Abstract

This review essay analyses the proposed synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, which often presents itself as a critique of the kind of utopianism associated with 'Freudo-Marxism'. In Yannis Stavrakakis's The Lacanian Left this anti-utopianism slides towards a left reformism, in which the emphasis on constitutive lack prevents any thinking of transformation. Ian Parker's Revolution in Psychology presents a bracing but reductive polemic, in which psychology and psychoanalysis seem to function as mere reflections of capitalist ideology. What goes missing in both accounts is the possibility of a re-thinking of subjectivity, both individual and collective, posed between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism.