Historical materialism, first of all,
> asks what were the historical conditions of emergence of such disciplines
> as "economics," "sociology," "psychology," etc. as well as of their
objects
> of study (e.g., "the market," "civil society," "abstract individual,"
> etc.). Empirical data gathered in each discipline are sometimes of
> interest to historical materialists, but such data for analytical reason
> are to be relativized within dialectical reason (which asks how these
> institutions such as "psychology" arose and what roles they have played in
> history). "Psychology" didn't always exist, just as wage labor didn't
> always exist. The "Unconscious," "psyche," etc. are variants of a notion
> of universal and timeless human nature (like the idea of the soul in
> Christianity), and, for this reason, Marxists should not think of them as
> _explanatory tools_; on the contrary, the emergence and trajectory of such
> concepts is _what is to be explained historically_.
>
Sure, but you could--and should--say the same thing about historical materialism, in whatever forms it takes (i.e parties, nation-states, publishing houses, e-mail lists, etc.) Doing that doesn't make historical materialism useless or pointless--only historical. Likewise for psychoanalysis. You don't have to find psychoanalysis as an _explanation_ all that helpful to still see that it can have value. For example, saying the working class is the symptom of xyz is pretty banal. But talking about the way it does and can create symptomatic effects can be more interesting, since that kind of formulation stipulates a kind of dialectical relation between capital/bourgeoisie and working class etc. etc. It seems to me imagining *kinds* of dialectics could be pretty useful, eh? I mean, against the idea that there is "an" historical dialectic? That's at least one use that isn't explanatory, but descriptive/analytic, and it seems to me very worthwhile.
I haven't been keeping up with Slavoj's stuff as I should, but some of the recent stuff I've liked, especially since he seems pretty unabashed about recovering crucial parts of modernity's "incomplete project" of which socialism would have to be a part. The fantasy that you can construct anything resembling a just society that won't have any of the residual forms of the "old order" seems ridiculous to me--rejecting psychology and religion out of hand seems like a gesture of incredible privilege--or epistemic violence, whathaveyou.
As for Carroll's question: depends who you talk to. James Hillman and Michael Ventura (authors of "We've had 100 Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse") say that psychology could or should be the study of people's political identifications, as well as the politics of their identifications. That sounds like a start to me.
All best Christian