ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is as intrinsically interconnected with structuralism as with Marx's theory, with which it shares central conceptual, methodological, epistemological, and ontological affinities. Historically, however, thinkers did not begin to become aware of the intrinsic relation between the two theories until after the onset of Marxism's own crisis, that is, its development into the totalitarian ideologies of Bolshevism and Stalinism. The first systematic attempt to relate Marxism and psychoanalysis is attributed to the Frankfurt School. Methodologically, a central Marxian and Freudian principle is that the logic of the norm is revealed in the exception or "pathological symptom". A fundamental epistemological affinity between Marx and Freud consists, in Etienne Balibar's words, in the "theoretical, non-empirical character of the constitution" of the "object" of their theories, which is what makes each theory a new science. A culminating point of psychoanalysis as the realization of a materialist theory of metaphysics as postulated by Marx's theory of commodity fetishism is Jacques Lacan's concept of "surplus-enjoyment".
