Freud and Symbolic Economy: Reading Jean-Joseph Goux
Apr. 28, 2025
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“Economics does not deal with things, but with relationships between persons, and ultimately between classes; yet these relationships are always bound to things and appear as things.”
F. Engels, Review of ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’, MEW 13, p. 476.)
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​In his writings from the 1970s, the French philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux proposed a joint reading of Marx and Freud that avoids both thematic juxtaposition and allegorical comparison. Instead, his approach is grounded in a structural homology between political economy and psychic economy. Writing at the height of the structuralist period in France, Goux developed a theory of symbolic economies in which the structure of the Freudian subject mirrors the forms of value and exchange that dominate capitalist society. This perspective enables psychoanalysis to be understood not as a timeless science of the psyche, but as a historically embedded model of subjectivity—shaped by the forms of rationality that define modern capitalist modernity.
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Goux was an influential figure in the 1970s. Thinkers as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Lacan acknowledged his impact. Yet paradoxically, Goux has become a relatively marginal figure today, particularly within Marxist approaches to psychoanalysis. This marginalization is itself striking, given that his work directly engages with the economic unconscious—an area of renewed relevance.
What follows is a brief reconstruction of Goux’s contribution to thinking the relation between the Freudian unconscious and economic rationality.
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1. A psychic economy modeled on money
In Les Iconoclastes (1978) and later in Économies et symboliques (1990), Goux argues that Freud’s theory of the psyche is grounded in an economic paradigm. It is governed by a logic of substitution, equivalence, measurement, and deferred representation — a logic that also defines the commodity-form as analyzed by Marx. In the commodity form, the social aspects of the worker's labor are not perceived as something actively produced, but rather as if they were inherent, natural features of the products themselves. The unconscious, from this perspective, functions as a structure of deferred exchange: a kind of libidinal stock market where representations and investments circulate through symbolic equivalences and energetic quantifications, presenting themselves as natural features of the psyche.
Freud himself, in his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), speaks of "quantitative excitations," "charges of energy," and "amounts of investment" in ways that fuse monetary and thermodynamic vocabularies. Goux interprets these not as casual metaphors, but as indicators of an isomorphic structure linking modern subjectivity with the abstract value-forms governing economic life. Just as money abstracts from the material specificity of goods to represent them via a universal standard of exchange, repression produces substitutive representations that translate libidinal excitations into socially operable symptoms.
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2. From commodity fetishism to symptom fetishism
This structural parallel extends to the notion of fetishism, which is central to both Marx and Freud. For Marx, commodity fetishism is the process through which social relations between people appear as relations between things. For Freud, fetishism involves the disavowal and displacement of the source of desire, allowing a partial object to become the focus of libidinal investment.
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Goux observes that the Freudian symptom—conceived as a compromise formation between repressed desire and censorship—operates like a psychic fetish. It conceals its origins, condenses multiple layers of meaning, and appears as an opaque, autonomous phenomenon—much like the commodity obscures the labor relations as well as symbolic relations that underwrite its value. In both cases, the social process of commodity production and the process of psychological socialization are concealed behind a naturalistic pretense, thereby mystifying the social and historical character of this so-called "nature."
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This analogy leads to a radical hypothesis: psychoanalysis does not reveal a transhistorical unconscious, but rather a historically specific structure of subjectivity. The libidinal economy, far from being universal, mirrors the logic of capitalist exchange—not as a reflection but through deep structural homology.
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3. A critique of naturalized psychoanalysis
Goux’s project is not to conflate Freud and Marx but to deploy Marx’s critique of political economy as a framework for interrogating Freud’s theory of psychic economy. If the unconscious is structured like a marketplace—as Freud occasionally suggests—then classical psychoanalysis risks naturalizing the very rationalities it seeks to expose. The danger, according to Goux, is that psychoanalysis universalizes forms of equivalence, substitution, and deferral that are in fact products of capitalist modernity.
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Any effort to link psychoanalysis to social critique must, therefore, denaturalize symbolic forms. It must show that these are not timeless structures of the mind,but historically situated mechanisms of subjectivation. This approach opens the way for a reconceptualization of psychoanalysis as a critical hermeneutics of modern subjectivity—one already anticipated, though differently articulated, in the work of Alfred Lorenzer (1977) and Cornelius Castoriadis (1975).
References
Duménil Gérard & Lévy Dominique. 2000. Dynamique du capitalisme. Paris: PUF.
Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1973, Économies et symboliques. Paris: Seuil.
Goux, Jean-Joseph. 1978. Les Iconoclastes. Dictionnaire du savoir contemporain. Paris: Seuil.
Lorenzer, Alfred. 1977. Sprachspiel und Interaktionsformen : Vorträge und Aufsätze zu Psychoanalyse, Sprache und Praxis. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Marx, Karl, & Engels, Friedrich 2015. Marx-Engels-Werke: Bd. 13., Januar 1859 bis Februar 1860 [MEW 13]. Berlin: Dietz.
Sigmund Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), in The Standard Edition, vol. I.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1975. L’institution imaginaire de la société. Paris: Seuil.
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