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.)
In his works 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, it rests on a deep structural homology between political economy and psychic economy. In the midst of the structuralist period in France, Goux developed a theory of symbolic economies, in which the structure of the Freudian subject is conceived as mirroring the forms of value and exchange that prevail in capitalist society. This approach allows psychoanalysis to be situated 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.
For Goux, the expression “symbolic economy” refers to more than a simple analogy between psychic and economic processes. It designates a common structural logic governing different systems of mediation. Money, the linguistic sign, the paternal function, the phallus and other privileged symbolic operators all perform comparable functions : they establish general equivalence, organize exchange and regulate circulation within their respective domains. Rather than treating these institutions as independent inventions, Goux interprets them as homologous forms emerging from the same historical organization of symbolic life. Psychoanalysis therefore belongs to a broader history of symbolic economies rather than constituting an autonomous science of the human mind.
Such a perspective has important epistemological consequences. If the Freudian unconscious reflects historically specific forms of symbolic mediation, psychoanalysis can no longer be understood as a universal anthropology of the human mind. It becomes itself a historical object, expressing a particular configuration of subjectivity shaped by the symbolic forms of capitalist modernity. The task of a critical psychoanalysis is therefore not only to interpret psychic life, but also to investigate the historical conditions that have made its own categories possible.
Goux was very influential in the 1970s. Authors as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Lacan found important inspiration in Goux. But unlike these authors, Goux seems relatively little mentioned today. Paradoxically, this oversight appears to be particularly evident in the context of the Marxist approach to psychoanalysis.
In what follows, I would like to briefly recall Goux’s contribution to the reflection on the relationship between the Freudian unconscious and the economy.
1. A psychic economy modelled 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, governed by a logic of substitution, measurement, equivalence, and deferred representation. This logic also characterizes the commodity form as analyzed by Marx. The unconscious, in this reading, is a structure of deferred exchange, a kind of “stock exchange” in which representations and libidinal investments are subject to processes of symbolic equivalence, energetic quantification, and circulation.
Freud himself, already in the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), speaks of “quantitative excitations,” of charges of energy, and of “amounts of investment” in terms that interweave monetary and thermodynamic vocabularies. Goux reads these not as casual metaphors, but as evidence of an isomorphic structure linking modern subjectivity and the abstract forms of value that govern economic life. Just as money abstracts from the concrete qualities of goods to represent them through a single standard of exchange, the Freudian process of repression produces substitutive representations that translate libidinal or traumatic excitations into symptom-formations that can circulate socially.
For Goux, these formulations are significant because they reveal more than an economic vocabulary. They suggest that the Freudian apparatus itself is organized according to an economic logic of circulation, accumulation, investment, displacement and discharge. The psyche is conceived as a system in which psychic quantities are constantly redistributed and transformed according to principles that closely resemble the abstract operations governing modern economic exchange.
This structural homology also presupposes a Saussurean conception of value. Just as linguistic value emerges from differential relations rather than intrinsic properties, economic value and psychic value are constituted within systems of symbolic differences. Money, signs and libidinal investments acquire their meaning only through the network of relations in which they circulate. Goux’s project thus belongs fully to the structuralist attempt to identify common formal principles underlying apparently distinct symbolic orders.
2. From commodity fetishism to symptom fetishism
This parallel extends to the concept of fetishism, which is central both to Marx and to Freud. For Marx, commodity fetishism is the process by which social relations are naturalized : relations between people appear as relations between things. Goux points out that, in Freud, sexual fetishism performs a similar function : it displaces and masks the origin of desire, making a partial object libidinally investable and socially operable.
The symptom, understood as a compromise formation between desire and censorship, can be interpreted as the psychic equivalent of the fetish : it condenses multiple meanings, conceals the source of desire, and imposes itself on consciousness as an opaque reality-just as the commodity obscures the labour relations beneath the apparent neutrality of its exchange value.
This analogy allows Goux to formulate a bold hypothesis : psychoanalysis does not describe a transhistorical unconscious but rather a historically specific structure of subjectivity, whose internal economy mirrors the rationality and abstraction of capitalist exchange. Libidinal economy is thus formally attuned to monetary economy-not as mere reflection, but through structural homology.
The relation proposed by Goux is however neither causal nor reductive. He does not argue that economic structures produce psychic structures, nor that psychoanalysis merely reflects capitalism. Goux› claim is methodological : different symbolic systems may display homologous forms of organization while remaining relatively autonomous. What they share is not a common substance but a common logic of mediation, equivalence and exchange.
3. A critique of naturalized psychoanalysis
Goux’s project is not merely to juxtapose Freud and Marx, but to deploy the critique of political economy as a critique of psychic economy. If the unconscious is structured like a marketplace – as Freud himself sometimes suggests – then classical psychoanalysis risks naturalizing the very forms of rationality it seeks to analyze. The danger, in Goux’s view, lies in presenting this logic of equivalence and substitution as universal, rather than as historical products of capitalist modernity.
Any project aiming to link psychoanalysis with social critique must therefore strive to denaturalize symbolic forms : to show that they are neither eternal nor universal, but historically situated. This opens the way for a reconceptualization of psychoanalysis as a critical hermeneutics of historically produced subjectivities, a path later pursued in different ways by theorists like Alfred Lorenzer (1977) or Cornelius Castoriadis (1975).
Goux’s work therefore raises a question that extends far beyond psychoanalysis. If theories of the subject are historically shaped by the symbolic forms of their own epoch, then every psychology, every anthropology and perhaps every theory of knowledge must also be read as part of a history of symbolic economies rather than as timeless descriptions of human nature.
Revisiting Goux today therefore means more than recovering a neglected structuralist thinker. His work invites us to ask whether transformations in symbolic mediation also transform the conceptual forms through which subjectivity itself becomes thinkable. The question remains open, but it gives Goux’s work a relevance that extends well beyond the debates of the 1970s.
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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