Psychoanalysis and Critique of Capitalism: From Freud to Lacan

This talk returns to two crucial frameworks, in which Freud examines the intertwining of the capitalist social mechanisms and the logic of the unconscious: on the one hand, the link between unconscious labour and production of pleasure, and on the other, the social aetiology of neuroses, which associates the proliferation of traumatic neuroses with two major features of capitalism: war and crisis. From here, the talk moves on to Lacan’s critique of capitalism, which can be outlined in three steps: first, the ongoing political relevance of his “return to Freud”, denouncing the normalising tendencies of post-Freudian psychoanalysis and psychotherapy; then, Lacan’s theory of enjoyment, which in many aspects systematised Freud’s speculative conception of pleasure by linking it with Marx’s critique of political economy; and, finally, his theory of discourses, which provides a specific tool to think the historical and structural metamorphoses of capitalism.

Samo Tomšič is author of the book The Capitalist Unconscious (Verso, 2015), a major, comprehensive study of the connection between Marx and Lacan’s work.