Organized By The Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis

Please note: the entrance to the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis is on Livingston St. Upon arrival please ring “3rd Floor Reception” for entry and head up via elevator to the 3rd floor.

With the current surge in COVID cases, RSV, and other illnesses, we ask that you please stay home if you are sick. Masking is strongly encouraged, especially if you have recently been around someone who is sick. Masks will be provided.

Jacques Lacan accepted that Freud’s discoveries were inseparable from Western capitalist modernity. However, as Lacan also admitted, the historical development of such modernity would eventually lead to the vanishing of the Freudian unconscious. Agreeing at least in this with Lacan, Herbert Marcuse predicted the disappearance of the unconscious as conceptualized by Freud: the unconscious would cease to concern each subject and would become massified, making psychoanalysis obsolete. This would not be a problem of psychoanalysis, but of modern society, which could be criticized in its massified aspect from the psychoanalytic point of view.

Marcuse’s argument is a good example of the operation of critique in the Frankfurt School. The contradiction between true ideas and historical reality allows us to criticize reality in the name of a truth that does not coincide with reality. This is the truth that Marcuse finds in Marxism and psychoanalysis, considering both obsolete and true in their obsolescence, and therefore using them as powerful resources to critically examine reality, a reality that is characterized by being illusory or ideological, oppressive or repressive, unjust or unsatisfactory to our interests and desires.

Taking up Marcuse’s critique, I will continue to ally Marxist and psychoanalytic theories, accepting them as even more obsolete and powerful than in the times of Lacan and Marcuse. Both theories will serve me to reconsider the disappearance of Freud’s unconscious. I will maintain that this unconscious disappears fundamentally not because of its massification, but because of what Marx would describe as its ‘real subsumption’ in capitalism. In other words, capital’s jouissance would increasingly be in the place of the Other’s desire. The symbolic system of culture would be progressively assimilated and reduced to the capitalist economic system. This thesis will allow me to reinterpret Lacan’s capitalist discourse, elucidate new pathologies of neoliberalism and discuss theses such as that of the ‘man without an unconscious’ by Massimo Recalcati.

David Pavón-Cuéllar is a Mexican Marxist philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst and critical psychologist. He is a professor of Psychology and Philosophy at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo in Morelia, Mexico. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Rouen (France) and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). His recent books include Psicoanálisis y colonialidad: hacia una inflexión anticolonial de la herencia freudiana (Mexico City, Fontamara, 2024), Then and Now: On the Crowd, the Subject, and the Collective (with Betty Fuks, Paola Mieli, Rosalind Morris and Alain Vanier, New York, Agincourt, 2023), Sobre el vacío: puentes entre marxismo y psicoanálisis (Mexico City, Paradiso, 2022), Psychoanalysis and Revolution: Critical Psychology for Liberation Movements (with Ian Parker, 1968 Press, London, 2021, translated into nine languages), Virus del Capital (Buenos Aires, Docta Ignorancia, 2021); Más allá de la psicología indígena: concepciones mesoamericanas de la subjetividad (Mexico City, Porrúa, 2021, translated into portuguese), Zapatismo y subjetividad: más allá de la psicología (Bogotá, Cátedra Libre, 2020); Psicología crítica: definición, antecedentes, historia y actualidad (Mexico City, Itaca, 2019); Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or Against Psychology? (London, Routledge, 2017).