"Irrationality and aggressiveness in our time are, therefore, not emanations of some unalterable human instincts. Nor do they express simply the supposedly 'natural' rejection of reason. Irrationality and aggressiveness in our time reflect primarily the refusal to accept as sacrosanct the rationality of capitalism. They testify to the protest against the mutilation and degradation of reason for the sake of capitalist domination. This outcry against bourgeois rationality, as well as its identification with reason as such is magnificently depicted~in Dostoevsky's Underground Man who 'vomits up reason' and who scornfuIly rejects the commandment to accept the proposition that two times two equals four. While this strikingly exemplifies the posture of irrationalism, an important aspect of the Underground Man's attitude should not be lost sight of. It is that the Underground Man, irrational and crazy as he is, is actually profoundly right in 'vomiting up reason' in refusing to bow to the logic of two times two equals four. For this logic is the logic of the capitalist market, of the exploitation of man by man, of privileges, insecurity, and war. To be sure, his contempt for this rationality, his uprising against the 'common sense' of human misery, is an irrational reaction to a pernicious social order. But it is the only reaction available to the isolated and helpless individual who, incapable of comprehending the forces by which he is being crushed, is unable to struggle effectively against them. This reaction is neurosis."
Published in 1960
Periodic reminder that Freud had no idea what he was talking about and psychanalysis is garbage with no scientific rigor or utility.
Sounds like denial.
Freud's ideas were original, useful, and massively influential on the world and philosophy: psychoanalysis itself should be considered not as science, but a post-philosophical discipline, as is the Marxian project in its entirety. To say that these things weren't "scientific" is tautological; it is to say nothing.
To further suggest that Freud's work didn't have utility is to live in willful ignorance of psychoanalysis as the predominant intellectual current twentieth century - in the dyad of the Subject, the development of psychoanalysis was a reflection of the development of quantum theory; structuralism, post-structuralism, the work of Adler, Jung, Lacan, Marcuse, Deleuze, Derrida; all inbetween, all that came after, across so many disciplines - could not be without Freud or the subconscious.
Ftr Baran essentially agreed with you he just didn't say it as plainly because he was an economist and genuinely just didn't know the details of psychoanalytic practice.
