What is the relevance of Karl Marx to psychotherapy? Is there any? Many people might argue against it. Perhaps the main objection would be not to combine fundamentally economic ideas with concerns from another area of study, especially a fuzzier one. For me that staunch Purism is puerile, as if all spheres in the Humanities are not ultimately concentric. They all center around us, the human being, who is, among other things, both financial and psychological. It is the unique beauty of Marx’s thinking that it emphasizes this connection instead of severing it.

Other objections will all likely contain some degree of dismissal on the grounds that Marx was just plain wrong. How exactly? Well, he predicted a salutary paradigm shift from the limitations and abuses of Capitalism to a positive expression of Communism. But what have we seen so far on the world stage? Capitalism is still here and all attempts at Communism have failed. Putting aside the self-serving impatience that lurks in that criticism, it also throws out the baby with the bathwater, and disregards proper paternity tests! Marx is not Marxism; he is a deep thinker whose ideas penetrate the human condition.

Many of them resonate powerfully in the psychotherapy office. As a prime example, consider the Marxian concept of alienated labor. Marx suggested that under Capitalist conditions of profit and wages, labor degenerates from a potentially fulfilling pursuit to a deadening commodity that drains vitality from the employee. In this way the majority of people in the system, because they occupy the role of employee, become deeply alienated from what they do professionally, and come to regard work as mostly a means to an end: basic survival, which becomes harder and harder to secure. When my clients talk about their jobs, their strategies in regard to having or not having jobs, their history with jobs, it takes no extra effort at all to hear the insights of Marx speaking as philosophical subtext.

Try it yourself. How do you feel about your job? Does it exercise you in ways that feel deeply fulfilling? Maybe some aspects do and some aspects don’t? Maybe seldom. Maybe never. You would not be alone in the last two cases. The value of Marx is to remind you that, no, you’re not alone. In considering his point of view, you gain a wider perspective about how the vast majority of the population is alienated in the same way as you, how that experience is systemic and theoretically inevitable under the laws of the present economy. Yes, you can take measures to improve your life on an individual basis, but real consideration of the collective situation is also indispensable for framing your options well.

Otherwise, ironically, the options tend to further reflect Marxist axioms. In this case, the laborer longs for the very thing that oppresses him: to become the lord of capital, to become the boss, the entrepreneur. By this thinking the only vision of personal freedom is to ascend out of subjugation and reach the more lucrative position of privilege, even though that position obligates you to exploit those like whom you used to be! In this unfortunate perpetuation of the problem, the best result might be for conscience to creep in as an agent of useful redirection. As a psychotherapist I invite that favorable outcome by helping my clients clarify and prioritize their deepest values. Through genuine birthing of one’s deepest values, one is likeliest to transcend and transform reactivity. It is also the surest way to make labor pains into useful ones.