Herbert Marcuse turned Freudianism on its head in his critical theory.

Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) is a tragic argument: civilisation is purchased by permanent instinctual renunciation. The pleasure principle must yield to the reality principle, and no amount of social reform can refund the happiness surrendered. Repression is the price of culture, and the price is fixed.

Marcuse, in Eros and Civilization (1955), accepts Freud's mechanism and reverses his conclusion, using two concepts:

• Surplus repression — the repression required over and above what scarcity actually demands, imposed to sustain domination rather than civilisation.
• The performance principle — the historically specific form the reality principle takes under capitalism, organising people by their competitive economic performance.

The reversal follows. If part of repression is surplus, and the reality principle has a historical form rather than an eternal one, then advanced technology, by abolishing scarcity, makes a non-repressive civilisation conceivable — a libidinal rationality where labour becomes play.

So Freud's biological destiny becomes a political variable, and the deepest conservative claim of psychoanalysis is converted into a warrant for liberation. Marcuse's later warning in One-Dimensional Man (1964) — repressive desublimation, where sexual liberty itself pacifies — shows he knew how easily that promise is captured.