Going back to Zizek, whom you mentioned in the other thread, I really think his starting point for integrating Marx, Freud, and Lacan was Marx's concept of commodity fetishism, in fact I think he even says as much in the Zizek! documentary I saw a few months ago.
I would agree.
The book I quoted from in the other thread was
The Sublime Object of Ideology, which explicitly outlines this integration in a section titled "Commodity Fetishism."
I'm not a Marxian, but the psychological implications of his writings are fascinating. Lacan writes that it was not Hippocrates who identified the notion of the "symptom," but rather Marx. iek explains this very coherently in his book.
A symptom is a signifier of some deeper problem or issue; but it is not to be identified with that issue. Someone says "I feel nauseous." It's later discovered that they received a concussion. The nausea is not the condition. It is merely a signifying symptom.
Marx and Hegel were the first to begin illuminating this separation, and the emergent notion of the "symptom." iek recapitulates Marx's argument that the crucial difference between feudalism and capitalism is that in feudal societies there exists a social relation between men and a material relation between things; but in capitalist societies there exists a material relationship between men and a social relationship between things.
However, in capitalist societies we have apparently free agents acting of their own accord; being "good utilitarians," iek says. What is concealed, he claims, is that the master-slave dialectic exposed by Hegel and furthered by Marx, is still at work in capitalist societies; but it is obscured by the emergence of the social relation between things. This is the symptom of a capitalist society that points to some deeper issue; namely, that "free agents" aren't truly free. This applies not just to the proletariat. Marx claims that the bourgeois class is just as enslaved by the system; both worker and property owner need each other in order to progress/exist.
"Being-a-king" or "being-a-property owner" are just results of the social network between individuals. Kings are only kings because there are people who serve them; but this equation gets twisted around, and the subjects come to believe that they serve the king because he
is a king. That his "king-ness" exists external to their relation. This misrecognition, which is obvious in feudal societies, is concealed in capitalism by shifting the social relation from individuals to objects (which become commodities).
Lacan argues that this misrecognition is at work in psychoanalysis as well. In his famous explanation of the "mirror stage," Lacan claims that in every individual's life an important development occurs in which that individual comes to its own self-identity only through the apprehension of other like forms. However, this is also an alienating experience, and creates a tension for the ego that will never be resolved. As soon as this recognition occurs, the individual is presented with two incompatible notions. That it is a unified being, but that its inner forces (especially in infancy, when it doesn't yet have control of its motor functions) are seemingly fragmented, capricious, and specifically uncontrollable.
Marx argues that objects relate in the same way; the only way objects/commodities can know their own value is by their comparison with other objects. Thus, they come into comparison merely because of their social relation; but this gets twisted as well, and thus the illusion descends again. It appears that the objects within this relation are equivalents "already in themselves," before any relation or network transpired. That is, that they intrinsically possess the qualities of being equivalent, just as the king instrinsically possesses the quality of "kingness."
