Is a Psychic Thermidor Inevitable? Marcuse’s Hedonism and Its Freudian Challenge
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Dror Yinon
Abstract
In this paper I argue that Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization is a revision of his early hedonism presented in his early papers from the 1930’s, a revision necessitated by the challenge Freud’s psychoanalysis posited to the possibility of hedonism. In the first section of the paper, I present Marcuse’s critical hedonist position, mainly in “On Hedonism” (1938), where he develops a social and objective hedonism that should be set as a main political goal of a society. Accordingly, the key to a transformation of society is located at the social-political level. However, Freud’s metapsychology shows that the barriers that prevent a transformation of society are located at a much deeper level and are found in the relation between the psychological structure of individuals and social pressure, between the dynamics of the instincts and society’s material welfare. Thus, the possibility of a society that asserts happiness as its principle depends on the possibility of a transformation of human metapsychology and its social manifestation. This challenge, and the manner in which Marcuse dealt with it is the subject of the second section in which I analyze Eros and Civilization as Marcuse’s rethinking of his hedonism in light of Freud.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction
- Special Section: Language, Translation, and Cultural Transfer in the German-Jewish Experience
- “Crossing the Bridge, Facing the Problem”: The Problem of Transference in Avot Yeshurun’s Poetry
- Nazi Germany in the Viewfinder: On Space and Movement in German-Jewish Youth Culture
- Eastern European Perspectives on the Restitution of Nazi-Looted Jewish Cultural Property: Gershom Scholem in Prague, 1946
- Other Contributions
- Better Use an Arrow: ‘I-Thou,’ ‘Relation,’ and Their Difference in Martin Buber’s I and Thou
- Is a Psychic Thermidor Inevitable? Marcuse’s Hedonism and Its Freudian Challenge
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction
- Special Section: Language, Translation, and Cultural Transfer in the German-Jewish Experience
- “Crossing the Bridge, Facing the Problem”: The Problem of Transference in Avot Yeshurun’s Poetry
- Nazi Germany in the Viewfinder: On Space and Movement in German-Jewish Youth Culture
- Eastern European Perspectives on the Restitution of Nazi-Looted Jewish Cultural Property: Gershom Scholem in Prague, 1946
- Other Contributions
- Better Use an Arrow: ‘I-Thou,’ ‘Relation,’ and Their Difference in Martin Buber’s I and Thou
- Is a Psychic Thermidor Inevitable? Marcuse’s Hedonism and Its Freudian Challenge
