Psychoanalysis is too culture-specific for general cultural critique while Marxism is not

Evidence

I have always felt uneasy about the use of psychoanalysis in cultural critique since it is so culture-specific in its provenance. Like many others, I too have felt that Marxism, focusing on something on a higher level of abstraction than the machinery, production, and performance of the mental theater, and as obviously global as capitalism, is not open to this particular charge. (To say capitalism is all over the place is not as universalist as to say everyone’s psyche is patterned the same.) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1449

Categorization

• DEFINE: Spivak’s standard objection: psychoanalysis presupposes a universal psyche, whereas Marxism’s universalism about capitalism doesn’t claim everyone’s psyche is patterned the same.
• XREF: connects to: Institute critics rejected psychoanalytic ideology readings that ignored material class conditions; Judaism socialism and psychoanalysis fused into a shared Frankfurt programme