Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-k7p5g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-12T01:34:41.388Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Accounting for Pleasure: Sigmund Freud, Carl Menger, and the Economically Minded Human Being

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Richard T. Gray
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

There is a surprising coherence between the human self-understanding and worldview that underpin the theoretical program of the Austrian marginalist economist Carl Menger (1840–1921), first articulated in his 1871 Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre (Principles of Economics), and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic project. Both are grounded in a Hobbesian-Darwinian emphasis on monadic individuals guided by egoistic drives, self-interest, and a competitive struggle for individual advantage (Birken, Consuming Desire 1–39). Both, moreover, are steeped in a kind of Malthusian pessimism that invokes increasing scarcity of resources as the underlying cause of human existential anxiety and as the defining feature of human interactions with the “real” world of commodities (Riesman 3). For the Mengerian marginalist as for the Freudian psychoanalyst, the driving forces behind human life are existential need, the instinct for self-preservation and self-improvement, and the development of successful strategies for managing and satisfying needs.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 122 - 130
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Birken, Lawrence. Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of a Culture of Abundance, 1871–1914. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Birken, Lawrence. “Freud's ‘Economic Hypothesis’: From Homo Oeconomicus to Homo Sexualis.” American Imago 56.4 (1999): 311–30. Print.Google Scholar
Edmundson, Mark. “Freudian Mythmaking: The Case of Narcissus.” Kenyon Review 10.2 (1988): 17–37. Print.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud, Standard Edition 21:57–145.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “Entwurf einer Psychologie.” Nachtragsband: Texte aus den Jahren 1885–1938. Ed. Angela Richards. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, addendum: 373–486.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.” Freud, Standard Edition 12:213–26.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “Formulierungen über die zwei Prinzipien des psychischen Geschehens.” Freud, Gesammelte Werke 8:229–38.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch geordnet. Ed. Freud, Anna et al. 17 vols. London: Imago, 1940–68. Print.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 8.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Letter to Wilhelm Fliess. 25 May 1895. Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse: Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess, Abhandlungen und Notizen aus den Jahren 1887–1902. London: Imago, 1950. 129–31. Print.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Letter to Wilhelm Fliess. 25 May 1895. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904. Ed. and trans. Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. Cambridge: Belknap–Harvard UP, 1985. 128–31. Print.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “Negation.” Freud, Standard Edition 19:233–39.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “Project for a Scientific Psychology.” Freud, Standard Edition 1:283–398.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. Strachey, James. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1953–74. Print.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. Freud, Gesammelte Werke 14:419–506.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. “Die Verneinung.” Freud, Gesammelte Werke 14:9–15.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6.Google Scholar
Goux, Jean-Joseph. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Trans. Gage, Jennifer Curtiss. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Hill, Carl. “The Economics of Witz.” The Soul of Wit: Joke Theory from Grimm to Freud. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1993. 91–128. Print.Google Scholar
Jevons, William Stanley. The Theory of Political Economy. 1871. 5th ed. New York: Kelley, 1957. Print.Google Scholar
Kitcher, Patricia. Freud's Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Science of Mind. Cambridge: MIT P, 1992. Print.Google Scholar
Meek, Ronald L. The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Translations. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963. Print.Google Scholar
Menger, Carl. Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre: Erster, allgemeiner Theil. 1871. London: London School of Economics, 1934. Print. Rpts. of Scarce Tracts in Economic and Political Science 17. Vol. 1 of The Collected Works of Carl Menger.Google Scholar
Menger, Carl. Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre. 2nd ed. Ed. Menger, Karl. Vienna: Hölder, 1923. Print.Google Scholar
Menger, Carl. Principles of Economics: First, General Part. Trans. Dingwall, James and Hoselitz, Bert. Glencoe: Free, 1950. Print.Google Scholar
Riesman, David. “The Themes of Work and Play in the Structure of Freud's Thought.” Psychiatry 13.1 (1950): 1–16. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shull, Bernard, and Warner, Silas L. “Viennese Zeitgeist and the Economics of Sigmund Freud and the Psychology of Austrian Economics.” Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 14.1 (1986): 1–13. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vološinov, V. N. Freudianism: A Critical Sketch. Trans. Titunik, I. R. Ed. Bruss, Neal H. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. Print.Google Scholar
Weeks, Mark. “Freud and the Economics of Laughter.” Genbunronshu 28.2 (2007): 227–39. Web. 22 Nov. 2010.Google Scholar
Zaretsky, Eli. Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis. New York: Vintage-Random, 2005. Print.Google Scholar