Marxism, Psychoanalysis and Sociological Methods: Voloshinov’s, Soviet and European Marxists’ Dialogue with Freud

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to understand, on the one hand, the dialogical relationships between the texts of Voloshinov and Freud’s theory and, on the other hand, the reception of Freud among Soviet Marxists from the first half of the 1920s and by European Marxists. Our main findings included evidence that: a great number of Soviet Marxists from the period mentioned argued that Marxism and Freudianism interfaced regarding the same presuppositions of dialectical materialism; Voloshinov rejected Freudianism, above all, due to Freud’s criticism of the Soviet State; and, finally, Soviet and European Marxists tried to link Freudianism to Marxism, or trace the differences between the two theories.