Looking for a general Marxist view on Freud.

At first glance, to me everything relating to Freud sounds like pseudoscientific, idealist garbage ... everything that Marx's scientific socialism should be opposed to in principle. Nevertheless there was a Freudo-Marxist school that overlapped with the Frankfurt School, who thought the ideas of Freud and Marx could be married to some extent.

So,

  1. What was Freud about?
  2. Was Freud full of shit?
  3. Is Marxism compatible with psychoanalysis?
  • tamagotchicowboy [he/him]
    ·
    10 months ago

    1. Psychoanalysis, one of the first talk therapists, a mixture of old school psychological-clinical materialism getting an upgrade to include more areas and taboos like death and sex (he over focused on it there but that's a tendency when one ignores something for so long) and idealist conjecture since he didn't/couldn't study his conditions fully and had a limited dataset, his patients were all deeply ill bourgeois. I see Freud as more of a dualist, when he was dialectal its in a Hegelian sense

    2. To a degree (see above), to a degree he or his followers even hit today, Freudian psychology is big AF so its not a simple yes-no, his influence on other areas of thought is undeniable. There's issues with subjectivity v objectivity judgements in making calls in a case that gets very messy and goes back to psychology (or medicine in general's) roots in the west.

    3. Again not so clear cut, its very idealistic and mechanical at places to the point of bordering mystical (that's where Jung steps in and takes mystic metaphysical thought to completion, Freud just pokes at it with a stick but never directly with a sort of almost nostalgia) and with his limited data set all these bits of info would paint an observational data set a bit off from the rest of material reality, but then even as far off as this data set was he did learn something very tangible and repeatable socially about the importance of open communications and therapy for aiding in mental illness and in general, in places yes, in others no he's 100pct idealist, for a general you could make it work for you to understand something depending on what you want to look at. Many psychologists and clinicians in general even today do not look at environmental conditions, which isn't to give the guy slack but to say how feudal we still are in the west.