Freudian mental categories are historical products of bourgeois subject disintegration

Evidence

Thus the work of art, during the expressionistic period, would seem to be reduced to the status of testimony and symptom, of charts, graphs, X-ray plates. Yet what if the Freudian raw material (now thought of not so much as the elements of theory or scientific hypothesis, but rather as a peculiar type of content in its own right: dreams, slips of the tongue, fixations, traumas, the Oedipal situation, the death wish) were itself but a sign or symptom of some vaster historical transformation? In this context, the Freudian topology of the mental functions may be seen as the return of a new type of allegorical vision and as the disintegration of the autonomous subject, of the cogito or self-governing consciousness in Western middle-class society. Now such characteristically Freudian phenomena are no longer seen as permanent mental functions awaiting throughout human history their discovery and revelation by Freud, but rather as new events of which Freud was at once contemporary and theorist. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 74

Categorization

• XREF: This is the classic Jameson move translating Freud into historical/allegorical terms — directly continuous with his later critique of the ‘political unconscious’ and with Adorno and Horkheimer’s reading of psychoanalysis as a symptom of reified subjectivity. — connects to: Psychoanalysis justified the Frankfurt circle’s contempt for specialized academic disciplines; Freudian analytic neutrality conceals an authoritarian respect for bourgeois taboos — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1102; Freud reproduced the bourgeois contempt of instinct he set out to dismantle (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Defines the dialectical reading of Freud: not a permanent science but a symptom of a specific historical moment — the return of allegory in the form of psychic topology.
• DEEPTHINKING: The density here — Freudian phenomena reframed as ‘new events of which Freud was at once contemporary and theorist’ — is a paradigm-level reframing that inverts the usual relation between theory and its object.

Broader Connections

• The Freudian unconscious may be a historically contingent artifact, not a timeless structure #corroborates (0.80) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 406
• Psychic dejection stems from a bourgeois instinct structure produced by childhood repression #expands (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 439
• Freud reproduced the bourgeois contempt of instinct he set out to dismantle #qualifies (0.75)
• Freud’s turn to the death instinct paralleled the historical decline of the bourgeois family #corroborates (0.72) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 355
• Uncritical worldviews make a single personality a composite of many historical layers #corroborates (0.72)