Freud, Politics, and Jewish Thought

This short interview with Eli Zaretsky discusses Freud, Politics and Jewish Thought. This discussion of his days as a student radical, reading Herbert Marcuse, gives you a taste:

In 1968, at a convention of Students for a Democratic Society, I spied the title of a pamphlet by Herbert Marcuse on the book table: “The Obsolescence of the Freudian Conception of Man.” That ideas like repression, regression and the unconscious could become obsolete shocked me. I remember this today because it encapsulates the two meanings of Political Freud. First, for a New Leftist like myself, Marcuse epitomized the idea that it was impossible to understand politics without insight into the irrational forces that shaped history, and that Freudian thought was incomparably the deepest path we had to such insight.