Standard should be handed out to all those who attended his non-religious funeral, a wish which was respected.

Our sincere condolences go to his family.

Blogger's Note:

An obituary for Comrade Merry also appeared in the March 2004 issue of the Psychiatric Bulletin, which goes into greater detail about his life.

Are you being driven mad? (1981)

From the May 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

One in twelve males and one in eight females in Britain will spend some part of their lives in a psychiatric hospital. Most women between thirty and sixty are regularly prescribed tranquillisers by their family doctor. Since its introduction in the 1930s, ECT (electric shock treatment or electroconvulsive therapy) has been used on thousands of people. There is a widespread use of neurosurgery and other therapy methods, and admissions to psychiatric hospitals are increasing as daily life in our society becomes more tense and frenzied.

“Madness” is very often behaviour which conflicts with conventional ideas of normality or proper thinking. We all think as an involuntary activity, in ways which are specifically human and which differentiate us from our older animal relations. To think is to reflect m the brain the material reality of the environment: il is a relationship between matter and matter. The way in which we relate to our material surroundings determines how our thoughts are to be classified by other people. In primitive society people believed that they were in touch with another world when dreaming. In the Middle Ages people who rejected Christian morality were tortured as lunatics who were possessed by the devil. "Sanity” can be interpreted as a readiness to accept common experiences in conformity with common ideas; "insanity" can be dissent from the social conditioning process.

Mediaeval society had certain ideas about how women should behave. Those women who did not fit in with those ideas were often persecuted as witches. Sprenger and Kramer's hook on how to spot a witch, The Malleus Maleficarum, written m I486, was the downfall of many a woman who suffered from epilepsy. the symptoms of which were listed in the book as the classical characteristics of a witch. In 1515 five hundred unfortunate women were killed for witchcraft in Geneva in the space of three months. In the eighteenth century the "mad" were confined to institutions where they were chained up. beaten, humiliated and put on public display. The diaries of many a nineteenth century nobleman contain reports of Sunday afternoon outings to the lunatic asylum to be entertained by the misfortunes of the deranged.

Most British mental hospitals were built to fit m with nineteenth century ideas about mental health: these days the chains have gone, but the humiliation of the confined has not. Many inmates in modern asylums were first put there for moral or criminal transgressions An unmarried servant girl at the turn of the century who bore a child would face such moral outrage that she would become depressed and, instead of receiving sympathy from those around her, would be locked up in an asylum. Soldiers who could not take the conditions of war, homosexuals who cracked up trying to repress their feelings for the sake of acceptability, poor children who saw nothing wrong with stealing from the rich, men who broke under the monotony or responsibility of their jobs, wives who were left on their own by husbands who grew tired of them, girls who could not conform to the advertisers' modes of anatomical excellence —all of these may be found m any psychiatric hospital. They are not sick just sick of what society is.

Conventional mental disorders are experienced by almost everyone at some time. Depression is a perfectly natural response to a lifestyle in which we are taught to have expectations, but are denied the opportunity to fulfil them. If we are depressed because we are not allowed to do what is technically feasible but socially forbidden, we are simply reacting to a seemingly insoluble social dilemma. Socially produced ills are what cause such depression: people formulate their own reasons to be miserable. Another common mental illness is paranoia: the feeling that there is some force beyond you which is trying to dominate or oppress you. Most of us have felt vulnerable, threatened, unwanted or inadequate at some time. But are we ill because we have these feelings? In a society based on the hypocrisy, artificiality and authoritarianism of the sort that is an integral part of the buying and selling system, are those who are in the inferior social class wrong to have a feeling that we are being oppressed?

It would be very nice for our bosses if every worker who complained that he is oppressed could be classified as a nutcase, but responding to the oppression which surrounds us is not paranoia. In a society which locks people up for taking what they have produced (stealing from work), for refusing lo kill (in many countries military service is still compulsory) or for attacking the government (as is the fate of dissidents in the Russian Empire and South Africa), it is the ignorance of oppression which betrays the greater mental contusion. Then there is schizophrenia which most psychiatrists define as a state of mental fragmentation: it is a condition in which part of the mind accepts reality as it is, while the other part entertains delusions. These so-called delusions are sometimes treated by neurosurgery, the aim of which is to modify the patient's thinking so that the brain responds to all events in a standard way. A case of schizophrenia is cited by Morton Schatzman in his book, Radical Therapist:

Recently, a young man in the NATO military forces, with a position in a chain of command to push a nuclear-missile "button”, decided to refuse to obey orders related to his job. He told his superiors that they should not command any man to do such a job. He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and was hospitalised.

Mental problems are caused by the relationship between the human mind which is rational — and a mystifying social environment — which is irrational. If we misunderstand the world around us we are entitled to feel depressed and threatened and deluded. When one considers just how crazy the present system of organising human affairs is, mental non-conformity is to be strongly advised. What is often called “madness" is a rational response to such problems as war, poverty and insecurity. In The Inner World of Mental Illness, so-called psychiatric disorders are characterised as

. . . opposed to a normality which is intimately related to the major value orientations of western society. It may be asserted therefore that abnormality (psychosis) involves negative relationship to prevailing social normative prescriptions . . . In the jargon of the moment we may call this "alienation”.

The mental health pressure group. PROMPT, has stated that one of its roles  is

. . . to demonstrate that what currently passes as "mental health" is often the measure of the person’s exploitability by those who own (or otherwise control) the means of production and distribution of that which is necessary to sustain life; and to show that a person called “mentally ill” is often someone strongly reacting against their exploitation.

In state capitalist Russia dissidents who try to criticise the bogus socialism are often locked away from the public on the grounds that they are mad. Once locked away, many of them are driven to actual mental derangement by excessive isolation and the use of drugs. Once diagnosed as being insane the dissenter loses whatever credibility he may have once had. Bukovsky and Gluzman, in their Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents, points out that

Dissidents, as a rule, have enough legal grounding so as not to make mistakes during their investigation and trial, but when confronted by a qualified psychiatrist with a directive from above to have them declared non-accountable, they have found themselves absolutely powerless.

The other capitalist states use similar methods. British television, for instance, is quite expert at branding social dissenters in such a way as to lead acquiescent workers to reject what they are saying very often before they have even said it. Most socialists will have been called a crank or a lunatic at some time for having spoken about a world without money. Of course, men like the Duke of Edinburgh who dress up in military uniforms and talk about how safe nuclear weapons are, are considered to be perfectly sane and worthy of public respect.

The battle for socialism is the battle against the conventional ideas of our age. Socialists ask questions. We ask why it is that there are people who produce all of the wealth of society and yet live in poverty and people who are idle who live in luxury. Why do grown men and women cry when they run out of money in the middle of the week and they have a family to feed. Why are children sent to school to be conditioned? Why are otherwise rational men and women occasionally seen to address the sky and ask for help? Why must we live in constant fear of being killed by bombs that none of us want? Why are our fellow human beings dying of starvation by the minute while food rots? Why slums? Why palaces? Why unemployment? Either it is all normal and those of us who reject it are 'insane,' or else we are sane and it is mad.

Socialists aim to bring the ideas held by the majority of people in line with their experiences. This is the role of any scientist who is serious about his work. But instead of endeavouring to examine social reality, government scientists tend be employed to perpetuate the current form of reality. This is particularly true of modern psychiatry which is more concerned with the treatment of symptoms than with examining their cause. Indeed, if psychiatrists were to study causation they would be put to the impossible task of either giving up their occupations and trying to change society or continue their jobs in the knowledge that what they are doing is futile and often counter-productive.

If a man lives his life in chains and responds by kicking out at those around him, the psychiatrist’s solution of binding his legs or dulling his brain so that he is too weak to kick is less reasonable than the socialist solution of destroying the chains. However, under capitalism — the social system which prevails throughout the world today — the freedom of the parasites at the top can only he secured by the social constriction of the vast majority. So, reasonable a proposition as it may he to smash the chains which presently confine us, they who pay the psychiatrists are paying to ensure that symptoms are treated while the problem remains.

But surely if we, the majority class in society, are the victims of this system, we should be destroying the chains ourselves? Indeed we should but it is an unfortunate fact that a majority of that majority class have become accustomed to the confinement of life under capitalism and nothing would disturb them more than the prospect of social freedom. How is it that capitalism has spared its victims from such dangerous thoughts of non-conformity? We can begin by rejecting the most popular explanation: that human beings come into the world with ideas already implanted in their brains. This is the argument of the apologist for capitalist normality, who is anxious to inform us that we have "forgotten about human nature”. (As if the moment he reminds us we are going to stop being socialists!)

In fact, ideas are not inherent, but are acquired by convention. Our language is a learned code. Our concepts of right and wrong are products of historical change. Learning is the essence of our conformity. We learn to accept things as they are in three ways: firstly, by the overt agencies of thought control, such as schools, universities, newspapers, television, radio, parental guidance, and religion, secondly, by experience of the system which one comes to accept as natural phenomenon; thirdly, at an early age our feelings of freedom and human creativity are repressed to fit in with conventional social relationships. Rejection of these conditioning. processes is often labelled as insanity.

For instance, if a child takes no notice of the social norms imposed by its parents and teachers it will be persuaded, bribed, locked up, beaten — but if these things fail and the child does not step into line it may be labelled as disturbed, insane or subnormal. This label will have profound effects upon the future economic and personal prospects of the non-conformist. People who reject the 'naturalness' of their social environment are easily dismissed as fantasists or utopians. It in within the terms of sanity to complain that the rent is too high, but it is a case for psychiatric concern if one demands decent living conditions for everyone. Many innovative scientists, who have challenged conventional hypotheses, have been dismissed as lunatics. The non-repressed individual is virtually unknown in our society, but if you try to live in an unrepressed manner you are likely to end up either being isolated in squalor or confined to an institution. How many of us could honestly say that we would live as we are living now if we were really free?

In The Manufacture of Madness Thomas Szasz says that psychiatry

. . . is harmful to the so-called mental patient. This is not because it is liable to abuse, but rather because harming people categorised as insane is its essential function. Institutional psychiatry is, as it were, designed to protect and uplift the group (the state) by persecuting and degrading the individual as insane or ill.

He goes on to point out that there is no basic difference between modern ideas of madness and those of mediaeval society. Despite the so-called liberalism of the modem state

. . . there are still the disadvantaged, the disaffected, and the people who thought and criticised too much. The non-con formist, the objector, all who deny or refuse to affirm society's dominant values, are still the enemies of society.

This view is confirmed by an article in The New Scientist (21/6/79) in which it was reported that in South Africa, Germany and Japan

. . . doctors unabashedly carry out psychosurgery to make “patients" more obedient and supposedly as a “cure" for homosexuality.

It should be pointed out that many patients have died as result of needless psychosurgery. It should also be pointed out that many of those being presently held in such top security mental hospitals as Rampton are undergoing corrective treatment involving drugs and ECT, as well as brain surgery, simply because they have refused to obey the social norms. The terrible thing is that the more such people claim that they are being abused, the more the psychiatrists who are supposed to be treating them accuse them of being mentally ill. It is not only in Russia that offenders against the status quo are sentenced to insanity.

Dissent is safest when it is engaged in en masse. The purpose of the Socialist Party is to be an instrument for mass opposition to the capitalist system as a way of living. If you stand out against it alone your friends, family and workmates will try to dismiss your non-conformity as eccentricity or utopianism. The more of us there are, the harder it becomes for the Normals to ignore us with a nervous laugh. We, the overwhelming majority of the human race, have no weapon which is more effective than our capacity for critical thought. Ideas coupled with political solidarity will penetrate every single aspect of the social edifice which seems so unbreakable to the lone dissenter. If we are bitter and vociferous and impatient it is only because the system which aims to control us has driven us to it. Now let us be mad and sane enough to learn to control the system.

Steve Coleman

"I was only doing my job" (1974)

From the August 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

The academic world has been “shocked” and “appalled” by the results of ten years’ extensive research tests carried out by the psychiatrists at New York University. A book has appeared, and they have received full coverage on radio.

Briefly, the ingenious idea was this; just to see how far normal, ordinary, conventional people would go carrying out “horrific” instructions, which would torture and even kill the victim, usually by electric shock. At what point would the subject say “No! I can’t and won’t do it”?

Not merely did they not disobey, but showed the most callous indifference, and even when told that they had killed somebody, said “I only did my job” or some such. What they did not know was that the agonized screams of torture were by paid professional actors.

Why the psychiatrists are making such a hullabaloo about all this it is difficult to see. We do not need ten years’ extensive (and expensive) research in New York to tell us that ordinary, conventional, simple, naturally sociable, kindly people can behave otherwise in special circumstances.

In fact it is precisely the “normal” ordinary, unquestioning, unthinking people who accept authority and orders so blindly. So long as some fanny is trotted out to “justify” the foul deeds. (Usually, “If we don’t do it to them, they will do it to us.”) The appalling massacres of innocent defenceless women and children at My Lai, the Portugese atrocities in Africa, the systematic extermination of the Red Man in the States, are just isolated incidents in a long list. This writer is personally acquainted with numbers of affable likeable chaps, teachers, who as Air Force pilots took part in the saturation bombing of Germany.

Just what does it prove? That human nature is the most changeable thing under the sun, that homo sapiens is easily the most adaptable animal on this planet, leaving chameleons and hawk-eyed moths far behind. Not only this, but he is a most social-communal animal. So long as he has the social approbation that it is a necessary “job”, he will shoot, torture and murder without compunction, like the KGB in Russia as Arthur Koestler and Solzhenitsyn have shown. This writer attended sessions of the famous (or infamous) trial of the Auschwitz concentration camp staff in Frankfurt. The German press was amazed to find that the one-time torturers, gas-chamber operators, and murderers, had become highly respectable insurance managers, bank clerks, business representatives and family men. In fact this was urged in their defence as expiation.

So far from “not being able to change human nature”, it is impossible to stop it changing. Not merely do we see this by our own personal experience in everyday life, but it is also confirmed by modern genetics: the study of differences between individuals. The whole modern knowledge of genetics shows that though all animals (including homo sapiens) are born with a certain “nature” or physiological apparatus acquired from both parents, their behaviour in various social situations depends entirely on circumstances. This is the authentic view of modern genetics. The idea that features or characteristics acquired by parents are automatically passed on is fallacious. Jewish baby boys’ foreskins have been docked for a thousand years, they inevitably reappear; so have fox-terriers’ tails. The genes make a boy tall or short, brown-eyed or frizzy-haired. What he then does is his affair.

As Professor Anthony Barnett writes in his book on The Human Species:

These changes in social organisation involve drastic changes in human behaviour, and they in turn depend on the fact that human behaviour is plastic and not genetically fixed. We see once again the absurdity of the notion that ‘human nature cannot change’.

This commonly made assertion always implies that human ‘behaviour’ is essentially fixed, it is therefore the exact opposite of the truth.

It is the behaviour of the working class to band together in its own interest. What makes this common interest is not genetical inheritance, but social position. Eventually, black workers, yellow workers, “the long, and the short, and the tall” will join up to establish Socialism. If workers inevitably inherited their parents’ wage-slave characteristics they could never become Socialists. Of course docile ignorant wage-slaves in New York willingly obeyed the most vile orders; they were not Socialists! Let them try their daft experiments on us. We said NO ! during the war.

Horatio.

50 Years Ago: Mind in a cul-de-sac: Laing (2022)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

If one considers the family in its genealogical image as a tree, today lumberjacks are out. The tree, by various allegations, is blighted and corrupt, the leaves malnourished while society still praises its luxuriance. In the nineteen-fifties Dr. Kinsey showed statistically that monogamy was a stale pretence; in the ‘seventies Women’s Liberation proclaims it to be a cage. The most trenchant attacks on the family, however, have come from the psychiatrist Dr. Ronald Laing. In a series of writings on the condition of schizophrenia, Laing has shown family groups as circles bent on mental violence, selecting this and that member as victims for destruction. Only the mad are sane, says Laing.

A psychiatric theory may not, in itself, be thought to matter much outside the world of attempted therapy where—as with more palpable physical disorders—¬the patients are patched to be sent back to the environment where their troubles grew. But Laing’s has been popularised as material for social and political dissenters. Contributing to the New Left Review, Peace News and New Society automatically connected him with the cultural Left; in 1967 he was one of the speakers in the “Dialectics of Liberation” seminar at the Round House, London, with Marcuse, Stokely Carmichael and others. The film Family Life is a representation of his view of everyday relationships: an onslaught against the stupidity, unfairness and general motivation of the conventional and a vindication of the young dubbed insane, with the implication that the latter had better run from the former as fast as they can.

It is also a representation of the nature of Laing’s popularity. The appearance of cheap editions of his books coincided with the emergence of the “underground”, the movement for dropping-out and psychedelia. (…)

In the 1965 preface to an earlier work, The Divided Self, Laing speaks of his theories as condemning not only family relationships but the social order at large, because it “represses not only ‘the instincts’, not only sexuality, but any form of transcendence”. The preface was withdrawn from the 1970 edition, and he is now reported to have retreated into mysticism.

(Socialist Standard, August 1972)

Psychology and Socialism (1956)

From the July 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

The famous thinkers of modern times are easily named and their realms identified: Darwin for evolution, Einstein for relativity and so on. That is as far as it goes for most of us, and it is much less easy to be aware of their influence on everyday life and thought. There is no doubt, however, of the influence of Sigmund Freud, whose birth-centenary was celebrated recently. “Ego,” “inhibition" and “unconscious" are words in daily use; people as a matter of course comment on others' behaviour in terms of complexes and subconscious wishes.

In a television programme on May 13th, eminent men testified to Freud's influence in many fields of thought. “All anthropology today assumes the Freudian view of human character," said Professor Blackburn. "Through the teaching of Freud we are forced to pay attention to the personality of the delinquent. . . rather than what he has done," said Professor Sprott. Cyril Connolly spoke of the Freudian inroad on literature—“we’re all still reading from it"—and another speaker quoted the Catholic Charles Baudouin: "Modern man cannot conceive of himself without Freud."

Anniversary tributes are always lavish, of course. Nevertheless, there can be no question of the part psychological theory and psychiatrical practice have come to play in modern life. The classic doctrines remain their basis. Freud himself, with his emphasis on "the Unconscious," the mass of repressed thought and memory, is pre-eminent His one-time followers, Jung and Adler, proposed other driving-forces of behaviour for Freud's sexuality: for Adler it was power-striving, for Jung "the Libido," a generalized force giving rise to all creative activity. In the study of conscious thought, the Behaviourists led by Pavlov and Watson have stated and exemplified the doctrine of the conditioned reflex, which was described by Bertrand Russell in "The Scientific Outlook" as “ the basis of learning, of what the older psychologists called the ‘association of ideas,' of the understanding of language, of habit, and of practically everything in behaviour that is due to experience."

In addition to these two main schools, there are several branches of psychology dealing with specific aspects of behaviour. For example, there are the "investigators of intelligence" whose conclusions still hold sway in the educational world and their tests applied as measures of innate abilities. Many others, too: group behaviour, leadership, art, crime, all have come in the psychologists' orbit.

More than anything else, psychology is an attempt at a solution, and before there is a solution you must have a problem. Freud's theories grew out of his own clinical research into cases of hysteria and neurasthenia; the existence of a study of the mind implies the growth of mental and emotional disorder in the modern world. True, there were disordered minds before modern times—Shakespeare wrote about them, Nero seems a clear case of paranoia—and before the statistics. Nevertheless,  there is no question of the tremendous growth of such illness in the twentieth century. No big hospital today is without its staff of psychiatrists.

The central theme of Freudian psychology is the supposition of an unconscious mind, receiving the impressions of experience and shaping, like an unseen hand, the acts and motives of conscious life. "The unconscious," wrote Trotter in Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, "is the realm of all the experiences, memories, impulses and inclinations which during the subject's life have been condemned by the standards of the conscious, have proved incompatible with it and have therefore been outlawed from it. This banishment in no way deprives these excluded mental processes of their energy, and they constantly influence the feelings and behaviour of the subject. So strict, however, is the guard between them and the conscious that they are never allowed to pass the barrier between one sphere and the other except in disguised and fantastically distorted forms by which their true meaning is closely concealed."

That is all very well as far as it goes. There is nothing far-fetched in the idea of a fantasy-life as a source of conflict and frustration and ultimately illness; indeed, it is only too recognizable. The converts to religion are seeking stability and assurance which ordinary life does not give them; the film-star and speedway worshippers, the tough novel addicts are only snatching at secondhand emotional satisfactions. If one grants, however, that fear, guilt and unhappiness may be rooted in the subconscious, there is still the fact that the subconscious and the conscious both are rooted in society. Consciousness of itself has no meaning: man, the social animal, has only social consciousness.

To some extent psychiatrists, are compelled to recognize this. A good deal of their work amounts to rehabilitation rather than anything else—finding different jobs, recommending for re-housing and so on. This writer once saw the line of waiting patients for psychiatric treatment in a London hospital: written over them, as plain as the marks of a physical beating, were the signs of poverty and care and the fact that what they really needed most was an extra ten pounds a week apiece. That is why generally psychiatrists are as impotent as most other therapists, trying to cure the complaint without removing its cause.

It is a mistake to brush off the question of psychiatry as an amusing vogue for idle rich people or a refuge for nuts and ninnies. The first suggestion was tested in America a few years ago by two Yale investigators who grouped all the mental cases in one city—New Haven—according to income and social background. By far the greatest proportion (36.8 per cent.) came from the bottom group of unskilled poorly-paid workers with incomplete elementary education. To debunk psychiatry does not explain why currently one person in twenty in America or one in sixteen in Britain is finding his way to a mental hospital at some time or other—to say nothing of the aspirin addicts.

Our complex, class-divided society imposes a thousand and one repressions on its people, from the material discomforts which turn lively girls into nagging wives to the ulcerating strain of city life and the loneliness of the crowd. Fear is ubiquitous in modern life: not man's sensible fear of physical danger, but a multitude of small relations of it. The insecurity from which no-one is free means perpetual fear of losing one’s job, of illness, of being unable to pay the instalments, of dropping places in the contemporary caste-race called “standards of living." The case was stated very well in a broadcast on Crime Comics and the American Way of Life by Irving Sarnoff, in March last year:

"Unfortunately, not every American can get more. Unfortunately, too, the very process of striving after more, by foul means or fair, pits person against person in an endless struggle. For those who cannot show constant increments, the struggle is especially bitter. . . . Paradoxically, success is so often dependent upon the masking of the very antagonisms engendered by the struggle, that we are required to wear an armour of good humour, compliance, duplicity and detachment. Nevertheless, the inner anger remains and finds devious outlets in psychosomatic complaints, insanity, divorce and crime."

Only it isn't exclusively American, of course. And to all of that may be added the host of petty anxieties reflected in present-day advertising, the basis of which seems to be that you can sell most of a thing by making people afraid to be without it. Thus, the accent is on fear of not getting on; of leaving one's family unsupported; of the social and sexual consequences of off-white shirts, perspiration and strong breath.

This is perhaps the appropriate point to refer to the Behaviourists. Pavlov’s and Watson's experiments are so well known as to need little description. Show a dog food, and its mouth waters; ring a bell at the same time, and eventually its mouth waters at the sound of the bell; unless its cerebral hemispheres have been removed.

Or have a child play with a white rat; scare the child with a bang, and soon it fears the rat. The possibilities for manipulating behaviour were so extensive, in fact, as to lead to the conclusion that thought itself was but the inward expression of conditioned reflexes. Watson wrote: "States of consciousness provide no objective data that admits of scientific examination, nor can the behaviourists find any evidence for mental existence of any kind."

Conditioned reflexes are recognizable enough in the modern world. See them in the woman's magazine adulation of royalty; the wartime hatred of the other side; the emotional stirrings to a hymn or a military band; the advertisements for every washing-powder. And the fact is that the Behaviourists discovered nothing in the laboratory that others have not found out empirically. Bernard Shaw, as acute at some times as he was silly at others, is recorded as having said when Pavlov’s treatise was first published: "If the fellow had come to me I could have given him that information in less than 25 seconds without tormenting a single dog."

It was probably true. Advertizing and salesmanship practise as a matter of course what Behaviourism preaches as a matter of theory (and other departments of psychology too. The magazines of popular psychology invoke Freud and Jung, but their material is the sell-more-and-get-on doctrine of How to Win Friends and Influence People). The Behaviourists' conclusions about the nature of thought conclude only how little is yet known about thought. The brain and nervous system have been charted, the parts named which are associated with some mental processes—and that is virtually all.

K. S. Lashley, after a long series of experiments, could say no more than "the learning process and the retention of habit are not dependent on any finely localised structural changes within the cerebral cortex" and “the mechanisms of integration are to be sought in the dynamic relations among the parts of the nervous system rather than in details of structural differentiation." And again, of his findings from mutilating the brains of rats: "Such facts can only be interpreted as indicating the existence of some dynamic function of the cortex which is not differentiated in respect to single capacities, but is generally effective for a number to which identical neural elements cannot be ascribed." These, from Lashley's “Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence," are among the most positive statements made on thought and habit, and they are so tentative as to be almost speculative.

One aspect of psychology certainly should not be overlooked. Whatever knowledge of individual and collective behaviour has been gained is used to further the interests of the ruling class: to tame the recalcitrant and choose the efficient worker, to boost morale in wartime and help productivity in the factory. The social psychology of industry is a product of the last 80 years, the era of relative surplus-value—when exploitation has taken the form of squeezing and cajoling more out of the worker in a shorter working day.

That psychology has thrown side-lights on human behaviour is true, though the evidence suggests that the same would have been forthcoming from other sources. It raises questions—but fails to answer them. Freud saw that 19th century civilization was bad for people, but he offered no alternative. The psycho-therapist deals with introspection, with repression, tension and anxiety as personal conditions when in reality they are social conditions. Individual mental illnesses may be cured in the same way as one man’s ulcer may be excised—and the way of living which produces thousands more remain.

A million acts of charity point to but do not remedy an economic condition of poverty. Similarly, psychology underlines but offers no solution to a problem of society. The answer cannot lie in “adjustment” for individuals: is it to be adjustment to a rotten society? The only real solution lies in changing the structure of society itself.

Robert Barltrop

Mental Health — a brief Critique by a Mental Hospital Worker (1973)

From the June 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you are feeling the strains of life, if you are beginning to feel you cannot cope, or if you become aware that you see existence differently from other people, then watch out as you may find yourself in the clutches of a psychiatrist. Such characteristics may be considered symptoms of mental illness and, whereas you are free to accept or reject the advice of a doctor if you suffer from a physical illness, this right may be removed from you in the case of a disease of the “mind.” Although the 1959 Mental Health Act made treatment for mental illness on a voluntary basis possible, there are still over 10,000 individuals in Britain compulsorily detained in mental hospitals against their will. Beware unruly, aggressive behaviour as, if you are apprehended by the police, Section 29 gives leeway for you to be detained for 72 hours in mental hospital on the order of a mental health worker, temporarily overcoming the necessity of court action. Whether a short-term or long-term stay, the “care” of the individual in hospital involves the removal of control of life from that person; during that time existence will be regulated and regimented by hospital staff.

It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that what is being dealt with are “faulty brains” and that the “mental” person must immediately be guided totally by others before they cause damage to themselves or the public. However, we must look at the assumptions underlying this approach to insanity, the dangers to every individual in society arising from these assumptions, and also the power that medics have over the destiny of so many lives as a result.

Social Definition . . .

What is meant by “insanity?” The general model used is the medical one. The individual is said to be sick, with a disease of the brain. As a consequence the term "mental health” has been coined and this in turn results in a whole set of reactions towards the insane man or woman (such as sending them to a doctor who specializes in brains, putting them into hospital, and treating them with drugs or surgery) which are not necessarily correct.

This approach is often completely presumptuous, probably arising from the growth of psychiatry through the roots of medicine rather than psychology. Although “mental” behaviour may be an obvious result of brain malformation or brain damage (in which case the behaviour tends to be of a specific type), in a vast proportion of cases of disturbance, no physiological/structural abnormalities are to be found in the disturbed person. Classification of individuals as suffering from a particular mental syndrome is based almost completely on the individual’s behaviour, including responses to other people, the ideas expressed, the ability to hold down a job, and the patterning of results on “intelligence” tests. In other words, the definition of insanity is based on comparing individuals’ behaviour with the behaviour shown by the general population. So it is a social definition and cannot be the objective phenomenon that is claimed, but is subject to the prejudices and ideologies of the professionals involved in the field of mental health.

If the insane individual is the one who deviates from the normal what is meant by “normal” must be considered, as there is a great range of behaviour shown by members of society. Normality is behaviour that is generally tolerated throughout society, and the normal person is the one who has managed to survive in society with an acceptable balance between the development of his potentialities (including personality, intellectual and physical traits) and the conditioning by which his abilities are directed into socially acceptable functions (including such behaviour as being able to chat in the local).

. . . and Social Judgement

If, like Laing, you view the normal as sick (but see Socialist Standard, August 1972), what criteria have you for dealing with deviants from the “normally abnormal?” Bourgeois psychology indicates time and time again that present-day society is not one that permits individuals to fulfil their potentialities but one that inhibits people’s full development. Work by John Holt and Paul Goodman shows this process at work in the school setting where children’s creativity, inquisitiveness and desire to learn is progressively stilted as they become socialized to a regime that thwarts originality and praises tactics where “correct” answers arc provided without any understanding. This in turn reflects a wider conditioning where the “correct answer” is conformity to the requisites of capitalism; individuality means individuality within strict limits; to stretch beyond these is to become insane or criminal.

This is not attempting to exalt those in mental hospital, for their existence is often a miserable one. But questioning the very nature of normality and the conceptual — and practical — approach to abnormality exposes not only the inadequacies of the care for the “insane”, but also reveals a danger to every one of us. In Russia intellectuals are confined in mental hospitals and people are quick to condemn this. Yet this is only an extreme form of the attitude of those in the West: those who do not “fit in” must be locked away. Where are the boundary lines between the mad and the sane? Are you sure you belong to the population considered normal?

Let us consider those unfortunate individuals who find themselves in mental hospital. Removed from a bewildering world of insurmountable problems they may feel happier in the protected environment of the hospital where life is organized for them, where they only have to obey the staff. Alternatively, they may be further confused by their removal from a world they know to this strange environment. Whichever the case, evidence indicates that the longer the time the individual remains in “care”, the less chance there is of them leaving. For institutionalization works itself upon the inmates who, devoid of opportunities to run their own lives, learn behaviour that is inappropriate for the outside world and so become greater misfits. Goffman gives a good analysis of this process in Asylums and indicates how the inmate can be reduced to an obedient moron who is quiet and always follows the rules. From my own personal experience, when working in a mental subnormality hospital (in many ways identical to a psychiatric hospital), it was blatantly obvious that the person who attempted to assert himself in any way suffered great social recriminations and punishments with withdrawal of privileges. This type of individual, probably with the characteristics to survive better than other patients, is unlikely to be allowed out of the hospital by those in authority as they consider such behaviour to be “bad” — and so the hospital becomes a prison.

What's it all About ?

People “outside” show little interest in the mental hospital and, possibly due to this, doctors are left free to give E.C.T., drugs and brain surgery despite very inadequate knowledge of the consequences of these actions. The patient has no means of self-protection, and this is an uncaring society — which is possibly why many people are in mental hospitals anyway.

The problems are many and knowledge very limited. Certainly those individuals suffering from “mental syndromes” require support, care and understanding from the community in order to learn how to cope with life rather than to be rejected and locked away. But one cannot help being sceptical about this being possible in a society where most people are in some way “mentally sick”, which places so many pressures upon everyone that time is too precious to concentrate on helping “social inadequates”, and where everyone has a multitude of their own problems.

Judy

Letters: Scientific proofs (2006)

Letters to the Editors from the July 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Scientific proofs

Dear Editors

As both a scientist and a socialist, I was dismayed to read two statements in the May Socialist Standard which appear to reflect an anti-science or anti-academia bias. The first statement, found in the Pathfinders column, is that “science itself is unable to prove anything very much at all, whether it is a theory of gravity, evolution, or climate change”. While this is ‘technically’ true, it is more than a little disingenuous, and may lead readers to believe that the Socialist Party rejects science as a tool for understanding nature and the human condition.

Science works by proposing theories, which are tested to see if they account for the available data, and then modified if they do not. Because new data is always being discovered, scientific theories are never proved with absolute certainty in the sense of a mathematical or logical proof, but rather in the sense of a legal proof – “beyond a reasonable doubt”. The overwhelming evidence in support of the theory of evolution is such that no biologist disputes its ability to account for the fossil record and origin of species; in this informal sense the theory can rightly be said to be “proven”.

Socialists should therefore not reject calls for scientific proof of our social and economic theories; rather, we should meet them by providing supporting evidence, or by modifying our theories when presented with contradictory evidence.

The second passage with which I take issue appears in Voice from the Back, where some professors are ridiculed for speculating on some matter of Christian mythology instead of speaking out against world hunger.

I’d like to know what evidence the author of this piece has that these professors are not socialists and are unsympathetic to the problem of world hunger. And is it his belief that the study of ancient history and literature has no redeeming value, and that it will be abandoned in socialism? Or merely that any activity not directly related to bringing about socialism should be held up to condemnation and ridicule?

Perhaps the author may be able to devote every waking hour of his life to socialist propagandizing, but most of the rest of us need to set aside at least some of our time for employment, hobbies, relaxation, and yes, even inconsequential philosophical debates.

Tristan Miller, 

London SW4

Another view of Freud

Dear Editors

I’d like to comment on the article “Freud and Marx: do they mix?” (May Socialist Standard) and put forward some of my own thoughts on the subject. In order to appreciate Freud you really need to approach him with the right mind-set. That mind-set, in my opinion, is an ability to understand where he’s “coming from”, together with a willingness to appreciate his insights without necessarily buying into his ideas wholesale.

This second point was explained by J.A.C. Brown in his book Freud and the Post-Freudians:

“It is convenient to regard the total body of Freudian thought as falling into roughly three categories: its basic psychological concepts; the theories based on clinical observations and described in terms of this conceptual scheme; and the essentially philosophical conclusions on such subjects as the nature of society and civilization, war and religion, which Freud drew from his own thought and experience. 

Whether or not such a division is logically justifiable it is undoubtedly empirically useful in any consideration of his influence on scientific thought; for many would accept his general approach to psychological problems who would not be uncritical of his theories, and others would accept both without taking very seriously his metaphysical conclusions.”

Freud’s outstanding fault was over-generalisation. But even this criticism of him has to be qualified because you have to judge each of his points individually. Making sweeping statements about someone who made so many different individual points over so many years is it itself an overgeneralisation. Many people have claimed that Freud’s ideas are untestable. This isn’t necessarily true. Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg have made a concerted effort to test Freud’s ideas against a wide range of scientific evidence. Their findings are compiled in their two books The Scientific Credibility of Freud’s Theories and Therapy and Freud Scientifically Reappraised.

The following paragraph, which appears in their first book, gives you an idea of their general approach:

“Overall, the best argument we can muster for scientifically testing Freud’s models is the fact that many competent people have already tried their hand at it and discovered new, interesting things. It should be added that their fairly precise quantitative observations are making it possible to speak in terms of the degree to which Freud’s ideas are valid or not valid, rather than simply Freud, at least in terms of his theoretical conclusions, had a somewhat pessimistic view of human nature, and in this sense saw things differently from socialists."

However, I believe that this should be set against Freud’s compassionate acceptance of human weakness and limitation, and in this respect, I believe, Freud and Marx were soul mates. Many of their peers would have been happy to regard the hysterical men and women as well as the poor oppressed masses as both, each in their own way, the cause of their own misfortune. Freud and Marx regarded them as fellow human beings, championed their causes, and sought to relieve them from their suffering. In doing so they both went completely against the grain of the societies they lived in, and for that bravery of spirit alone, deserve our gratitude and respect.

The idea that people are the cause of their own misfortune is a central argument of those on the political right. This is particularly so in America where it’s even accepted by many of those who suffer as a result of it. The idea is that whether someone is emotionally disturbed, or mentally ill, or a single mother, or lacks the skills, strength, or ability to get a well paying job, they are somehow supposed to have chosen to be exactly as they are. Giving them no support is then justified on the grounds that they could choose to somehow magically change themselves and their circumstances if they really wanted to. It’s interesting to note that these right-wingers choose to see emotional and economic difficulties in a very similar way.

Freud and Marx would have been united in opposing this absurd idea. Freud would have pointed out that people with emotional problems are victims of their own natures and certainly don’t choose to be the way they are. I don’t need to say what Marx would have said about the source of economic hardship.

In spite of the huge differences in their areas of interests there are quite a number of ways in which Freud and Marx parallel one another. They were both big fans of Darwin and saw themselves as doing work in a similar vein to him.

For an explanation of how Marx’s views on religion correspond to Freud’s ideas about paranoia see Paranoia by David Bell. This is an excellent little booklet which I thoroughly recommend. It gives a brilliant explanation of “false communities”, racism, hatred of asylum seekers, resentment welfare recipients, etc. from a  psychoanalytic point of view. Psychoanalysis has a tremendous amount to offer to anyone who wants to have a better understanding of human behaviour.

I can’t resist mentioning the books of Robert Jay Lifton in which he applies his background in psychoanalysis to the study of recent historical and political situations. Socialists should simply take from Freud and psychoanalysis whatever they find helpful or interesting and leave aside that which they don’t.

Adam Waterhouse, 

Bristol

Dear Editors 

The article on ‘Freud and Marx’ (May Socialist Standard) was quite interesting and may lead some readers to study more of the works of Freud, Reich and Fromm. However, it appears to make the usual errors by critics of their pioneering work

Freud’s discovery of psycho-analysis is used by the medical profession world-wide and has proved to be beneficial and invaluable in treating patients with deep emotional difficulties.

The article states that “Instinctual Sexual Energy” has never been found. This is not the case. Any objective observation of older babies and very young children will demonstrate that they have a natural and “instinctive” sexual or sensual drive for genital play for long before they have any understanding or knowledge of sexual functioning.

While there have been advances in sexual liberation for adults, in recent years, this has not led to much improvement in social attitudes. There is a specific reason for this. Development in the first five years of life pass through the stages of oral, anal and genital evolution of pleasure zones.

By puberty, on average, girls are menstruating at 10 years of age and boys, on average, are ejaculating at 12 years. So physiologically they are ready for mating.

This in our “Civilised” society is understandably unacceptable. So unlike all other living creatures, the “Sexual Instincts” must be repressed and thwarted. Freud and Freudians understood this and suggested that a price in emotional terms would be made. Hence the ‘Life and Death’ instincts evolve that give rise to the emergence of all kinds of sexual perversions that can develop. These are also expressed in ‘death’ drives in addictions, such as drug taking, smoking, alcohol, etc. And as Wilhelm Reich proved, into homoerotic political diversions, such as fascist and nazi fantasies. (Study the Nazi symbols and expressions and the “death instinct” is self-evident.) Sexuality or sensuality is the deepest natural emotional instinct all humans possess.

Most people, though unaware of their repressed emotions, are able to cope sufficiently in life. It is essential, however, to understand the complexity of our personalities, if we are ever going to be able to create a fully successful socialist society that will be really lasting. For we are not machines or robots, but thinking animals with many emotional layers. Just as the work of Marx is a guide to understanding, and not a dogma like religions. So also, is the work of Freud, Reich and Fromm.

Lionel Rich, 

London NW6

Biology as Ideology (2008)

From the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

For over 40 years there has been an increasing momentum to the wholesale medicalisation of human and social problems

It was in the late 19th/20th centuries that the notion of conceiving of distress/madness as a ‘mental illness’ came to predominate. In particular, the work of Emil Kraepelin, and the notion of trying to classify distress into a number of discrete psychiatric disorders, and that these disorders were diseases of the brain, and that these diseases of the brain were categorically distinct from the normal brain and normal behaviour.

For the last hundred years biological psychiatrists have been looking for pathologies in the brain to explain the different symptoms that ‘patients’ present. What with the 1990s being declared the Decade of the Brain, and with the Human Genome Project, they have had a good twenty years to propagate their view. Indeed, for over 40 years there has been an increasing movement towards the wholesale medicalisation of human and social problems. Virtually every problem is conceived as something that can come under the scrutiny not only of medicine in general but psychiatry in particular. Who are the gurus on TV and the press to whom we turn to for solutions to our personal and societal problems—Dr. Mark or Dr. Joan! The politics is taken out of problems. It is not social conditions that require changing—it is our biology. And for ‘mental illness’, this means the resort to pills—the chemical balance of your brain needs to be adjusted.

Today, the bible of psychiatric approach to human misery is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV). When it appeared in 1994 (only 7 years after DSM-II), it was some 900 pages long (a revision is due in 2010 and is expected to be 1250 pages). Within DSM are over 300 diagnoses. If you feel in need of a diagnostic label you are sure to find one here.

Over the years of revision from DSM in 1952 the shift has been away from a psycho-analytic perspective to a biological one. Now, the biological perspective is the dominant one, and refusal to toe the line can lead to a psychiatric career coming to an end—not only in terms of posts but also any research grants. No longer is the personal political – the personal has become biological.

The biological approach, however, has come under attack from a number of perspectives. The whole of the conceptual apparatus has been undermined by psychiatric service users, psychologists and sociologists. Yet the edifice still stands and may be gaining in strength. The general public seems to be keen on it, let alone other professional and political interests. It will be a tough nut to crack.

As more mental illness categories are added because more people are showing their misery in different ways, this provides an ideal opportunity for the commodification of happiness—with the solution to unhappiness being offered by the pharmacology industry, often referred to as BigPharma.

No place for culture

The biological approach claims that its diagnostic categories are objective and universal because they are based on the pathologies of the brain. Schizophrenia is schizophrenia in AD 2007 or 2007 BC, in Britain or Borneo. The particularities of culture have no place here.

But this is not the whole story. There are cultural psychiatrists who are opposed to this Western imperialist encroachment. Not only are there differences across contemporary culture but even in the West differences are found across time. To show the difference in how misery shows itself across cultures consider these examples of what are called culture-bound syndromes.

Koko: usually Malaysian males who believe their sexual organs are shrinking, and is accompanied by panic as this is an indication of imminent death.

Latah: experienced by Indonesians who develop an exaggerated startle response, which includes shouting rude words and mimicking the behaviour of those nearby.

Western psychiatry tries to put these cultural forms into its categories.

To show how even in the West psychiatrists have changed their mind, consider what Samuel Cartwright classified as “drapetomania” in 1851. This disease was previously unknown to medical authority, although its diagnostic symptom was well known to “our planters and overseers”. This symptom was found only in black slaves and involved “absconding from service”.

He concluded that what “induces the Negro to run away is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation and much more curable”. The cause was not pills but “whipping the devil out of them”. The patient should be treated like a child. But he warned against being too lenient or overly severe whipping—both of which would induce “drapetomania”. The term is derived from the Greek “drapetes”— a runaway slave.

Even schizophrenia has been seen as a disorder that is of recent origin, being rarely noted before the rise of modernity, in traditional or pre-literate societies.

The biological approach is not only wrong, but it is also ideological. This is not to deny that biological factors are not prominent in certain disorders. But whatever role biological factors play, psychological interactions cannot be reduced to the biological. As biological entities, all our activities have a biological component. But psychological activities are constituted in the interaction or transaction of a biological organism and a physical social environment.

Social relationships

A significant difficulty in looking at the literature which makes reference to social conditions is trying to sort out those which are capitalist specific or class specific from those which are a part of social life in general.

Moreover, it is difficult to sort out those sites where capitalist social relationships have direct effect on the conditions occurring there, such as work and unemployment, from where they have a mediated effect. That is, where capital does not directly create that site but works through an already existing institution, such as the family, gender relations, ‘racial’ relations, and personal relations.

In addition to those, there is the problem that capitalism has with the notion of class. Capitalism likes to think that class problems are a thing of the past or is a subjective matter. Therefore, it is reluctant to fund research which looks at this as a variable. It will accept an occupational or educational definition of class but it will not accept a Marxian definition.

Psychiatric research relating to class seems to have gone through three phases:

First, from the Victorian period up to the Second World War. Unlike mainstream medicine which was very much concerned with the environmental and social conditions of the poor—important public health measures, e.g. sewerage and water, were the focus in trying to improve the physical health of the working class—the focus of psychiatric epidemiology was on the identification of types of mental disease and (because of the brain pathology notion) localising the source of these in the constitution of the person and their family inheritance. This was the period of tainted genes and eugenic solutions.

Second, from the Second World war to the 1970s. The period of the long boom and of social reconstruction, of making capitalism modern, saw an interest in the social conditions of the working class. With the rise of the community health movement, the sources of mental health problems were seen to be, at least in part, those of poverty. Eugenics had of course lost all credibility. So, instead of segregating the mentally ill, the issue was to ameliorate social conditions. Studies showed that schizophrenia was more common in the poorer communities, as well as depression and anxiety.

Third, from the 1970s to the present. With the end of the post-war boom and the crises of the 70s and 80s, the social reformism came to an end. Community care was found to be too expensive and so cuts were made. Once again identification of problems, rather than sources of problems, became the main issue. With the introduction of new diagnostic practices and pharmacological treatments there was a return to the biological, and there was a strong bias against showing the effects of social conditions on the origin and development of the disease. There were exceptions, but that is what they remained. If you wanted large research grants from the biologically dominated institutes you put in a biological proposal.

Because of this state of affairs, it is difficult to identify clear-cut research studies which put social class in the forefront. But those few that are available all show that the ‘lower’ the social class and degree of urban poverty the greater the incidence of mental health problems. However, the relationship is not always clear-cut. For example the chronically unemployed are less distressed than those who are poorly employed (i.e. those in stressful, badly paid and insecure jobs).

In dealing with this distribution of mental health problems two, antagonistic, hypotheses have been proposed. The first assumes that social stress causes mental health problems. The second assumes that inherited or acquired causes lead to the patient being socially disadvantaged, and this leads to a downward social drift.

The emphasis on social stresses points toward a change in social conditions, whereas the social drift model with the emphasis on genetic faults or self-induced damage, such as alcohol or drug abuse, points toward blaming the person and the use of individual treatments.

Psychic reformism

Throughout the 20th century there have been movements that have promised happiness to us: Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, “Every day in every way I am getting better and better”, Gestalt Therapy, EST, self-actualisation, the human potential movement and so on. They’ve come and they’ve gone. They fail to meet the hype because in part they are confined to merely individual happiness—I’m OK. They argue that if you sort your head out you can be happy. But it ignores the nature of the society in which we live. Unless this necessary condition for being a human being—miserable or flourishing—is taken into account, any hope for change is doomed to failure—yet another form of reformism. But we’ve had enough of reformism dangled in front of us, promising this time that things really will be different.

But is there anything to think that socialism has something to offer as an answer to the problem of human misery? In socialism we will still have some of the problems that make you feel miserable, scared, depressed or demented. Socialism is not a solution to all mental health problems, it is a solution only to those created by capitalist conditions of life, or to class conditions of life. While some of the problems are due to being human beings living within a social setting, others are due to being biological organisms, and as such will break down if we are damaged or just get old (e.g. aphasia, epilepsy, anger management problems, Alzheimer’s, front lobe syndrome, pharmacologically induced psychosis). While there could be a reduced use of medication and an increased use of social therapy, the power to detain people whose condition renders them dangerous to others will still be needed.

Socialism involves the abolition of the wages system. This entails that our ability to use our labour power is no longer subjected to the power of the capital social relationship, to be used only when capital sees a profit. Rather our labour power becomes ours, to be used voluntarily as part of our relationship with others, working in association towards our goals—to production for use to meet our needs.

Socialism also involves:

• The abolition of useless production, freeing up of millions of people from producing products and services necessary only for capitalism.
• Social decision-making on what is useful—no tat, built-in obsolescence or environmental damage.
• Breaking up of the division of labour, having multiple roles in society.
• Voluntary work—from each according to their ability; less emphasis on efficiency so people can work as much as their competence allows
• Co-operation between user and provider: not a commodity relationship; providers doing it because they want to—so less likelihood of abuse; no power differential between providers and users but partners; emphasis on building competencies

The case for socialism as more than an opposition to the economic exploitation of the working class. Throughout their writings, Marx and Engels criticised capitalism because of its effects on the working class as human beings, as more than mere economic agents.

In arguing against capitalism there was a positive model of human being set up in opposition, and as a position from which to evaluate capitalism. This positive possibility of human socialism needs to be put forward. Socialism is about establishing a mode of society which allows individuals to develop their powers to be more than mere producers or consumers. Capitalism has long produced the potential for such individual development, the task now is to realise it, to persuade working people that there is more to living than the shit of capitalism—we are more than pigs, content with mere physical satisfaction.

Ed Blewitt

Freud and Marx: do they mix? (2006)

From the May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Freud was born 150 years ago this month. Here we look at those who have tried to combine his theories with those of Marx.

Freud, who was an atheist and regarded himself as a scientific materialist, put forward a theory to explain irrational behaviour. As a doctor specialising in mental disorders and a pioneer in this field, he was quite entitled to put forward the hypothesis that mental disorders were generally connected with sexual repression in early childhood. But he was equally required to propose a mechanism as to how this could come about. His suggested materialist explanation was that there existed in human beings a special form of instinctual energy—sexual energy—to which he gave the name “libido”. That gave other scientists something to go on, something to look for in the physiology of human beings.

The trouble is that no such instinctual sexual energy has ever been found. Freud has, however, been proved right that what happens in early childhood is of crucial importance for the development of the adult personality. Other scientists have confirmed that this is the period of fairly rapid learning. But there is no reason to suppose that this is all about sex. Sexual preferences and orientations will be just one amongst many other things that will be learned during this period.

It is also true that people have been taught (more in the past than today) irrational ideas and attitudes about sex and this has had a harmful effect on their adult sex life and, in extreme cases, on their mental health. Freud’s critics don’t deny this but say he was wrong to seek to reduce everything to the expression or repression or diversion of some instinctual sexual energy.

Instinctual energy?

Wilhelm Reich, like Freud, was a medical doctor. At first he had been interested in the physiology of sex but then, under Freud’s influence, became interested in its psychology as well. But he always retained an interest in physiology and was the one of Freud’s followers who took the most seriously Freud’s hypothesis that there existed a material energy form called “libido” or “instinctual sexual energy” and set about trying to find it.

His break with Freud did not come over this, but over politics. Freud was an ordinary defender of liberal capitalism and wanted to keep his theories as essentially a clinical cure for certain forms of mental illness. Reich didn’t agree. He felt that a free society could exist if people in general were taught to take a rational attitude to sex. This led him in 1927 to join the Communist Party, from which he was to be expelled in 1933.

Reich offered an explanation as to why fascism had developed: sexual repression in early childhood. According to him, the particular form of sexual repression and family life practised in pre-Nazi Germany led to people, including workers, coming to have an authoritarian personality which inclined them to follow and be dependent on leaders, who represented the patriarchal father-figure they had been brought up to believe in and which, as a result, they had a psychological need for.

Reich’s theory didn’t have much impact at the time but it was revived in the 1960s and 70s when his The Sexual Revolution and The Mass Psychology of Fascism were hugely popular, being reprinted many times and translated into many languages. The combination of Marxism and sexual liberation caught the mood of the time. His argument in The Mass Psychology of Fascism as to why people had supported fascism was transferred virtually unchanged to explain why people supported capitalism; it was as if its title had been “the mass psychology of capitalism”. In this way sexual liberation came to be seen as being intrinsically anti-capitalist.

There is nothing wrong with sexual liberation but it stands on its own and doesn’t need Reich’s psychological theories to justify it. Since the 60s and 70s the so-called sexual revolution has proceeded. The patriarchal family is not half so patriarchal as it used to be and is not so widespread either—yet capitalism is as solidly supported by the majority of people as it ever was. Which in itself undermines theories based on Reich as to why workers support capitalism.

In 1939 Reich claimed to have found Freud’s posited instinctual sexual energy, calling it “orgone”. After that, he went completely haywire, claiming that it came from outer space and could cure cancer. As a result of refusing to stop selling “orgone boxes” to cure cancer, he was jailed for contempt of court and in fact died in the hospital wing of a prison in 1957.

This pathetic end should not disguise the fact that he was merely trying to prove what was at the basis of Freud’s theories: that there was such a thing as sexual energy. He failed, and so has everybody else. These days not even most Freudians defend the existence of sexual energy in the sense Freud understood it, as an instinctual bodily energy that could be repressed or diverted into other forms of bodily energy.

Philosophical speculations

Although Freud did believe that ultimately a materialist basis for mental states would be found—that the nature of the “sexual energy” he posited would eventually be uncovered—he himself never claimed it had been or was anywhere near to being discovered. This didn’t him prevent him from continuing to speculate on the basis that it did exist. Indeed, from one point of view, Freud can be better seen as a speculative philosopher than as a practising scientist, at least in his later years. The trouble was that he came up with speculative theories which could neither be proved nor disproved.

For instance, he posited a “life instinct” and then, later, a “death instinct”. He talked about a “pleasure principle” and a “reality principle”. But how could the existence of such “instincts” and “principles” be proved? Some (most, in fact) of his followers—Reich for instance—denied that there was such a thing as a “death instinct”. So, Freud said there was; Reich said there wasn’t. But how to prove which one was right? You can’t. There’s no way of doing so.

One philosopher who took up Freud’s philosophical speculations was Herbert Marcuse. He started from a book written by Freud in 1930, Civilisation and Its Discontents. This is one of the most anti-socialist books ever written since it provides a pseudo-scientific justification for the so-called “human nature” objection to socialism. Freud was quite explicit about this:

“(. . .) men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at most defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbour is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him”.

According to Freud, human civilisation is based, and has to be based, on the repression of the basic “sexual” or “instinctual” energy he believed humans to have. What happened, in Freud’s view, was that this repressed sexual energy was diverted into the work which had to be engaged in to produce the things humans needed to survive and build up the material side of civilisation. This speculation that the energy for work comes from diverted sexual energy is baseless. We know where we get this energy from—the food we eat, which is a form of chemical energy which the body converts into potential mechanical energy.

Without such sexual repression, Freud taught, we would all behave like babies do in the first year or so of their life seeking immediate gratification, which in Freud’s mind meant sexual gratification. But more, by this time Freud had introduced a “death instinct” into his speculative philosophy. So, without sexual repression, human society would collapse into an orgy of sex and violence.

Marcuse—who was a philosopher and not a scientific researcher—set out to show, in his Eros and Civilisation (1955), that Freudian theories did not necessarily rule out a free, non-repressive society. He accepted Freud’s speculation that civilisation had originally been based on a necessary sexual repression, but added two riders: (1) that only a part of this had come from the conditions of scarcity which obliged humans to work, another part came from living in class-divided societies where ruling classes imposed an extra repression over and above that arising from natural scarcity, and (2) that, with the coming of automation and the like, scarcity had now been conquered. This being so, sexual repression—that imposed by natural conditions as well as that imposed by class-divided society—was no longer necessary. Civilisation need no longer be based on sexual repression. A free, non-repressive society was possible. Freud and socialism could be reconciled.

Marcuse’s explanation as to why people accepted capitalism was that they had been psychologically manipulated into wanting it. In other words, that their basic “instincts” had been remoulded so as to fit in with capitalist society. In so doing he presented himself with a dilemma: if this was really the case, how could such people ever come to want to get rid of capitalism?

Community life

Erich Fromm tried to combine Freud’s ideas with those of Marx in a quite different way. Whereas Freud (and Reich and Marcuse) saw the mind as something that could be explained in terms of the individual’s instinctual biological development, Fromm said that the mind was a social phenomenon. Thus, while Freud explained mental illness in terms of the failure of an individual to develop normally through the various stages of sexual development which his theory posited, Fromm (a medical doctor and practising psychiatrist himself) explained mental illness in terms of the failure of the individual to relate properly with other individuals. For him, not only the mind but (most) mental illnesses were social.

This might even be said to amount to the complete overthrow of the Freudian system. Fromm himself didn’t go that far. He still believed in psychoanalysis as a therapy and he still thought in terms of a “life instinct” and a “death instinct”. In his book The Sane Society (which also appeared in 1955) he wrote the following (which led orthodox Freudians to say that he wasn’t really a Freudian at all):

  “Freud, searching for the basic force which motivates human passions and desires, believed he had found it in the libido. But powerful as the sexual drive and its derivations are, they are by no means the most powerful forces within man and their frustration is not the cause of mental disturbances. The most powerful forces motivating man’s behaviour stems from the conditions of his existence, the ‘human situation’” (chapter 3).

By “the conditions of the human situation” Fromm meant that humans are the only animal species whose individual members have an awareness of themselves as separate individuals, have “self consciousness”. This gives us a sense of individuality and freedom, says Fromm, but at the same time a sense of aloneness. According to him, the driving force behind human behaviour is not, as Freud claimed, the search for pleasure which was ultimately sexual, but the desire to overcome this sense of aloneness, the desire to feel part of a greater whole, the desire to be liked and accepted by other human beings.

This is a theory of human nature. In the argument about human nature that has gone on amongst socialists—is it human nature to be completely adaptable or are there conditions that humans couldn’t adapt to because it would be contrary to their nature?—Fromm comes down in favour of the second view. Humans are social animals, and we need each other not only practically so as to collectively produce the material things we need to live but also psychologically—we need to feel part of a group, of a community. From which it follows that any society which does not satisfy this psychological need, or which actively works to prevent it being satisfied, is incompatible with human nature.

The basic theme of Fromm’s The Sane Society is that capitalism, because it encourages competition between individuals, pitting them against each other in a rat race for power, privilege and prestige, is a society that is incompatible with human nature. It is an “insane society”, a “sick society”. Only a society based on co-operation and community is a sane society as one which properly meets the psychological needs of human beings for a sense of belonging; not just a sense of belonging but a state of actually belonging to a real community.

The existence of false communities—such as those provided by racism, nationalism and religion—would seem to confirm Fromm’s theory that there is a human need to be part of a community with other human beings and that capitalism is against “human nature” because it denies, and works against, this basic need. Although capitalism continually seeks to reduce us to isolated social atoms who only collide in the marketplace as buyers and sellers, the basic human need for community still expresses itself even if in distorted and perverted forms.

If true, this is the answer to the dilemma that Reich and Marcuse had got themselves into with their theory that capitalism had learned how to manipulate what they regarded as the driving force behind human behaviour—Freud’s imaginary “sexual energy”—so as to create people whose very personality and character structure has been moulded for life under capitalism. It would mean that there was still hope for socialism. Capitalism can try to suppress the human need for co-operation and community but will never be able to succeed.

Adam Buick