From Freud and the Frankfurt School to the “Cultural Marxism” Theory

In Part One, I explored a disturbing question: how did psychiatry and psychology—professions associated with understanding and treating human suffering—also become associated, in some people’s minds, with manipulation and social control?

That investigation took me through Nazi psychiatry, eugenics, Cold War fears about brainwashing, the CIA’s MKUltra program, anti-psychiatry and Scientology.

But another claim kept appearing.

Marxism.

According to one version of the story, Karl Marx’s ideas eventually migrated from economics into psychology, then into universities and cultural institutions, where Marxist thinkers discovered that changing society would require changing culture, sexuality, family structures, religion and people’s understanding of themselves.

This eventually becomes the theory commonly called “Cultural Marxism.”

Depending upon who is describing it, the phrase can mean very different things.

Sometimes it simply describes genuine Marxist approaches to culture.

Sometimes it refers loosely to progressive or left-wing ideas within universities.

But in its strongest form, it describes something far more dramatic: a deliberate project, supposedly originating with Marxist intellectuals and particularly the Frankfurt School, to undermine traditional Western civilisation from inside its cultural institutions.

So once again I wanted to ask the same questions I asked in Part One:

What actually happened?

What do scholars reasonably debate?

And:

At what point does documented history become a story that the evidence can no longer support?

The answer surprised me.

Because there really was a relationship between Marxism and psychology.

Just not the one I had been hearing about.

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First, the Short Answer

Did Marxism influence psychology?

Yes.

Did Karl Marx create psychology?

No.

Did Marxism influence every major branch of psychology?

No.

Did psychologists deliberately try to develop Marxist forms of psychology?

Yes—in some countries and intellectual traditions.

Did members of the Frankfurt School deliberately combine Marx and Freud?

Absolutely.

Was this secret?

No. They wrote books about it.

Did some of these thinkers hope their ideas would contribute to profound social change?

Yes.

Does that establish that they created a coordinated program to infiltrate Western institutions and destroy Christianity, the traditional family, heterosexuality, capitalism and Western civilisation?

That is where the evidence becomes dramatically weaker.

That distinction is the central issue.

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Karl Marx Was Not a Psychologist

Karl Marx lived from 1818 to 1883.

His principal concerns were philosophy, political economy, class, labour, capitalism, history and social organisation.

He did not create a psychological treatment.

He did not establish a school of psychotherapy.

He did not establish a psychology department.

And he never produced anything resembling a modern psychiatric diagnostic system.

Modern experimental psychology developed through a different intellectual lineage.

Wilhelm Wundt established the laboratory usually regarded as the first formal experimental psychology laboratory at Leipzig in 1879. The American Psychological Association describes this as the point at which psychology was brought formally into the laboratory as an empirical science.

Wundt was investigating perception, reaction time, consciousness and physiology—not attempting to implement Marxist revolution.

In fact, Wundt’s later political trajectory moved towards German nationalism rather than Marxism.

So the proposition that psychology itself was created by Marxists collapses almost immediately when we look at its institutional history.

But that doesn’t mean Marx had nothing to contribute to later psychological thought.

Far from it.

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Marx Had Something Psychologists Could Use

One of Marx’s most psychologically interesting concepts was alienation.

Marx believed that social and economic arrangements could affect how human beings experience themselves, their labour, other people and the products of their own activity.

In his account of capitalism, workers could become separated from meaningful control over their work and, more broadly, from aspects of their own human potential.

Modern philosophical scholarship still describes alienation as simultaneously a social and psychological probleminvolving problematic separation between aspects of human life that ought to belong together.

This was an enormously important conceptual shift.

Instead of assuming that psychological distress existed entirely inside the individual, Marx’s approach raised the possibility that someone’s psychological experience could partly reflect the social conditions in which that person lived.

That idea would eventually appear in many forms far beyond orthodox Marxism.

Poverty affects mental health.

Working conditions affect wellbeing.

Social exclusion affects human development.

Family structures influence personality.

Culture influences beliefs.

Power can affect identity.

None of those propositions requires someone to be a communist.

But Marx helped establish an intellectual tradition in which the relationship between individual psychology and social structure became impossible to ignore.

And this is the first genuinely important Marxist contribution to our story.

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There Really Was a Marxist Psychology

This part often gets missed when people rush either to defend psychology or to dismiss the Marxism connection.

After the Russian Revolution, psychologists in the Soviet Union faced a very direct intellectual challenge:

What would a psychology based upon Marxist philosophy actually look like?

Different psychologists answered that question differently, and Soviet psychology was never intellectually uniform.

But Marxism was unquestionably important.

Academic histories of Soviet psychology describe Marxism as a foundational philosophical framework, although researchers disagreed profoundly about how psychological science should actually be made Marxist.

The most famous name to emerge from this history is Lev Vygotsky.

Today many psychology and education students know Vygotsky primarily for concepts involving child development, social learning and the importance of culture.

His work is enormously influential.

But Vygotsky was also working within the intellectual world created by the Russian Revolution.

Modern scholarship explicitly examines his project as an attempt to construct a Marxist psychology, particularly through the idea that human psychological development must be understood historically and socially.

Importantly, scholars also caution against reducing everything Vygotsky thought to Marxism. Russian philosophy, culture and other intellectual traditions also influenced him.

That is exactly the kind of distinction this history requires.

What is documented?

Vygotsky was substantially influenced by Marxism.

What would be an exaggeration?

That Vygotsky was simply translating Communist Party propaganda into psychology.

His theories became influential internationally because psychologists found genuine intellectual value in his understanding of development, language, culture and social learning—not because an international Marxist organisation ordered universities to teach him.

Oxford’s history of Marxist influences in psychology reaches a similarly complicated conclusion: Marxist ideas influenced psychology in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Italy and elsewhere, but they did so in many different ways, sometimes serving state ideology and sometimes inspiring movements seeking greater individual autonomy and liberation.

So there is no reason to deny it:

Marxist psychology actually existed.

But that is still very different from saying:

Psychology is Marxist.

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Then There Was Freud

Sigmund Freud creates another problem for the simple theory.

Because Freud wasn’t a Marxist revolutionary waiting to join forces with Marx.

Psychoanalysis developed independently from Marxism.

Freud trained as a neurologist and developed psychoanalysis beginning in the late nineteenth century as a method for understanding unconscious psychological processes and treating neurotic illness. Cambridge’s history of twentieth-century political thought describes Freud politically as broadly a conservative liberal, sceptical of utopian political projects.

Freud was particularly doubtful about communist claims regarding human nature.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, he argued that abolishing private property would not eliminate aggression and hostility because, in his view, aggression was a much deeper feature of human psychology.

That matters.

If Freud was part of an original Marxist psychological project, somebody apparently forgot to tell Freud.

His understanding of human beings actually created a serious problem for Marxist optimism.

If social injustice primarily resulted from economic structures, then changing those structures might theoretically produce substantially different human relationships.

But what if Freud was right?

What if domination, aggression, envy, sexuality, unconscious conflict and irrationality could not simply be eliminated by changing economic systems?

Suddenly Marxism needed psychology.

And psychology had something Marxism lacked.

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The Marriage of Marx and Freud

During the 1920s and 1930s, several intellectuals began trying to combine the two systems.

This became known broadly as Freudo-Marxism.

The basic question was fascinating:

Marx could explain economic structure and class relations.

Freud could explain unconscious desires, repression and psychological conflict.

Could the two theories together explain why people sometimes supported political systems that seemingly worked against their own material interests?

Academic histories identify figures including Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm among those who attempted different syntheses of Marxism and psychoanalysis.

And this question became even more urgent after something happened that orthodox Marxists had struggled to explain.

Fascism.

Classical Marxist expectations suggested that economic crisis should strengthen revolutionary working-class consciousness.

Yet Germany experienced devastating economic turmoil and eventually produced Hitler.

Large numbers of ordinary people embraced authoritarian nationalism rather than socialist revolution.

Why?

An explanation based entirely upon economics seemed inadequate.

Maybe political behaviour also required an understanding of fear, authority, family relationships, sexuality, aggression, identity and the unconscious.

And that brings us directly to the Frankfurt School.

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The Frankfurt School Was Marxist

This is another point where there is no need to rewrite history.

The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923.

Its own institutional history states that its early research was explicitly concerned with the history of Marxism and political-economic research conducted in the spirit of Marxism.

Under Max Horkheimer, however, it gradually moved away from orthodox Marxism towards a much broader interdisciplinary form of social criticism that became known as Critical Theory.

So when someone says:

“The Frankfurt School had Marxist foundations.”

they are correct.

The important question is what happened next.

Horkheimer and his colleagues concluded that conventional Marxism couldn’t adequately explain modern society.

They began combining Marx with thinkers Marx would never have encountered—including Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche and, crucially, Freud.

Stanford’s account of Critical Theory describes this attempt to combine Marxist social theory with psychoanalysis as one of the Frankfurt School’s defining characteristics.

This wasn’t accidental.

It wasn’t secret.

And it wasn’t insignificant.

They genuinely wanted to understand how economic systems, culture, family relationships and individual psychology interacted.

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Why Did Marxists Need Freud?

They had encountered a fundamental problem.

Marxist theory placed enormous emphasis upon class interests.

Yet human beings clearly did not behave purely according to economic self-interest.

Workers could support authoritarian leaders.

People could passionately defend institutions that seemed to disadvantage them materially.

Individuals could internalise social authority so deeply that external force wasn’t always necessary.

The Frankfurt School wondered whether Freud could help explain why.

Oxford historian Martin Jay describes the School’s use of psychoanalysis as an attempt to understand questions including why the working class had not fulfilled Marxist expectations, why fascism had emerged and how people internalised authority.

That is an important historical fact.

And it sounds quite different from the innocent laboratory psychology of reaction times.

This really was psychology being used to investigate politics, authority and social structure.

But notice the direction of the inquiry.

They were not primarily asking:

“How can we psychologically manipulate people into becoming Marxists?”

They were asking:

“Why aren’t people becoming Marxists when our economic theory suggests they should?”

Those aren’t the same question.

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Erich Fromm: Society Enters the Consulting Room

Erich Fromm became particularly important in bringing psychoanalysis into the Frankfurt Institute.

Fromm believed individual character could not be understood independently of society.

Families existed within economic systems.

Parents transmitted social expectations.

Individuals internalised cultural values.

Character therefore developed at the intersection of psyche and society.

This line of reasoning would eventually influence what we now recognise as social psychological thinking.

Fromm later broke significantly with orthodox Freudian theory and also separated intellectually from much of the Frankfurt School.

That matters because the “Frankfurt School” is sometimes presented as though it were a tightly controlled organisation whose members all shared one doctrine.

They didn’t.

They disagreed.

Sometimes intensely.

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Herbert Marcuse Takes the Combination Further

Herbert Marcuse is probably the Frankfurt School thinker most important to modern claims about “Cultural Marxism.”

In his 1955 book Eros and Civilization, Marcuse explicitly reinterpreted Freud through a Marxian framework.

Stanford’s philosophy encyclopedia describes the work as both Freudian and Marxian, with Marcuse asking whether the repression Freud considered necessary for civilisation might partly reflect particular historical and economic arrangements rather than an unavoidable feature of every possible society.

Marcuse wondered whether technologically advanced societies could eventually permit greater human freedom and less unnecessary repression.

That meant sexuality, work, authority and economic organisation could no longer be separated neatly.

And here we arrive at something genuinely relevant to the modern controversy.

Marcuse did believe profound cultural change was possible.

He did challenge conventional sexual morality.

He did criticise capitalist society.

He did become influential among sections of the 1960s New Left and counterculture.

His own writings openly discussed the possibility of a less repressive civilisation.

Anyone claiming these ideas never existed is simply wrong.

But something else is equally important:

Marcuse was a philosopher and social theorist.

He did not control Western psychology.

He did not establish the APA.

He did not write the DSM.

And there is no evidence he commanded a network responsible for directing subsequent movements for women’s rights, gay liberation, racial equality or multiculturalism.

Influence is real. Command-and-control is another proposition entirely.

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Hitler Actually Destroyed the Frankfurt Institute

There is a historical irony that gets lost in some contemporary versions of the story.

The Frankfurt Institute wasn’t operating freely inside Nazi Germany.

The Nazis shut it down.

The Gestapo closed the Institute in 1933 on grounds of “subversive activities,” and most of its members fled Germany.

In 1934 the Institute relocated to New York and was housed at Columbia University.

This becomes an important moment in the Cultural Marxism narrative.

According to the strongest version of that theory, Marxist intellectuals moved into American universities and began transforming America from within.

The historical event underneath that claim is real:

Frankfurt School scholars did move to America and were associated with Columbia.

But context matters.

They were intellectual refugees escaping Hitler.

Recent scholarship on their Columbia period describes the Institute as occupying a relatively marginal, “para-academic” position rather than somehow taking command of the university.

And their research during exile focused heavily upon something they had just witnessed personally:

fascism, antisemitism and authoritarianism.

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The Authoritarian Personality: Science, Politics—or Both?

This produced one of the most controversial points at which Frankfurt School ideas entered psychology.

In 1950, Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson and Nevitt Sanford published The Authoritarian Personality.

The researchers investigated whether certain personality characteristics might make people particularly susceptible to fascism, prejudice and authoritarian leadership.

Their famous F-scale attempted to measure “potentially fascistic” tendencies.

This unquestionably influenced political and social psychology.

And I think critics raise a legitimate question here.

What happens when psychologists begin placing political beliefs inside psychological frameworks?

That deserves scrutiny.

If researchers start with the assumption that one side of the political spectrum contains psychological pathology while their own worldview represents psychological health, science can become entangled with ideology.

And The Authoritarian Personality has received serious methodological criticism.

Scholars have challenged its sampling, reliance upon Freudian assumptions, construction of the F-scale, acquiescence bias and tendency to conflate authoritarianism with conservative political beliefs. One prominent retrospective called it deeply flawed despite its historical importance.

Contemporary political psychology now investigates authoritarian tendencies much more broadly and debates the extent to which authoritarianism can occur across ideological positions.

This is precisely why I don’t think the history should be sanitised.

There were real attempts to apply psychological concepts to political attitudes.

Some were groundbreaking.

Some were flawed.

Some carried ideological assumptions.

But none of that requires us to invent a secret project.

The published research is interesting—and controversial—enough.

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Then We Need to Meet Antonio Gramsci

Another name repeatedly appearing in Cultural Marxism discussions is Antonio Gramsci.

Gramsci was an Italian Marxist and communist imprisoned under Mussolini.

His writings became enormously influential in later cultural and political theory.

One of his most important concepts was hegemony.

Classical Marxist thinking could sometimes make power sound primarily economic: whoever controls capital controls society.

Gramsci offered a more complicated account.

Societies were also stabilised through culture, institutions, education, religion, language and what ordinary people accepted as “common sense.”

Power could therefore operate partly through consent, not merely coercion.

Stanford’s account of Gramsci describes hegemony as a process of intellectual and moral leadership through which social power becomes embedded throughout society.

This was a major development in Marxist theory.

Culture mattered.

Education mattered.

Language mattered.

Institutions mattered.

Ideas mattered.

That sounds remarkably close to some contemporary descriptions of Cultural Marxism.

And there is a reason.

Some of the raw intellectual material really is there.

But another distinction is necessary.

Gramsci’s concept primarily analysed how existing ruling groups maintain social consent.

It was not simply a secret manual entitled How Communists Can Infiltrate Universities and Destroy Western Civilisation.

Like so many ideas in this history, something real has subsequently been expanded into something much larger.

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What About the “Long March Through the Institutions”?

This phrase appears constantly in discussions about Cultural Marxism.

It is frequently attributed to Gramsci.

That attribution is problematic.

The phrase “long march through the institutions” is associated with German student activist Rudi Dutschke, who used it around 1967–68 to describe achieving long-term social transformation through existing institutions rather than an immediate revolutionary seizure of power. Modern scholarship continues to attribute the formulation to Dutschke.

There are obvious similarities between this strategy and Gramsci’s emphasis on institutional and cultural struggle.

But historians caution that evidence for a direct line from Gramsci to Dutschke is much less clear than popular accounts often suggest.

Again we encounter the same pattern:

A real radical strategy existed.

A real Marxist analysis of culture existed.

A real generation of left-wing students entered universities, journalism, government, education and other professions.

Those facts are legitimate subjects for historical analysis.

But they still don’t demonstrate that a single organisation coordinated all subsequent cultural change.

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Did the Radical Generation Actually Change Western Institutions?

Here I think dismissing every concern as “conspiracy theory” becomes intellectually lazy.

The generation shaped by the 1960s did influence Western society.

University education expanded enormously.

Ideas about race, sexuality, gender, war, authority and individual freedom changed.

Former student radicals eventually became professors, journalists, lawyers, politicians, teachers and public officials.

Some deliberately wanted to transform institutions.

Recent scholarship examining Dutschke’s “long march” argues that the 1960s generation did indeed contribute substantially to long-term transformations in Western institutions and social values—even though the outcome was far more complex and less revolutionary than its radicals originally imagined.

So a conservative person looking at universities today and saying,

“The political ideas of the 1960s influenced these institutions”

is making an entirely defensible historical argument.

But saying,

“The Frankfurt School secretly designed everything that happened afterwards”

is making a completely different kind of claim.

One describes historical influence.

The other requires evidence of centralised causation.

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So What Exactly Is “Cultural Marxism”?

This is where terminology becomes difficult.

There genuinely are Marxist traditions of cultural analysis.

Scholars have applied Marxist ideas to literature, media, ideology, education and popular culture for generations.

Oxford’s history of Marxist traditions in cultural studies identifies thinkers and traditions including Gramsci, the Frankfurt School, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall.

In that academic sense, discussing Marxist cultural theory is entirely legitimate.

But “Cultural Marxism” acquired another meaning.

Political scientist Jérôme Jamin describes a historical transformation in which the term moved from an academic context into a global conspiracy narrative alleging that Marxist intellectuals deliberately sought the destruction of Western traditions and values.

Australian researchers Rachel Busbridge, Benjamin Moffitt and Joshua Thorburn similarly describe the dominant conspiratorial version as claiming that Frankfurt School intellectuals orchestrated a long-term effort to take over cultural institutions and undermine Western civilisation.

That distinction is critical.

Someone can reasonably investigate:

“How did Marxist ideas influence Western culture?”

without accepting:

“A hidden Marxist organisation secretly engineered Western cultural decline.”

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Where Did the Modern Conspiracy Narrative Come From?

The contemporary narrative appears much later than the original Frankfurt School.

Research traces important versions of it through political movements in the United States during the late twentieth century.

A frequently identified milestone is Michael Minnicino’s 1992 essay attacking the Frankfurt School and linking it to “political correctness.” Minnicino was associated at the time with the Lyndon LaRouche movement. The narrative was subsequently popularised by conservative activists including William S. Lind and Paul Weyrich, particularly through the Free Congress Foundation.

By the early 2000s, the story had developed a recognisable structure:

Classical Marxism failed to overthrow capitalism because Western workers were too prosperous and attached to traditional culture.

Marxists therefore abandoned economic revolution.

They shifted their attention to culture.

The Frankfurt School combined Marx and Freud.

Their followers entered universities.

They attacked Christianity, family, sexual morality and Western traditions.

Political correctness, feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights and other progressive movements were supposedly products of this long-term strategy.

It is an extraordinarily powerful story.

Partly because nearly every stage contains a small piece of recognisable history.

Marxism existed.

Gramsci wrote about culture.

The Frankfurt School was Marxist.

It used Freud.

Marcuse advocated radical change.

Student radicals challenged traditional institutions.

Some entered universities.

Western culture subsequently changed dramatically.

The question is what happens when those separate facts are connected by arrows of intentional causation.

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This Is Where Correlation Becomes a Master Plan

Consider the difference.

Historical account:

Marcuse influenced some 1960s radicals.

Expanded claim:

Marcuse created the sexual revolution.

Those are different.

Historical account:

Marxist academics became influential within some humanities and social-science departments.

Expanded claim:

Marxists captured Western universities.

Different again.

Historical account:

The Frankfurt School studied family structures, sexuality, authoritarianism and culture through Marxian and Freudian concepts.

Expanded claim:

The Frankfurt School deliberately designed feminism, gay liberation and multiculturalism to destroy the traditional family.

Again, not equivalent.

The problem isn’t necessarily that the first statement in each pair is false.

Several are historically defensible.

The problem is assuming that the first statement proves the second.

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A Useful Evidence Test

ClaimWhat the historical evidence suggestsKarl Marx created modern psychologyFalse. Psychology developed through multiple philosophical, physiological and experimental traditions.Marx’s ideas influenced later psychological thoughtTrue. Particularly concepts involving alienation, social conditions and human development.Soviet psychologists deliberately developed Marxist psychologyTrue. Vygotsky is an important example, although his work had other influences too.Freud was a MarxistFalse. Freud was sceptical of communism and developed psychoanalysis independently.Thinkers deliberately combined Marx and FreudTrue. Freudo-Marxism and Frankfurt School Critical Theory did exactly this.The Frankfurt School had Marxist originsTrue. Its own institutional history says so.The Frankfurt School studied culture and psychology because orthodox Marxism seemed insufficientTrue. This is central to Critical Theory’s intellectual development.Marcuse advocated major social and cultural changeTrue. His writings are explicit about emancipation and repression.Frankfurt thinkers influenced sections of the 1960s LeftTrue, particularly Marcuse.Gramsci argued that culture and institutions matter politicallyTrue. His theory of hegemony is explicitly concerned with culture and consent.Gramsci coined “the long march through the institutions”Probably false. The phrase is attributed to Rudi Dutschke.Left-wing intellectuals subsequently entered and influenced Western institutionsYes. This is legitimate historical territory for debate and research.The Frankfurt School centrally coordinated this processNo persuasive evidence establishes this.Feminism, civil rights, gay liberation and multiculturalism were Frankfurt School operationsThe evidence does not support such a reduction. These movements have distinct and much broader histories.Modern psychology is fundamentally MarxistFalse as a description of the discipline as a whole.“Cultural Marxism” can describe genuine Marxist cultural analysisYes, depending upon how the term is defined.“Cultural Marxism” describes a proven secret plan to destroy Western civilisationThat is where the narrative moves into conspiracy theory.

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Why the Theory Is So Persuasive

I think dismissing believers as unintelligent misses something important.

The theory has what I would call historical anchors.

If everything in the story were invented, it would be relatively easy to dismiss.

But it isn’t.

There was a Frankfurt School.

It was Marxist-influenced.

It incorporated Freud.

It investigated family and sexuality.

It analysed mass culture.

It criticised capitalism.

Marcuse did influence radicals.

Gramsci did believe culture mattered to political power.

Radicals did talk about transforming institutions.

Some of those radicals later worked within those institutions.

Modern Western social values did change dramatically.

The theory becomes persuasive because the listener is shown a series of true statements and then invited to accept a much larger conclusion:

Therefore all these cultural changes were part of the same Marxist strategy.

But history rarely works that neatly.

Social movements compete.

Ideas mutate.

Groups split.

Intellectuals disagree.

People borrow concepts without accepting the ideology that produced them.

One generation radicalises; another moderates what it inherits.

Institutions absorb rebellious ideas and transform them into something their creators would barely recognise.

That is considerably messier than conspiracy.

But it is usually much closer to how culture actually changes.

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There Is Also a Question About Antisemitism

This aspect needs careful treatment.

Several leading members of the Frankfurt School were Jewish intellectuals fleeing Nazi persecution.

Some later versions of the Cultural Marxism narrative have incorporated older conspiratorial ideas about Jewish intellectuals secretly undermining Christian or Western civilisation.

Scholars therefore identify antisemitic elements in some forms of the theory.

But I would also be cautious about making the reverse mistake.

It doesn’t follow that every person who uses the phrase “Cultural Marxism” is consciously antisemitic.

Many people using the term today are talking about what they perceive as left-wing ideological influence in universities, media or government and may know little or nothing about the term’s more extreme historical associations.

Ideas travel.

Their users don’t necessarily know where they came from.

The useful approach is therefore to examine the claim being made, rather than assuming someone’s motives merely from a phrase.

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And Here Is Where Psychology Becomes Particularly Interesting

Having studied psychology, this is the part I find most thought-provoking.

It would be difficult to argue seriously that contemporary psychology is a Marxist discipline.

Modern psychology contains cognitive psychology, behavioural science, neuroscience, biological psychology, psychometrics, developmental psychology, evolutionary approaches, experimental social psychology, neuropsychology and numerous competing clinical models.

The discipline places enormous emphasis upon empirical testing and contains theories that are philosophically incompatible with Marxism. The APA itself defines psychological science in terms of empirical observation, theory testing and multiple research methods.

But Marxist-influenced ideas did contribute to one important intellectual shift:

the individual cannot always be understood separately from society.

That insight now seems almost ordinary.

Trauma occurs within relationships and environments.

Poverty can affect psychological development.

Discrimination can produce psychological consequences.

Work can contribute to wellbeing or distress.

Culture affects identity.

Family environments influence psychological development.

Social inequality affects opportunity.

None of these observations proves Marxism.

Nor do psychologists need to accept Marx’s economic program in order to investigate them.

But historically, Marxist and Marxian thinkers helped push psychology towards taking social structures seriously.

That influence shouldn’t frighten us.

It should simply be acknowledged.

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Where I Think the Reasonable Debate Actually Is

The debate becomes much more interesting once we stop arguing over whether Marxism influenced psychology.

It did.

A better question is:

How much influence should political philosophy have inside a science of human behaviour?

That question applies to the Left and the Right.

Researchers bring assumptions about human nature into their work.

What counts as healthy?

What counts as oppression?

What counts as normal?

What counts as freedom?

Is psychological distress primarily inside the individual?

Or can society itself become psychologically unhealthy?

Should therapists help people adjust to society?

Or should psychology sometimes question the society to which people are being asked to adjust?

Those are not purely technical questions.

They contain values.

And perhaps one legitimate lesson from Critical Theory is that pretending science never contains assumptions about society doesn’t make those assumptions disappear.

The answer, however, cannot be replacing one orthodoxy with another.

The protection is evidence, methodological criticism, intellectual pluralism and the freedom to challenge prevailing ideas.

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The Irony of the Frankfurt School

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the Frankfurt School itself was obsessed with the problem of manipulation.

Horkheimer and Adorno worried about mass culture.

They studied propaganda.

They investigated authoritarianism.

They asked why populations could become psychologically susceptible to fascism.

They were deeply concerned about modern societies producing conformity rather than independent thought.

In other words, the people now accused of creating an enormous system of psychological conformity were themselves trying to understand how societies manufacture conformity.

One can disagree profoundly with their answers.

Their methods can be criticised.

Their politics can be challenged.

Their influence can be questioned.

But reducing their work to:

“They devised political correctness so Marxists could take over America”

does something intellectually unfortunate.

It replaces a complicated and genuinely fascinating intellectual history with a much simpler story.

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So, Did Marxism Influence Psychology?

After researching this question, my answer is unequivocal.

Yes.

Marxism influenced psychology.

It influenced Soviet psychology.

It influenced Vygotsky.

It influenced radical psychotherapy.

It influenced social psychology.

It influenced Erich Fromm.

It influenced Critical Theory.

It influenced Herbert Marcuse’s reinterpretation of Freud.

And Marxist ideas contributed to broader discussions about alienation, power, culture, work, inequality and the relationship between society and individual psychological experience.

We shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

But the second claim—

that psychology was designed by Marxists as a mechanism for destroying Western civilisation—

requires an entirely different level of evidence.

I haven’t found it.

What I have found instead is considerably more interesting:

competing intellectual movements;

attempts to understand fascism;

psychologists struggling to reconcile individuals with society;

Marxists arguing with other Marxists;

psychoanalysts arguing with Freud;

radicals trying to change society;

political opponents reacting against those changes;

and ideas travelling through generations in ways their original authors could never completely control.

That isn’t a conspiracy.

It’s intellectual history.

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Influence Is Not the Same as Control

Perhaps this is the lesson connecting Part One and Part Two.

In Part One, MKUltra demonstrated that governments really have secretly experimented with human behaviour.

But that does not prove that contemporary psychology is an intelligence operation.

In Part Two, Marxism demonstrates that political philosophy really has influenced psychological and cultural theory.

But that does not prove that modern Western culture is the product of a secret Marxist operation.

The mistake occurs when a documented historical fact becomes unlimited evidence for a much larger belief.

Healthy scepticism asks:

What evidence do we have?

Conspiratorial reasoning asks:

What else could this prove?

Those are very different questions.

And for me, this investigation has produced a conclusion I didn’t expect.

We don’t need to protect psychology from its political history.

We need to understand that history better.

Marxism influenced psychology.

Capitalism influenced psychology.

Religion influenced psychology.

War influenced psychology.

Medicine influenced psychology.

Feminism influenced psychology.

Civil-rights movements influenced psychology.

Sexual politics influenced psychology.

Governments influenced psychology.

And psychology, in return, has influenced every one of them.

Perhaps the greatest mistake is searching for a single hidden ideology controlling the discipline.

The history of psychology reveals something much more human:

a continuous struggle over what a person is, what makes us free, what makes us suffer, and who gets to define the difference.

And that brings us to another uncomfortable question.

If Marxism’s influence on psychology has sometimes been exaggerated, what about the allegation underneath it that remains worth examining?

Has psychology itself become political?

That is where I think Part Three should begin.