Psychoanalysis normalizes patients into a sick society rather than curing it

Evidence

There is indeed a goodly portion of psychoanalysis in this philosophy—analysis without Freud’s fundamental insight that the patient’s trouble is rooted in a general sickness which cannot be cured by analytic therapy. Or, in a sense, according to Freud, the patient’s disease is a protest reaction against the sick world in which he lives. But the physician must disregard the “moral” problem. He has to restore the patient’s health, to make him capable of functioning normally in his world. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 674

Categorization

• XREF: This parallels the attention-economy/psychology critique — therapy as social adjustment, connecting to the flattening-of-critical-thought thesis. — connects to: Modern hygiene conceals rather than cures the psychic ills it represses; Psychoanalysis gained popularity as a response to intensified state and social coercion on individuals. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1041; Psychoanalysis reduces the social to the psychological by axiom (+7 more)
• SEED: Angle: how modern wellness culture and therapy-as-self-optimization inherits this exact ‘restore the patient to functioning’ logic that Marcuse diagnoses — the therapeutic individual adapting to a sick world.

Broader Connections

• Conformity is normal rather than a psychological weakness #corroborates (0.85)
• Psychoanalysis reduces the social to the psychological by axiom #expands (0.82)
• Psychoanalysis gained popularity as a response to intensified state and social coercion on individuals. #complicates (0.80) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1041
• Psychoanalysis claims objectivity while psychodynamically dismissing those who raise institutional racism #corroborates (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1258
• Contemporary psychic misery is structural, not a narcissism epidemic #corroborates (0.80) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 81
• Psychoanalysis itself was born from sublimated bourgeois political frustration #expands (0.78) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 210
• Psychoanalysis posits drives and prohibitions as disconnected givens, splitting human unity #expands (0.75)
• Psychoanalysis marginalized Fanon for violating its boundary between inner psyche and social reality #expands (0.75)