The suggestion that psychoanalysis has significance for Marxist psychology may give rise to doubts in some readers about the author's standpoint: Haven't Marxists (and Marxist–Leninists) always been sharply critical of psychoanalysis, and hasn't it been shown that every integration of psychoanalysis and Marxism, every “Freudo-Marxism,” whatever its particular form, is necessarily untenable because psychoanalysis, owing to its inextricable connection to bourgeois ideology, is genuinely irreconcilable with Marxism? So it must be said very clearly at the beginning of my remarks that I am basically in agreement with the Marxist–Leninist assessment that psychoanalysis essentially biologizes and individualizes its subject matter, that it psychologizes social conflicts, postulates a universal opposition between the repressing society and the unsocial drive-determined individual, abets irrationalism, and so forth. Accordingly, I share the opinion that any attempt to round out Marxism with psychoanalytic concepts in Freudo-Marxist fashion in the intention of making it capable of grasping the subjective motives of individuals or the masses will be accomplished only at the expense of the scientific and ideological foundations of Marxism.

In order to underscore my position on this issue, I can point to the fact that at this very moment, Critical Psychology is in sharp and sustained conflict with psychoanalytic views, especially with those with leftist or anticapitalist pretenses, including positions that are explicitly Freudo-Marxist, such as the “Critical Theory of the Subject” (Horn, Lorenzer, Brückner, Leithäuser, and so on), and those less obvious and programmatic attempts to modernize Marxism psychoanalytically, such as in the Althusserian and similar traditions.