Offering an in-depth interpretation of Sigmund Freud’s ‘collective’ or ‘social’ works, Leon Rozitchner insists that the Left should consider the ways in which capitalism inscribes its power in the subject as the site for the verification of history. Thus, after a brief commentary on Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, the present book provides the reader with a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Civilisation and Its Discontents and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Freud’s views, according to Rozitchner’s original reading, offer a striking contribution to a materialist theory and history of subjectivity.

This book was first published in Spanish as Freud y los limites del individualismo burgues by Siglo XXI Editores, 1972.