Psychoanalysis and Marxism as incompatible, warring schools.

I'm fascinated by the period (very roughly something like 1930-56) in which the choice between dialectal materialism and the subconscious was the key schism of broadly leftist thought - embodied by Members/Quiggin in A Dance To The Music Of Time but equally valid in the US I think (Anais Nin in diaries constantly bemoaning lack of sympathetic audience as her 'inward journeys' seen as bourgeois luxury that does not advance the struggle, etc).

Nowadays I think of some co-existing, watered-down mixture of sympathy to both as typifying any vaguely leftist viewpoint, so it's weird to read of this border being so vigorously patrolled! I suppose that it ended when psychoanalysis switched to making generally weaker claims (helping the individual rather than healing the world etc) and became a generally more complementary set of ideas?

What are the exact dates of this schism? What ended it? How prevalent was it?

kinda think it ended when "Marxism" separated from "communism" & expelling people from the party lost its savor

alternate explanation: the student protests, exposing a blind spot in traditional Marxist theory*, give psychoanalytic&sociological explanations a shot of credibility.
as Habermas writes in '69 or '70, it's perfectly normal for universities to foment rebellion in turbulent Latin American nations... but in the First World???!!?

Surrealism = Marxism + psychoanalysis

yeah I thought about using the various clashes between the Surrealists and the PCF as a framework for the "exact dates" that Gravel wants, but that may be narrowing the field too much...

the leftist critique of psychoanalysis (psa) persists through the Deleuze+Guattari critique in "Anti-Oedipus", but the response from pro psa people was to divide psa into a "bad cop" (American ego psychology, a tool of capitalism that was about getting rid of neuroses so that workers could go back to work) and a "good cop" (Lacanian psychoanalysis, Abraham & Torok, etc., which was far more amenable to radical modes of critique insofar as its catechisms to desire tended to celebrate the dissolution / fragility / contingency of the ego as such- being very loose here obviously).

The highpoint of the rapprochement would be the flowering of Hegelian Lacanianism of Zizek or the Maoist Lacanianism of Badiou, but you could also point out the basic simpatico move implicit in a popular academic Marxist tome like Fredric Jameson's "The Political Unconscious" using the apparatus of repression as a way to think about ideology. That's when the streams crossed back again.

But still, people always propose a false choice between theorizing the subject and theorizing society, so the "split" re-curs constantly when people are deciding what frames their particular arguments or claims.

I probably lack the theoretical background to discuss this on the level of some people in this thread, but it does seem to me like psychoanalysis' isolation of and focus on the self is very well suited to the purposes of capitalism, whether or not that makes it inherently wedded to capitalism, and/or antithetical to communism. It's no accident that advertising and marketing in america rely so heavily on ideas from psychoanalysis.

I'm reading an article from 1970 that refers to "marxist «explanations » of scientific progress" as having been fashionable but now démodée ; & I blush but I know nearly nothing about Marxism & what such a type of explanation / "explanation" would be. Maybe someone here can help me out? I don't know any marxists irl I think?

might be a ref to dialectical materialism?

So, I'm not fully sure, but Sartre talks about this some in the essay "Materialism and Revolution". And that's my sole reference point for your question. But here are the few sources he refers to:

Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
Engels, Dialectics of Nature
Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism

I'm not really sure when & where it would have been fashionable. Sartre does mention his contemporaries Pierre Naville & Roger Garaudy, and he seems to attribute to them some Marxist view of the sort.

I also suspect that there might be something stemming from Althusser, but I really don't know.

Adorno was a Marxist. He was suspicious of the disembodied, quanitifiable kind of knowledge science seeks, seeing it as an extension of the capitalist principal of "equivalence" in which the world is drained of meaning as each commodity is assigned a numerical value:

With the clean separation between science and poetry the division of labor which science had helped to establish was extended to language. For science the word is first of all a sign; it is then distributed among the various arts as sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by the addition of these arts, by synaesthesia or total art. As sign, language must resign itself to calculation and, to know nature, must renounce the claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to being a likeness and, to be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it.

The development of science is thus related to the development of capitalism. It's also an "instrumental" form of knowledge related to the domination of nature, not just the understanding of it.

I think. I don't understand this stuff as well ad I used to think I did.

Are marxists Hegelian in that they they hold that history has a determined path? I should know this stuff!

Sometimes! They believe that history flows scientific laws and describe their positions according to that understanding. So like, in Russia in 1917 there were a lot of Marxists who were against the Soviet seizing power from the bourgeois because Russia was not "historically ready" for anything but a bourgeois revolution. Lenin's response was that the Bolsheviks must be "as radical as history demands," suggesting that Marxist prognostications should adapt to changing circumstances/data, which seems scientific.

Western Marxists like Adorno tended to not believe in a deterministic account of history. He said something at some point like "philosophy's moment of self-realization had been missed" when there was no international revolution after the first World War, and Germany instead descended into fascism. Zizek takes a similar line today: the revolution might not happen. The "contradictions" in the capitalist system don't necessarily point to its demise... although it may point to ours.

People who have read more than me should correct me on anything I'm getting wrong or simplifying.

Another point: Marxism and psycholanalysis both were only declared "unscientific" in the 20th century with Popper's definition of "falsifiability." So like before then I don't think there was a rigid line between the positivist sciences and Marxist theory, which liked to think of itself as rigorously materialistic.

Or materialist rather

Doing some reading, it looks like Althusser may be the point of reference, though I'd need to read further to be sure.

The copy of the article I was reading may have been seen by Althusser himself, since this copy was that of the library of his own department.