ABSTRACT
Talcott Parsons’ basically Durkheimian theory of culture necessarily sets aside Sigmund Freud’s instinctualism or biologism in order to bring psychoanalysis into the liberal voluntarist paradigm of social interaction. The Frankfurt School had turned to psychoanalysis to examine the eclipse of the proletarian revolution by fascist and totalitarian state regimes in Europe. Prior to entering the Marcuse/Brown readings of Freud, it may be useful to insert Philip Rieff’s reading of the question to what extent successful psychoanalysis requires adjustment to or rejection of the civilizing process. The Frankfurt School had turned to psychoanalysis to examine the eclipse of the proletarian revolution by fascist and totalitarian state regimes in Europe. In France the Marxist turn to Freud had to get past the official line of the Communist Party on psychoanalysis as a bourgeois subjectifying ideology. The feminist appropriation of psychoanalysis involved a political volte face.
