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Andrew Culp

Explosive Social Psychology: Structural Causality in Freud and Althusser

“In History, these instances, the superstructures, etc. – are never seen to step respectfully aside when their
work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy
as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the
‘last instance’ never comes.”
-- Louis Althusser, For Marx, p 113.

What makes psychoanalysis so appealing to social analysis is that it challenges classical

notions of causality. In opposition to linear and expressive causality, psychoanalysis offers a

dynamic and powerful account of the how social forms are structured through indirect

connections. Freud never developed a coherent system of causality to be used for social

analysis, however. Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser gained incredible mileage by

appropriating concepts from Freud’s work on dreamwork, creating a model of structural

causality based on social psychology. In the paper I first outline the primary processes

developed by Freud that Althusser later imports. Next, I explain the motivations for Althusser’s

structural causality and then explicate how the processes of structural causality work. Lastly, I

use structural causality to push Freud to the limit with processes he invented himself.

The Primary Psychic Processes of Condensation and Displacement in Freud

The normal, stable state maintained in waking life recedes slightly with sleep, revealing

the deep conflict and struggle of the psyche. One way that conflict is played out is in dreams –

created by either something left over from waking life or by an unconscious wish that is

otherwise suppressed (Outline 39). The reason otherwise suppressed associations emerge within

dreams is because the brain’s censorship faculties are relaxed, providing an opportunity for

certain content to emerge (Introductory Lectures 176). The content is not directly intelligible to

the dreamer, however. The ego’s ability to suppress content is so strong and its opposition to the
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content is so intense that even though censorship is relaxed the content must find an indirect path

into dreams (Outline 40-1). The indirect path modifies, distorts and/or transforms the content so

that the original associations that generated the content of the dream is different than the

associations that the dreamer uses to make the dream intelligible (40). In order to differentiate

between these two different types of content, Freud uses latent to describe the original

associations that produce the content and manifest to describe the representation of the dream

given by the dreamer.1

Dreams are then one of the critical points of intervention for a psychoanalyst who is

seeking to gain access to the unconscious of an analysand. The analyst is not given direct access,

however, because the analysand can only provide manifest content; content warped by the

process that took it on a round-about path through the psyche. Tracing the content back to its

unconscious origins then requires understanding the different process that mutate the content

enough to pass by the relaxed psychic censor (Outline 41). The two essential processes Freud

develops are displacement and condensation. Displacement is when psychic interest is detached

from an important latent element reassigned to an element that is obliquely or indirectly related

(Introductory Lectures 174). Condensation, alternatively, is the process where a number of

different latent elements are combined and fused into a single unity – that single unity appears a

deceptively small node of manifest content that stands in for a multiplicity of latent elements

(Introductory Lectures 171).

1
In Interpretation of Dreams, Outline, and Introductory Lectures Freud asserts that dreams are the result of
linguistic chains of association. I want to remain ambivalent, if not slightly resistant, to this claim and think that it is
not a necessary component of Freud’s contribution to the structure of the unconscious. For a telling display of the
limits of restricting dreamwork to linguistics, consider Freud’s attempt to fit visual images within his model in
Chapter VI of Interpretation of Dreams or pages 175-181 of Introductory Lectures. Later in the paper I contrast
Althusser’s socio-historical Symbolic Order with others, notably Lacan’s assertion that the unconscious is
‘structured like a language’. I have limited by investigation to social psychology but this may have profound
implications for dreamwork as well.
For the purposes of the paper I will only speak of ‘elements’. See Althusser’s For Marx p56-8 for more on
materialist elements.
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The two primary processes of displacement and condensation are operable not only

within dreams but the psyche more generally. In clinical contexts Freud argues that

displacement and condensation are primary processes active in the formation of hysterical and

obsessional neuroses, dreams, jokes, and transference. This section of the paper will focus

exclusively on displacement and condensation within a clinical context. Later, after outlining

Althusser’s importation of displacement and condensation to develop structural causality, I

return to Freud’s social psychology.

a. Displacement

Displacement is a slight of hand that confuses the suppression process in order to

smuggle through an element of the unconscious that would otherwise be suppressed. A latent

element that is important enough [intense] to be suppressed uses its importance as a distraction,

by either 1) misattributing importance to an element that has assured entry and therefore making

itself seem too unimportant to suppress, or 2) disguising itself through an oblique reference that

retains an intense level of importance but is unintelligible enough to evade the psychic censor

(Introductory Lectures 171).

Exploring the first method, of displacement as Laplanche and Pontalis note, requires an

economic model of psychic investment (Language 120). Following such an understanding, the

total amount of psychic energy in the system remains the same at the levels of both latent and

manifest content. What differs, however, is what appears as the important elements at each

level; the latent element that plays such an important role in the unconscious is manifest in the

dream without disguise but appears as insignificant, overshadowed by a different element that

should be unimportant but has traded its position of importance. Because the dream is now
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centered on a previously unimportant concept it may appear strange. To identify the latent

content the interpreter wouldn’t need to reveal disguised content, instead the interpreter would

detach the psychic investments from the elements of the dream and reassign them in different

quantities, re-centering the dream on the latent content that generated the dream (120-2).

The second method of displacement doesn’t require an economy of psychic investment

but instead a special relationality between elements. There are two moves that allow an element

to be smuggled out of suppression: one, the element disguises itself in a way that is unintelligible

to the psychic censor; and two, the element attaches itself to the other elements through an

“unusual external association” (Introductory Lectures 174). It is worthwhile to pause and

examine the details of these “unusual external associations.” The content of the element after

being displaced, according to Freud, is not a simple substitution where the component part of an

element replaces the whole (e.g. a part-object, breast, standing in for the whole, mother), but an

allusion (174). And the relation between the latent element and its allusion, as Freud remarks in

footnote, is external. By external he means that the relation of the two elements, the latent

element and the allusion, is not based on meaning but on something superficial or accidental, for

instance similarity of sound, verbal ambiguity or otherwise (174). Jokes and slips of the tongue

illustrate this type of displacement well. Some humor, for example, is when one recognizes an

unintentional unconscious revision of a preconscious thought (Jokes 222-3). Saying something

unintended, like the opening joke in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, where a poor

man showing his appreciation of a rich man treating him ‘familiarly’ instead says he was treated

‘fa-millionaire-ly’ (Jokes 47). Or, the slip of the tongue where the President of the Lower house

of the Parliament opened a session he was dreading by accidentally declaring it closed

(Introductory Lectures 34). What is critical for this type of displacement is that differences in
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intelligibility – a latent element made unintelligible to the psychic censor can still be legible in its

manifest forms, else certain type of jokes would never be humorous. There must therefore be

structures of intelligibility between the unconscious, conscious and between different psyches.

b. Condensation and Over-Determination

Condensation is the process in which multiple latent elements are reduced and fused into

a single manifest element. Describing condensation appears deceptively easier to explain than

displacement: first, a group of latent elements are brought together; second, those elements are

fused into a single composite structure according to something they all hold in common; third, as

the common element passes from latency into the manifest dream only fragments of the

associated latent content are brought with it (Introductory Lectures 171-2). A simple example is

jokes based on the contraction of two terms, like the “fa-milllionaire-ly” joke described above.

The contraction, and thus condensation of two seemingly opposing terms, is what makes the joke

possible. If the sentence is reconstructed without the contraction, it is no longer humorous

(Jokes 47-53).

The difference between displacement and condensation is important. While displacement

calls into question the proper assignment of intensities to the objects within a dream, for

instance, it does not include the type of indeterminacy that condensation implies. When multiple

latent elements fuse together through condensation, otherwise disparate psychic energy is

concentrated in single nodal point of intersection. Most of the associated content is stripped

away in the transition from latent to manifold dream content, leaving an intense representation

whose visibility is based solely on the commonality of a multiplicity of partially concealed

elements from which it draws its immense intensity (Language 81). The differences that exist
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that do appear in the manifest content may appear blurred or vague due to the process of

condensation, described by Freud as looking like composite photographs or taking several

photographs with the same photographic plate (Introductory Lectures 172). From the point of

view of the interpreter of manifold dreams, it may be apparent that the manifold content was

produced by a unique intersection of largely disparate forces and the only intelligible information

is their commonality. Determining the sameness is simple but there is little to go on determining

the difference other than either blurs and vagaries or, to complicate matter further, multiple

layers of latent and manifest elements that crisscross each other, informing and extending into

each other (125, 173).

The telescoping reduction of a multiplicity to a single common term creates a certain

sense of indeterminacy. The single term is packed full of content that is not self-explanatory,

and while fragments or residuum of related latent elements may accompany the common term in

its journey into the manifest dream their suggestiveness is limited. The work of reconstructing

the latent elements from a manifest dream requires an extensionality of the common terms,

extending it in multiple directions that may be seemingly unrelated, oppositional or even

contradictory (Interpretations of Dreams 350). In order to assist this work, Freud develops over-

determination – mostly clearly explicated in The Interpretation of Dreams. Over-determination

recognizes the external, indirect route elements take via displacement and the extensional

multiplicity of condensed elements (Interpretation of Dreams 201). Linear mechanical causality

is therefore not possible when determining the latent elements that generated the dream, as Freud

noted, dream-work is not “a word-for-word or a sign-for-sign translation; nor is it a selection

made according to fixed rules” but instead requires a complex model that takes into account,

among other things, all elements of the dream as they relate to one another, how dreams related
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to other dreams and the context in which the dream emerged (Introductory Lectures 181-3).

Over-determination therefore emphasizes a multiple causality where causes are not determinate

because they are necessary or sufficient. Instead, a combination of multiple latent elements

might cause a manifest dream-image even if each latent element, considered in isolation, would

not be enough to create the dream-image – a result of the combination of intensities created in

condensation. Or, a less important (yet still important) element of the dream looks like a cause

merely because attention has been displaced from an alternatively causal dream element

(Interpretation of Dreams 192-3). Interpretation of Dreams was an early work, first published in

1899, so the concept of over-determination would remain specific to dream-work in Freud’s

corpus.

Althusser’s Structural Causality

a. Althusser’s Anti-Hegelianism

Althusser’s intellectual project from which structural causality emerges can be situated in

a number of ways. In the historical conjuncture in which he was writing, the early 1960s,

Althusser was undertaking the de-Stalinization of the French Communist Party – an unpopular

move that met with extreme resistance (For Marx 10, 30-1). In particular, his skepticism is

aimed at two targets: first, the idealist dialectic of Hegel which results in an abstract-speculative

philosophy that doesn’t offer a break from capitalist ideology (12-4); and second, the theme of

humanist ‘liberation’ and the theoretical effects of its use, which he calls “a war-horse for petty

bourgeois intellectuals in their struggle against Marxism” (10-2).

Althusser, in an effort to isolate and abandon any of the idealism found in Marx,

periodizes Marx’s work. The argument is this – the contingency of Marx’s beginnings required
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him to first stand on the shoulders of others before developing an original philosophy.

Considering the historical conjuncture that the Young Marx emerged from, it is easy to see while

it may have idealist roots. Marx’s intellectual development began within the context of German

idealism, in-and-against the Young Hegelians (For Marx 77-84). The failure of 1840 proved that

German Reason, and more specifically the abstract-speculative philosophy of Hegelianism, can

be observed in Marx’s disillusionment with Germany and his move to France in 1843. It is

around this time that Althusser says that Marx made an epistemological break by beginning

development on his own concrete-material philosophy (For Marx Chapter 2).

The epistemological break, as Althusser and Balibar argued in Reading Capital, is

predicated on the development of a new type of determinism. Previous causal determinism is

based in two systems of concepts from classical philosophy. The first is transitive and analytical

effectivity, also called in other places mechanical or linear causality. Transitive causality, a

Cartesian system, mechanistically reduces effectivity to the whole as a sum of its elements. This

system does not take into account the relation of a whole to its parts, however, so the Leibnizian

concept of expressive causality was developed. Expression posits that elements of a whole are

mere expressions of an internal essence, each element is a phenomenal and adequate expression

of the whole. This relation is crucial to Hegel’s thought and serves as the idealist kernel that

makes each element of a whole (economic, political, legal, literary, religious, etc.) immediately

adequate to the inner essence and Spirit of the whole – the Protestantism of religion and

economics, the privations of civil and political life (186-7). The result is the ‘mythical shell’ of

Hegel’s dialectic that reproduces a “sublimated, inverted world” with every application of the

Idea to reality (For Marx 90-1).

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In Hegel, the idealist dialectic is exterior to objects and therefore classical causality can

sufficiently explain its operations. For Althusser and Balibar, however, to be revolutionary

theory must utilize the model developed by Marx that requires a concrete mode of presence.

Such a model situates objects as embedded within both the structures that act on them and its

effects (Reading Capital 188). The difference in models is clear, for Hegel the dialect is

structured as an external structure whose content is an essential Idea that gets applied to the real.

In Althusser the dialectic is made from life and the structure applied to the real world is made

from that world without presupposing a miraculous outside structure (For Marx 91). The result

is that classical causality, and Hegelianism in particular, relies on different structures and

therefore the processes that operate within the Marxist and Hegelian structures are different.

According to Althusser, the processes of the Hegelian dialectic “negation, the negation of

negation, the identity of opposites, ‘supersession,’ the transformation of quantity into quality,

contradiction, etc.” must be differentiated from the process of Marx’s materialism (For Marx 93-

4). In order to verify their fidelity to the original Marx, Althusser and Balibar note that Marx’s

use of Darstellung is the basis for an immanent causality (Reading Capital 188). The system of

causality remains underdeveloped, however, because of Marx’s commitment to theoretical

practice as a concrete presence (For Marx 178).

The difference between a Hegelian and Althusserian dialectic can be demonstrated in one

of the key concepts that Marxist theory often revolves around, contradiction – the contradiction

of uneven development (why Russia, ‘the most backward country,’ produced a revolution), the

presence of contradictory tendencies and countertendencies (an increase in total profit despite a

falling rate of profit), the contradictory emergence of subjects of capitalism (bourgeoisie and

proletariat) (For Marx 94-99). Hegelianism would assert that all of these are a result of the
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internal contradictions within the capitalist mode of production. This Hegelian notion is taken

head on by Althusser, he ridicules it for being unable to explain unevenness, identify sites of

rupture that have and must occur, and for being unable to justify its own existence except by

miraculation (102-4). Althusser is not blind to advances of expressive causality in Marxist

theory, however. Mao’s work on contradictions is an attempt to turn the counter-revolutionary

theory of sameness found in the mythical dialectic of Hegel into the revolutionary kernel of

revolution. Instead of relying on the work of an essential simple internal contradiction, as Hegel

does, Mao formulates contradictions as complex entities that bear revolutionary fruit in their

contradictory expression (194-5). Satisfied that Mao is properly non-Hegelian, Althusser still

finds Mao’s contribution unsatisfactory because of Mao’s reliance on an ever-pre-givenness of a

structured complex unity (199).

Pushing immanence to it’s limit, Althusser quotes famous Marxist phrases: Lenin, ‘the

soul of Marxism is the concrete analysis of a concrete situation’; Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and

Mao, ‘everything depends on the conditions’ – urging Marxist theory to move beyond the

essentialism of Hegel (For Marx 206-9). The real world of Althusser’s materialism is

constructed in “real struggle, real confrontations, precisely located within the structure of the

complex whole” (For Marx 215). To analyze the processes that operate within this world it is

crucial to first explain the three critical observations Mao makes about contradictions: first, there

are principal and secondary contradictions: second, that each contradiction has principal and

secondary aspects; and third, that contradictions are subject to uneven development (194).

Retaining much of Mao’s work on contradiction, Althusser switches out the Hegelian

assumptions Mao relied upon, replacing them with the Freudian processes over displacement,

condensation and over-determination (For Marx 209). No wonder Althusser decides to apply
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Freud’s model of the unconscious to the topology of Mao’s system of contradictions, it is

radically populated by elements that are constantly shifting in position, expressing differently

contradictory aspects, and develop in uneven, unpredictable ways. As Althusser notes, it is a

“complexly-structurally-unevenly-determined” causality (209). These processes serve two

critical functions – first, these processes explain the formation of contradictions, social forms and

structures; and second, it provides the ground for theoretical analysis and political practice that is

not available within the Hegelian system. The remainder of this section deals with the first

question, how displacement, condensation and over-determination function within Althusser’s

system of causality. An exploration of the consequences of the second function, the theoretical

and political consequences of structural causality, can be found in the next section.

It is important to distinguish what a principal contradiction in the Hegelian system would

look like compared to a principal contradiction in Althusser’s structural causality. Hegelian

expressivity would differentiate between principal and secondary contradictions on the basis of a

one-way causal street. This would place a central principal contradiction at the causal heart of

the whole – primitive accumulation, for instance – which expresses itself in secondary

contradictions that are incomplete, fragmented symptoms of the principal contradiction – in our

example it might be conflict over private property or labor disputes. According to this logic, if

the principal contradiction breaks down or is resolved – the commons is restored or worker

controls the means of production – the secondary contradictions will cease to exist – conflict

over private property, in this instance. No matter what is done in regards to the secondary

contradictions, however, they can only indirectly influence the real, more essential principal

cause (For Marx 205).

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b. The Mechanics of Condensation, Displacement and Over-determination in Althusser

The concrete, multiple, uneven causality implied by Althusser challenges the primacy of

the principal contradiction. While the principal contradiction is the dominant contradiction of

any given social system, it is not the essential contradiction to that system. The contradiction

could be a result of displacement, where previously indeterminate conditions switch places with

determinate conditions. One example is the shifting role that time-space compression played in

the shift from capital-intensive accumulation of Fordist capitalism to the flexible accumulation of

post-Fordism (Condition of Postmodernity 260-307). Dominant contradictions can also be the

result of the condensation of contradictions – multiple secondary contradictions could come

together, fused into a single unity, causing it to ascend to the position of the dominant

contradiction within a complex social whole. Primitive accumulation could be viewed in this

manner – when bourgeois ownership of capital and the means of production meets abstract labor,

they begin the circuit of capital (Capital Chapter 26). Each of these elements have complex,

structurally and unevenly determined causes that require a whole set of social, technological and

political conditions in order to bring them together (Capital Chapter 27). This is where over-

determination becomes most helpful: when previously in-determinant elements are invested in

(displacement) and then fused together in a common structure (condensation), social forms are

produced (For Marx 211). The social form produced does not need an essential core, but instead

can be a collection of otherwise unrelated forms (abstract labor, the accumulation of money,

ownership of the means of production) which change over time. The most critical observation

about structural causality, other than the observation that it includes multiple causes where each

alone may not be necessary or sufficient, is that the relation between the elements is not one of

simple contradiction. Instead, they are forces that relate in any number of ways, whether it be in
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opposition, antagonism, agonism, co-constitution, subversion, inversion, etc. (For Marx 210-6).

Elements that are necessary for a social form (land, labor and capital) don’t need a transitive or

expressive casual relation to either one another or to elements that replace them in the single

unity. In fact, the necessity of the elements can be determined post facto when looking back at a

range of contingent forces. A chart of the changing endogenous and exogenous variables of the

capitalist mode of production through time and space makes this very clear – accumulation,

regulation, capital, technology, social organization, ideology, political balance of power, and

finance regimes can all crisscross in and between each other, causing indirect causal chains that

compose, recompose and decompose one another (Grid & Fork). The capitalist mode of

production is always at risk of falling apart, “the flow of workers could dry up or leave, and

capital could be wasted rather than invested. The encounter is not only the contingency of the

origin but also the uncertainty of the future” (Primitive Accumulation 30). But in breaking down

– if the condensed fusion of multiple causal elements is exploded – the capitalist mode of

production is not guaranteed failure, it often serves as the impetus to find new ways to expand

and reconstitute itself (Anti-Oedipus 239).2

The Stakes of Structural Causality in Althusser and Freud

Structural causality’s importation of Freudian processes into an already constituted field

of social analysis magnifies the power of over-determination’s utility in social psychology. The

consequences for Marxian analysis are obvious and have been developed extensively elsewhere.

This paper instead focuses on Freud’s social psychology, a wildly speculative project that has

had a considerable influence on a wide variety of disciplines in the humanities and social

sciences. The reach and consequence of structural causality is far too broad for this paper to
2
In a longer paper this section would be expanded.
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develop a comprehensive account of the stakes in general. Instead, I isolate three areas that I

explore in this section and I reserve more open-ended questions for the conclusion. The three

consequences of structural causality I find most interesting that may also provide fruitful ground

for re-reading Freud include: one, a non-teleological causality that never culminates in an ideal

social totality but remains dynamic and concrete; two, a subject-less, non-atomistic motor; and

three, a system of causality that is grounded in socio-historical conjuncture.

a. Non-Teleology

Even though elements taken an indirect path within complex structures, neither Freud nor

Althusser imply that causality is indeterminate. Over-determination is an acknowledgement that

history is too complex to be able to point to a single cause. If that is true, then Hegel’s ability to

create a Universal History is a reductive arrogance that miraculously traces a path from the past

into the future toward a final Goal (For Marx 102). Despite its humble acknowledgement of an

inability to provide a single necessary and sufficient cause for history, over-determination

suggests processes (condensation and displacement) that not only describe potential paths of

histories but also provide the basis for a practical politics (For Marx 215).

This is not to say that Freud’s work didn’t include a certain commitment to non-

teleology. When developing his organistic notion of the subject in Beyond the Pleasure

Principle, Freud notes “it is often merely a matter of opinion when we declare that one stage of

development is higher than another” (50). This is also confirmed in Freud’s assertion that that

there is no way to determine whether civilization and human development has brought about

more happiness because happiness itself is “essentially subjective” (Civilization 41). This does

not prevent progress narratives that attribute unique status to the development of intellectual
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capacities and potential for ethical sublimation due to the processes of civilization. Indeed,

Freud even states that these progress narratives “may be difficult, too, for many of us, to

abandon” (BPP 50). Freud’s critique of progress narratives then mirrors Althusser’s attack on

Hegel – human development does not follow a path toward perfect but is instead a set of

dynamic conditions. The psychoanalytic result of the teleological Hegelian presentist arrogance

that Althusser points out is striking – supposing an “instinct towards perfection” is a process

involved in the formation of neurotic phobia (51).

Though they are both non-teleological thinkers, Freud’s non-teleology looks different

than Althusser’s “complexly-structurally-unevenly-determined” causality, however. This is most

clearly demonstrated when comparing Freud’s organism to Althusser’s revolutionary project.

Organic life, according to Freud, always seeks to return to a previous state of things – a state

compared to sleeping (BPP 43). It is no doubt obvious that this figure is one of conservation,

even sameness. When compared to the revolutionary project of Althusser, which is marked by

breaks, ruptures, and explosions, Freud’s subject appears counter-revolutionary. This is affirmed

by Freud’s cynicism about revolution, evident in a number of places in Civilization and Its

Discontents. When considering the technological advances that have come with civilization, he

argues that they have created too many associated hassles and multiplied sites for repression (39-

41). Even by the end of his book, Freud in unable to choose between either strict cynicism or

naïve idealism. The development of Eros, which Freud considers to be that the greatest

achievement of civilization, is locked in an eternal struggle with Thanatos in the battle for human

existence (110-111).

The most striking example of Freud’s counter-revolutionary tendencies, however, is his

paper-thin dismissal Utopian Socialism as sort of naïve Rousseauianism, suggesting that human
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nature tends toward aggression and that private property would not reduce conflict between

humans (Civilization 70-3). First, but less interestingly, Freud’s assertions ignore his own

observations about biology, namely that it is both extremely plastic and co-constitutive with

psychic influences (BPP 71-4). The consequence of this would be that human nature is not fixed

and is changed with external influences – more on this later in the third part of this section.

Second, and more relevant to Althusser’s political philosophy, property in Freud’s argument

takes on the same role as Hegelian secondary contradiction when imported into Mao’s work on

contradiction – Freud notes “aggressiveness was not created by property” (Civilization 71).

Read in this fashion, Freud is using an expressive causality where the internal essence of an

element, human nature, remains unchanged unless the essential kernel is acted upon. Changing

secondary contradictions, property relations, would leave human nature unchanged. The only

way of accessing the relations between humans, according to this form of causality, would be

through a direct influence on aggressivity – a strategy that, as Freud suggests, would not be

successful (73-4). Althusser, however, provides a model that provides an avenue for politically

influencing human nature. Even if aggressivity is an active force in the determining of the

complex whole (economic, political and ideological), it wouldn’t be determinate if it were

displaced or if other elements fused together and become a more powerful. Ultimately,

aggressivity can function as a tendency but not an a priori sufficient or necessary disruption to

the project of abolishing private property.

b. A Non-Atomistic and Subject-Less Motor

Althusser’s appendix to the chapter ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ in For Marx

is a brilliant critique of the atomism found in Engels’s 1890 letter to Bloch. The purpose of
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Engels’s letter is to explain how phenomena can have autonomous effectivity if the economy is

the principal determinant (For Marx 117-8). Engels is dissatisfied with his initial solution, that

of a superstructure that has its own effectivity and that the economy is only determinant in the

last instance, and applies a different model. The second model for explaining non-economistic

elements having effectivity that Engels proposes involves a collection of individual wills. The

individual wills, when “confronted and combined in relations of forces” results in a model, a

parallelogram of forces, which results in the historical event (120-1).

The foundational claims needed to ground Engels’s model are missing. As Althusser

adeptly points out, Engels never adequately formulates the object of individual wills. Individual

wills are posited as the object of the model but the origins of the wills and the determination of

those wills are never established. Instead, there is either a void or concrete circumstances

(social, economic, etc) that do not require the object to exist (For Marx 122-3). And beyond the

individual wills, there is just an infinite extension of parallelograms of forces, none of which can

establish a determinate for the last instance (123-4). Why does Engels posit individual wills as

the objects of his model? Althusser argues that Engels mistakenly sees individual wills as an out

to bourgeois political economy but instead repeats the atomistic myth of the homo oeconomicus

(124-5). The real object of Engels’s model that Althusser identifies is still the resultant of forces,

but not of individual wills. They are unconscious and therefore do not correspond to the

consciousness of each will but to “a force without a subject” or “from the outset nobody’s force”

– the implication being that there are resultants from a deindividuated unconscious (121).

Recognition of individual wills is just a mythic fiction created by bourgeois political economy

(125).
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The idea of a deindividuated unconscious that operates according to structural causality

offers a drastic inversion to Freud’s account of group formation. The question Freud poses in

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego is: why does an individual, when inserted into a

collection of people, act differently than when they are alone? (6-7). To answer this question,

Freud retains his model of the individual psyche and projects this model again onto the crowd.

The reason Freud gives for why individuals decide to join a crowd is that they have unfulfilled

wishes that can be met by purpose or leader of the crowd (54-61). On the scale of the crowd, it

is assumes that the leader occupies the position of the ego, directing psychic energy in ways to

optimize the crowd, by either consolidating power or sharing it among the followers (69-77).

The examples that Freud gives don’t hide his occasional disdain for how crowds operate – the

Church, the army, an authoritarian Father – all instances of leaders who can and have easily

transformed into paranoid maniacs.

The complicated relation of forces found in Althusser’s causality can be read onto

Freud’s model. By positing that group-minds are created in collective assemblages, Freud

begins the work of making psyches porous (GPE 7). The processes of projection and

introjection further challenge the border between the psyche and bodies (56-61). As

crisscrossing layers of conscious and unconscious elements are projected and introjected into

bodies, content overlaps and shared associations are created. Taken one final step,

psychoanalysis provides an explanation for individuation that acknowledges psychic

interconnectedness (46-53). This problematic is not meant to claim that individuation is an

illusion but instead to demonstrate that individuated psyches are a resultant in a similar way that

homo oeconomicus is a resultant. Removing the atomistic subject from Freud’s model may then

have the similar result as removing homo oeconomicus from political economy – unlocking types
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of group formations that do not serve the ends of atomistic social structures. Using structural

causality, it is possible to theorize about group formations without relying on the atomism of

Freud’s model. The casual relationships that Freud’s atomistic individuals are capable of are

direct and mechanical, restricting the type of crowds his is able to imagine to those forms that

fall between two poles, vertical-authoritarian and horizontal-egalitarian. With structural

causality, however, the starting-point for psychic energy is not found within a body that houses

individual wills but a relay of elements that share and trade energy according to condensation

and displacement. Through combinatory processes, a multiple of complex structures can

emerge, multiplicities that are connected through strange or accidental associations. If taken

back to the context in which the processes of structural causality firm emerged, the challenge is

to find as many different group forms as there are dream-images (Introductory Lectures 174).

c. Socio-Historical Conjuncture

The material basis for Althusser’s structural causality is history. This means that the

elements of any complex social structure are not pre-given but a result of the previous moment.

Althusser calls Lenin’s ‘current situation’, a modality of history that looks for the displacements

and condensations of contradictions in current concrete existence, a conjuncture (For Marx 178-

9). The way in which conjuncture can be differentiated from other modes of history is that it

requires an immanent causality that reveals elements or relations that may be concealed by the

operations of mechanistic and expressive causality. History viewed according to this model of

contingency allows the revolutionary to identify “the exact balance of forces, state of over-

determination of contradictions at any given moment to which political tactics need be applied”

(250). Lenin chose to look at the ‘current situation’ instead of the long-view of history. If Lenin
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would have viewed history any other way, Althusser argues, he would have been “swept off his

feet and carrier away by the avalanche of historical proof” that showed that anything Lenin could

do would be the result of “a process which began long before it and which will supersede it in

the realization of its own future” (179). The theoretical analysis undertaken by Lenin was not a

Universal or even general history but rather a history of the present in the present in order to

provide a basis for political action (179-80).

The place of history in Freudian psychoanalysis is far less certain. Freud does posit an

originary myth in order to explain the emergence of human consciousness but is quick to note

that it is merely speculative (GPE 69). The content of the story is the Oedipus complex, the

foundation for Freud’s insistence on authoritarian group forms and human’s desire to be

dominated (GPE 47, 68). What is interesting is that Freud doesn’t feel a need to historically

ground the other elements of his psychic system. Freud’s books are scattered with footnotes and

references that make appeals to biology, literature, economy, law and science, but the Oedipus

complex is one of the few elements that Freud consistently historicizes. Freud is no historian

and the anthropological grounding Freud provides for the Oedipus complex is weak. When

opened up to more recent anthropological evidence, the Oedipus complex no longer appears as

an ahistorical, unchanging, universal form but as a construction that exists within a particular

conjuncture (Anti-Oedipus 262-271). In structural causality terms, Oedipus may have been

possible in any given conjuncture but only under capitalism are there the proper balances of

forces and over-determination of contradictions to elevate the trinity of daddy-mommy-me to its

dominant status. This has an obvious, immediate payoff of clinical psychoanalysis – mental

illnesses don’t look like inevitabilities any more than a revolution against capitalism does.
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The result of socio-historical analysis on social psychology is even more profound; In

Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud argues that aggressivity is a fundamental human instinct.

To back up his claim, Freud asks, “Who, in the face of all his [sic] experience of life and of

history, will have that courage to dispute this assertion?” and then proceeds through a list of

historical examples of humans who exhibited aggressive behavior (69). This is a conflation of

history with expressive causality. As I demonstrated above, structural causality would challenge

the essential nature of aggressivity to humans. Expanding on my previous observations with the

socio-historical basis of structural causality, it becomes even clearer why the form that

aggressivity has taken through history has changed – there is no essence to aggressivity, it has

multiple causes, each of which are manifest differently in different historical conjunctures and

therefore aggressivity is actualized in different ways across time and space. If the indirect,

complex, structured, unevenness of causality is taken seriously, a multitude of ways would exist

within any given conjuncture to short-circuit aggression, regardless of its historical intensity.

The only way to determine how to displace and condense the correct forces and their amounts to

create a short-circuit cannot be pre-figured, however, it can only be created within current

moment of a conjuncture. Ultimately, this provides an avenue for transforming any element or

social form that is otherwise posited as inevitable.

Conclusion

I’m terrible at conclusions.

The structural causality of Althusser is a powerful system that is well suited for

intervening within socio-historical situations. Originally developed by Althusser to provide an

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alternative to the Hegelian teleology and humanist atomism, structural causality’s psychoanalytic

roots can be used to generate useful amendments to Freud’s social psychology.

Draft copy, do not cite without permission. Please write me with any feedback you might have.

Works Cited:

Althusser, Louis. For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London; New York: Verso, 1996.

Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: NLB,
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Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert
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Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. A.A. Brill. USA: Plain Label Books,
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Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: an Enquiry Into the Origins of Cultural
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Laplanche, Jean, and J. B Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Trans. Donald

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Read, Jason. "Primitive Accumulation: The Aleatory Foundation of Capitalism." Rethinking

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