The psyche is structured like the commodity
or
Is the automatic subject of value in the room with us right now?
By Luke Manzarpour
Presentation given at the Division 39 of the American Psychological Association conference Bodies in Praxis, 4th April 2025
Only because value itself, in its various value-form guises, has become the medium of sociation in the capitalist world, does such a thing as an individual exist at all historically.
Michael Eldred‘It is a pity,’ Masud Khan notes in his recently published diaries, ‘the analysts have paid so little attention to Marx.’ In response to the conference theme of anti-oppressive clinical praxis, I want today to suggest one possible direction of thinking we might pursue as clinicians who do pay Marx attention.
Freud’s attention to Marx is fleeting. He praises him for his ‘sagacious indication of the decisive influence which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic attitudes.’ All conscious phenomena, note. He brackets Marx out from his own thinking, and concludes that anyone who established the relationship between ‘the general inherited human disposition … and its cultural transformations … would have supplemented Marxism.’ A one-way conversation, in other words, in which psychoanalysis remains aloof and untouched - dealing as it imagines with eternal human realities - but has left Marxism radically altered. Here, with Freud, we find the prototype of the expulsion of historical specificity from psychoanalytic thought. As has often been observed, psychoanalysis is ever eager to supplement other disciplines; a generous guest but rarely a gracious host, it is not amenable to being supplemented itself. Hence much of value has been taken from psychoanalysis by Marxists, but with rare exceptions (such as Joel Kovel, Eugene Wolfenstein, and Ian Parker), psychoanalysts have resisted being informed by Marx in their clinical work. I am suggesting today that the practice of psychoanalysis allow itself to be undone by Marx by recognising that everything that occurs in the clinic is riddled with the logic of capital, and so surrender to ‘the shock of a genuine enlargement or grounding [via] a brutal passage from some “inner truth of existence” to the external world of history’ (Jameson).
By ‘the psyche is structured like the commodity’ I do not just mean to say that it resembles a commodity but that the commodity form is the overriding determinant of what we know as the psyche. We are shaped after the commodity’s likeness. Capital imprints us; it forms our primary object, usurping the place of our primary caregivers and their ‘function of facilitating representability and dimensionality in the primitive sensory world’ (Lombardi). I posit this claim alongside others being made at this time, including by members of this panel, that challenge psychoanalysis to enter the painful process of radically unbinding its commitment to transhistorical universality, to neutrality, to an asocial, ahistorical self-understanding and understanding of the suffering individual.
Allow me to quote at length György Lukács, who wrote over a hundred years ago:
Every psychology so far, Freudian psychology included, suffers in having a method with a bias towards starting out from the human being artificially insulated, isolated — through capitalist society and its production system. It treats his peculiarities — likewise the effect of capitalism — as permanent qualities which are peculiar to “man” as “Nature dictates.” Like bourgeois economics, jurisprudence and so on, it is bogged down in the superficial forms produced by capitalist society; it cannot perceive that it is merely assuming forms of capitalist society and in consequence it cannot emancipate itself from them. For this reason it is similarly incapable of solving or even understanding from this viewpoint the problems besetting psychology too. In this way, psychology turns the essence of things upside down. It attempts to explain man’s social relations from his individual consciousness (or subconsciousness) instead of exploring the social reasons for his separateness from the whole and the connected problems of his relations to his fellow men. It must inevitably revolve helplessly in a circle of pseudo-problems of its own making.
Lukács here is setting Freud on his feet by naming the naturalisation inherent in psychoanalysis an inversion. At that, I wonder whether psychoanalytic alarm bells are ringing, that is, that you share my own anxiety that he is trampling on highly prized psychoanalytic truths: the eternal PS-D positions, constitutional factors, developmental stages, primal envy, Anna Freud’s taxonomy of the defences, the drives, or in another register the ineluctable linguistic gap (as Lacan says the mirror stage ‘situates the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction’), or perhaps Laplanche’s ‘fundamental anthropological situation’ of the ‘enigmatic signifier.’ There is a vast, closely guarded realm throughout psychoanalysis of transhistorical human reality untouched by history, and a corresponding compendium of developmental just-so stories, through which Lukács here comes crashing like the proverbial bull in a china shop. Or to use another familiar metaphor, is he pulling on a thread that threatens to unravel the whole psychoanalytic enterprise?
While clutching our psychoanalytic pearls (excuse the bricolage of cliches), let us stay with Lukács and imagine that the formation of what we know as an individual is indeed specific to capitalism all the way down. What might a psychoanalysis that holds to this look like? I do not have anything like a definitive answer, but want briefly to sketch what I believe is a fundamental historical reality that psychoanalysis might take as central to its framework if it is to be socially and historically engaged.
Capitalism is characterised by a peculiar form of impersonal domination, which arises by necessity from its core dynamic, namely the exploitation of workers by private capitalists producing in competition for the market. As Marx draws out, this competition between isolated producers gives rise to a form of appearance in which capital itself seems to be orchestrating the workings of society: ‘Their own collisions with one another,’ he writes, ‘produce an alien social power standing above them, their mutual interaction as a process and power independent of them’ - the ‘automatic subject.’
For Moishe Postone, this alien power manifests at the broadest levels of society in two forms, corresponding to the abstract and concrete dimensions of the commodity: a procession of distinct material historical epochs characterised by the prevailing form of labour-saving technology (ours being the microchip), and the perpetual self-same abstract units of value. Taken together they form what Postone calls the ‘treadmill dynamic,’ whereby production and circulation of commodities are constantly speeding up and changing, yet society is simultaneously staying in exactly the same spot, tied to the reproduction of homogeneous value. This split is registered by Jameson, at a different level of abstraction more apparent to consciousness, as ‘an unparalleled rate of change on all levels of social life and an unparalleled standardization of everything - feelings along with consumer goods, language along with built space - that would seem incompatible with such mutability.’
Through these twin dimensions, capital appears to be able to circulate and expand of its of volition, with humans subjected to its whims as if to a force of nature; what occurs at the level of consciousness is the fetishistic appearance that capital generates itself, becoming a second nature distinct from humanity, a seemingly autonomous, self-expanding and animate subject, unmediated by production or even the market. Though in fact animated by the extraction of surplus value in production, at its most fetishistic capital ‘enters into a private relationship with itself’ as ‘self-valorising’ and, Marx writes, ‘becomes a very mystical being, since all the productive forces of social labour appear attributable to it, and not to labour as such, as a power springing forth from its own womb.’
In developing his account of this autonomous subject, Marx relies on a number of pregnancy metaphors: money begets money, commodities are pregnant with surplus value, capital gives birth to itself… I take him in so doing to be expressing an important reality, that capital has a quasi-parental quality; it conceives and gives birth to itself, but also to us. We can pursue this further by tracing the manner in which it not only births but nurtures us, facilitating our development into the peculiar kind of subjects we are today by forming the preconscious preconditions that structures our understanding of what is meaningful, desirable, and even knowable, principally itself. In the process value truly structures psychic reality, which cannot help but come to reflect its forms. As Christian Lotz writes, money as ‘the form under which everything is encountered within capitalism’ is ‘the condition of the possibility for the meaningfulness by which individuals find themselves surrounded—even if, in most cases, individuals are not aware of this and unconsciously and unintentionally reproduce the form.’
We can start to get a sense through this Marxian lens of what kind of generalised developmental environment we live in, that is, what kind of object capital is for us all. It can be characterised as a highly seductive but only narcissistically cathected object, which delights in recognising itself in the individual and disregards whatever else there might be, and so which divides us then along the lines of its core component the commodity (it is, in other words, what the Lacanian infant assumes his mother to be). The particular qualities of the commodity are a matter of complete indifference to capital, which it only registers reality as an instance of itself. Equally, capitalist social relations allow for individuals, writes Lotz, ‘only insofar as they fit into the abstractions of a monetized world, [where] that which is specific to someone or something no longer fits within the abstract world and thus it becomes invisible.’ Capital thus perpetually conveys what Thomas Ogden describes as a fundamental communication of the narcissistic primary environment:
“If you are not what I need you to be, you don’t exist for me.” Or in other language, “I can see in you only what I put there. If I don’t see that, I see nothing.”
The child of such parents, writes Eva Seligman, remains ‘merely the agent of their narcissistic needs, their appendage. He is trapped in a permanent fusion with them, or else he becomes walled off.’ This, I suggest, is a core dilemma facing all individuals within conditions of generalised commodity production, and such familial experiences are microcosmic instances of a social reality in which relationality is modelled on commodity exchange. Hence the split nature of the commodity, Postone writes, ‘is not solely one between individuals and their alienated social contexts: it also can be seen as one within the individuals themselves,’ for ‘[l]ike the commodity the individual constituted in capitalist society has a dual character.’
That which is recognisable as an instance of value and so socially meaningful experiences in turn a further split, between hoarded and circulatory selfhood as modalities of hoarded and circulatory capital. In constituting the individual in this way, capital has radically expanded the experience of ‘interiority.’ The ownership of money - and to some extent, of the commodity labour-power - affords the individual previously unimaginable possibility and autonomy, such that where one would have been anchored within a constellation of customs, it is now possible to choose how to spend and where to labour, in principle at least. Monetisation thus ‘tends to enhance the boundary between the autonomous self and the impersonal world,' writes Richard Seaford, and psychoanalysis is a product of this expanded self-containment. Yet it is a peculiar form of individuation, resting as it does on its status as agent of homogenising value, which always acts as ‘an exteriority that mediates the feeling of interiority’ (Beverley Best). The practice of psychoanalysis is also thus testament to the fact that any human capacity is reducible to the commodity labour-power; even our most subtle affective experiences can be tools of a trade.
All this is to begin to root the internally antagonistic individual we meet in psychoanalysis - including the analyst themself - in a historically peculiar moment, wherein commodification of the self instils in the individual constituted by impersonal domination a basic fault (Balint), a split between particularity recognised as commodifiable or not socially recognisable at all.
I suggest this encourages within the individual of late capitalism a core claustro-agorophobic anxiety, of being both trapped in oneself and completely unboundaried, walled-off or in fusion. The paradox of this subject is captured in an ad campaign for Prada’s Paradoxe perfume, the refrain of which is ‘I’m never the same but I’m always myself.’ The actor Emma Watson directed the video and it features her in various modes of being, i.e. performing various forms of labour. ‘I’m never the same but I’m always myself’ is intoned without pronounced affect, as if a harmonious balance, devoid of any anxiety or conflict, under her omnipotent control, but could equally be the presenting distress of the social character of late capitalism coming to analysis. That is, of being painfully decentred and centred, unmoored but fixed, trapped in a monotony that is disorientatingly fluctuous. It is what capital would say if it could speak.
The particular characterological structure of this subject was registered by Argentine Marxist psychoanalyst José Bleger in the mid-twentieth century, when capital was subsuming psychic life in newly total ways. Working at the margins of mainstream psychoanalysis and in dialogue with Marxian thought, Bleger was uniquely placed to perceive the form of psychic life wrought by capitalism at the level of the clinic in ways that have since largely eluded analysts. In his clinical work he found the increasing prevalence of ‘a different type of ego and a different sense of reality’ to that classically encountered, owing to an excessive prominence in psychic life of undifferentiation. Bleger calls this character the ‘ambiguous personality’ and traces its emergence to life in a ‘formless’ or ‘amorphous’ society, wherein ‘the world and the subject become homogenised’ by capital. The ambiguous personality
is as empty of interiority as it is of exteriority (or has a different kind of interiority and exteriority); they give us the impression (and this addresses countertransference experiences) of furtive behaviour, inauthenticity, lack of autonomy, naivety, vagueness, disorientation, oscillation, inconclusiveness, inconsistency, changeability, and sometimes of being indecisive and vacillating. We could say that ambiguity has a real polyvalence or proteiform character.
Such characters exist in accordance with the ‘treadmill dynamic’ described by Postone and Brick, in which capitalist society ‘necessarily must constantly accumulate to stand still,’ constantly change to remain the same: they ‘feel confined and pressured, as if time were ‘hurrying’ them; time is ‘hurrying them’ but they feel stopped or paralysed,’ writes Bleger. He offers his account of the ambiguous personality as both a specific clinical presentation and as paradigmatic of the social character attendant to late capitalism. The category gives clinical credence to and fills out the psychodynamics of what Fromm describes in the same period as the newly emergent ‘marketing personality,’ for whom the ‘market concept of value exchangeability [leads] to a similar concept of value with regard to people and particularly to oneself,’ where ‘others are experienced as commodities like oneself; they too do not present themselves but their saleable part,’ such that relationality between two individuals becomes that ‘between two abstractions, two living machines, who use each other.’
Such individuals attempt to resolve the disorientation and internal incompatibility through adhesive identification - the ‘defensive adherence to the object in the service of allaying the anxiety of disintegration' (Ogden, following Bick and Meltzer) - with capital and its forms, through labour and consumption, maintaining ‘extreme dependence on their work:’
Action and activity predominate, there is no interiority or ‘self’ and when they speak (in psychoanalytic treatment or outside of it), they speak about events, things, persons and activities, because this is the way they talk about themselves; because they are this.
Adhesive identification to the concrete dimensions of capitalist social relations - to the prevailing forms of labour-saving technology with which we are always in contact - but also to its abstractions, principally abstract time. As Ogden (whose work has much in common with that of Bleger) writes of one such patient, but which I believe is a universal experience today:
The “deadline” is elevated to the position of a continually felt pressure in the patient’s emotional life that can be a felt presence at every moment, whether or not the patient is consciously focused on it. These patients describe the anxiety of the approaching deadline as a pressure that they hate, and yet at the same time continually seem to create for themselves: “A due date is something to push up against like a wall in front of me.”
Abstract time becomes a ‘presence,’ an entity to give shape to the formless dread haunting capitalist existence. Yet the object with which we adhesively identify via gadget or deadline is a moment of that very formlessness, the blank expansion of emptiness, ‘the void at the heart of capital’ (Arthur). Not a subject at all, not even a narcissistic one, but an unconsciously anthropomorphised compulsion, a bad infinity that the structural dynamics of capitalism have conjured up. Hence we must perpetually attempt adhesively to identify with it anew, forever chasing an abyss (which I humbly suggest is the historical reality animating what Žižek takes to be the eternal conundrum of desire, the end of which he finds harder to imagine than the end of capitalism).
*
The antinomies of societies of generalised commodity production are inevitably reproduced within psychoanalysis, which tends to cleave into two factions, both of which resolve the diremption of selfhood by falling on one side of it and taking the other to be false. Broadly (and crudely) the ego psychology, object relations, and relational schools tend to posit enclosed, constitutionally defined ‘inside out’ or centred whole objects (or whole dyadic/family units) who relate to other whole objects, while the Lacanian and post-Lacanian traditions posit the individual who is constituted ‘outside in’ and ‘decentred’, fragmented, colonised by circulating signifiers. Lacanians see the ‘whole object’ as the problem and so clinically enact the social dissolution of the monadic self (Ernst Bloch’s modernist lament that ‘The empty ego forms no shell any more to hide the one inside who is not at home anyway’ reads like a desirable outcome of some forms of Lacanian analysis); the Anglo-Americans see the fragmented part object as in need of integration, assuming the bourgeois individual to be the ‘healthy’ mode of being, with the internal world a kind of storehouse of objects. This split is reproduced within each group, with Ogden for instance positing the decentred Kleinian self and Fink arguing for something like a centred Lacanian subject. There is an attendant split between those who view fixed truth as ‘the alpha and omega’ of psychoanalysis (Blass), and those for whom truth is just whatever is in circulation. Libido in turn is either genitally centralised or polymorphous, and either attached to centrally significant others or free-floating. Clinically there is an orientation to the transference as either being highly specific to each monadic individual or as the impersonal flow of signifiers, and to one’s affective countertransference as being either central or a localised distraction from the flow. There are multiple further antinomies traceable to the twin dimensions of the commodity (and the dichotomy of the hoarded and circulatory incarnations of its abstract dimension in the form of money) that slice psychoanalysis down the middle.
When cleaving itself in this way along the lines of the antinomies of bourgeois thought, psychoanalysis remains unable to think the torn halves of selfhood together, that is, the capitalistically-constituted individual whose idiosyncrasy is only socially recognisable as an instance of homogenous value, and if recognised at all is further dirempted: centred and decentred, fixed and fragmented, Parmenidean and Heraclitean, hoarding and circulatory, never the same but always herself. Favouring one side of this split self can be said to be adaptive/conformist in this account, one orientating the individual to the needs of fixed capital, the other to circulatory capital. Rather than choose between them, I am suggesting that their very opposition is an expression of commodified life, the internal incompatibility within a system that destroys all fixed positions and yet fixes everything in place, a tension that finds microcosmic form within the individual who is radically incompatible with herself.
I set out this roughly sketched Marxian account as a possible framing for a psychoanalysis that seeks to approach clinical material in a manner that is historically, socially, and politically alert. That is, one that would centre the antinomies that define psychic life of the commodified subject, and so expand the transferential frame, drawing on more of the social fabric with which to think. A psychoanalysis that would not exclude from thought the fundamental reality in which we live, while also aware that reality is often the best defence. With paradox of self not something to be resolved through ego integration or dissolution, but recognised as the internalised opposition between the abstract and concrete dimensions of the commodity, which cannot be overcome in the clinic but can potentially be experienced without flight to defence. Psychoanalysis that could incorporate what Jameson calls 'cognitive mapping,’ that is, the capacity to think 'that mental map of the social and global totality we all carry around in our heads in variously garbled forms,’ though not only to know it cognitively but to experience it affectively. This might loosen the psychic bonds to the forms of value and so reduce the reliance on pseudo-solutions that capitalism offers to the anxieties it creates, an anticipation of a generalised countenance of the anxiety of the broken middle of modernity. It would equip psychoanalysis with an account of its own historical emergence and so a reflexivity it currently lacks. It would be moreover to posit a fundamental consanguinity between the two individuals who meet in the clinical encounter, for they share a primary object - the automatic subject of value. The Marxian tradition has much offer clinical practice beyond these preliminary intimations.
With thanks to my fellow panellists Asa Mendelsohn and Gabriel Tupinambá, the meeting chair Lara Sheehi, and to Molly Merson for inviting me.
Some of this presentation forms part of a larger piece published in the print edition of Parapraxis Issue 05: Economies.
