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52laboriously investigates the well from there upwards; acquired overlaps and exceeds the range of factual _'_while Freud stands over the well and with penetrating knowledge of mental processes of psychoanalysis.gazeand totriesmaketo pierceout oritsguessever shiftingthe shapeandoftroubledthingswatersdownThe only possible reason such a person would //ebelow. Parlor's method is experinnent, Freud's conjec- publicly as Trotsky does about the general merit ofture, sometimes fantastic conjecture. The attempt to psychoanalysis as the initiation of a scientific psychologydeclare psychoanalysis "incompatible" with Marxism is that he is at considerable pains to suppress knowledgeand simply turn one's back on Fr,._udism is too simple, of certain features of his own mental life.or, more accurately, too simplisli,c. But we are in anycase not obliged to adopt Freud!ism. It is a working Here we are at the kernel of the "Trotsky Syndrome. "hypothesis which can produce a:nd undoubtedly doesproduce deductionsand conjectures whichproceed along It is typified by the person who asserts to himself, "Ithe lines of materialist psycholo_y. The experimental know all about my little personal neurotic flaw, but I can _procedure will in due course provitde the tests for these function quite nicely, thank you, without rooting it out."conjectureS.a ban the BUtotherWeprocedurehaVeno groun,dSwhicl_, evenand nOthoughright itt°maypUt The reflection of this personal obsession is support for _be less reliable, yet tries to anticip'.ate the conclusions to the policy of limiting issues within the movement to thewhich the experimental procedure !is advancing only very form of "objective differences" of formulation of _:slowly. Culture and Socialism "positions," ruling out of order the "subjective" issues.Trotsky's hysterical attitude toward Freud is not un-There are two features of this to be considered. Firstly, typical of individuals at certain crucial junctures of theirwe have evidence of Trotsky's Ego-state in the mere fact psychoanalysis. Previously, they have made splendidof his regarding Pavlov's rese_rches as having the progress, rootingout a wide variety of the Ego's neuroticslightest direct bearing on a scienl:ific human physiology, tricks, showing consequently excellent progress inThis on Trotsky's part is not only explicitly anti-Marxiangeneral functioning, etc. Abruptly, they plunge into anand anti-dialectical, but is the n_ost banal rejection atextraordinarily stubborn state of "resistance." Theythe humanism, moment qfhis writing of the broadest conceptions of insist, they have in agone variety quite of alternative far enough sorts in "giving of tantrums, up mythat in- liWhat could cause Trotsky, who otherwise knew dependence." ibetter, to write such rubbish? The internal evidence of Trotsky too, "knows all about his problems of episodic _:-the citedpiece gives the answer. Trotsky is arguing from impotence, psychosomatic illnesses, etc. He will not give _ !the standpoint of momentary neurotic hysteria: he is up the residue of his attachment to his mother-image, ! 3:grotesquely elevating poor muddl, ed Pavlov to the status his recurring lapses into tendencies to gain acceptance i._of a scient(fSc psychologist merely ,us a ruse.tbr slandering within a peer-group through propitiatory ruses of iSigmund Freud! Trotsky is bLysterically fearful of personal political impotence "Leninist organizational _.psychoanalysis, discipline." So, just as he wilfully slariders Freud, he _.He was ac.quainted with Freud"s work from his period wastes much of his invaluable energy and talent con- iin Vienna, and certainly familiar with enough of its cocting elaborate "objective" edifying excuses for what iessential features (through the Adler family and so forth) he knows, as Joffe did, to be simply neurotic "cop-outs"with deadly consequences for the movement which he _to have recognized its essential competence. Indeed, his fails during such moments. _princip!edobjections to psychoan;_lysis are identical withthe usual empiricist slanders against the identicalmethodological features of Karl Marx's writings!'Trotsky and HistoryTo summarize the working po!int: the argument thatexperimental methods in the genre of Pavlov's, is theA related case of such ambivalent and even childish"materialist" basis for a human p.,_ychology is the rawest,most vulgar sort of epiphenomilnalism as well as the conceptua,1 states is to be found in Trotsky's widelypurest reductionism of the sort w:hich Trotsky elsewhere differing judgements concerning the relation of theusually repudiates in the most emphatic terms, individual to history. This must have been an acutelypainful conflict, when one recognizes that his consciousAs to the motives for Trotsky's silly slanders of Freud identity as a revolutionary hinged on just this question. Ithere, it is impossible for a person to develop as a is yet more remarkablewhenonerecognizesthat at timesrevolutionary, showing the psych,alogical insights which he expressed a completely correct and self-conscious viewTrotsky shows throughout The iWstory of the Russian of the matter, especially, though not accidentally, in TheRevolution (for example), until h e has encountered the History of the Russian Revolution, wherein he correctlyconflict between the Ego-state and self-consciousness in attributes an epoch-making role to Lenin. In othera special way. To a large extent, the knowledge thus places Trotsky hysterically denies the power of the in-