Marcuse on True and False Needs

The problem of needs was first posed by Marcuse in his early essays in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung not in terms of the relation between ideology and materialism, or the relation between individual motivation and societal forces, as it had been for Reich and Fromm, but in terms of the ancient philosophical paradoxes of freedom and necessity, reason and pleasure, essence and appearance, potentiality and actuality, ideology and truth. 1 It was relatively late in his development that Marcuse turned to Freud and, when he did, it was not to investigate the problem of individual psychology, the weak link of dialectical materialism, but to pursue his interest in these classical philosophical dichotomies. In Freud’s metapsychology, reason and pleasure represent the antithesis in whose terms the conflicts of civilisation play themselves out. Hegel’s claim that history ‘is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages . . .’ ( Hegel, 1975 , p. 79) might well have been uttered by Freud, who maintained that ‘Happiness is no cultural value’ (quoted by Marcuse, 1969 , p. 23).