TITLE:
On the Possibility of Integrating Psychoanalytic Theory and Dialectical Materialism —Taking Zizek’s “Parallax Views” as the Text
AUTHORS:
Kaidi Wu
KEYWORDS:
Psychoanalysis, Dialectical Materialism, Zizek, “Parallax Views”
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Philosophy,
Vol.12 No.3,
August
5,
2022
ABSTRACT: If Marx’s dialectical materialism reveals people’s psychological activities or self-consciousness as a product of social life, its essence is a reflection of production relations. Then the advent of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory seems to have completed a certain “reversal” of the dialectical materialist interpretation reducing human social activities to the “magnification” of individual psychological activities, and treating the historical development of human beings as individual the counterpart of psychological development. In this regard, the opposition and contradiction between the two theories have become a foregone conclusion. But in Žižek’s “Parallax Views”, he took a different approach and provided a different route to realize the possibility of the fusion of dialectical materialism and psychoanalytic theory. If the nature of the opposition between psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism is the opposition between the internal psychological mechanism and the external reality, then when Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory stops the desire for emptiness and lack in the realm of human spirit, Zizek The desire for emptiness and lack is promoted to the ontological basis of actual existence. Thus, psychoanalysis and dialectical materialist philosophy will become one and the same science—as a science that pays attention to the emptiness, lack, and rupture of the constitutive subject or object. This is the real possibility of the fusion of psychoanalytic theory and dialectical materialism.