for an heiress to a big American fortune to reject the "freedom" of being released from kidnappers and to embrace and identify with "the freedom of all oppressed people"? It is the position of this research that Hearst's experience with the SLA introduced her to the facts about American capitalism and imperialism and exposed to her such injustices as racism, classism, sexism, and police brutality, as well as the propaganda machine that keeps injustice in power. Hearst's SLA experience afforded her the opportunity to reject as evil the American power elite of which her family was a significant part. In effect, the SLA can be perceived as having deprogrammed Hearst's personal and cultural conditioning.
In order to account for Hearst's psychological transformation under the tutelage of the SLA, it is appropriate to begin by turning to personality theory, which inevitably entails social theory as well. For that purpose, it is essential to include the theories of Marx and Freud. Taken together, Marx's analysis of culture and society as fundamentally social processes that imply certain social necessities and imperatives, and Freud's analysis of personality and culture as mutually interpenetrating and mutually determining processes, constitute an account of the whole of human experience. Marx's emphasis is on society, and Freud's is on human psychology and the social and cultural realities that derive from its reality. But neither Marx nor Freud confine themselves to one sphere or the other. Further, the individual personality as constructed by modern experience is of interest to both Marx and Freud.
As a master of social theory, Marx locates its personality in economics. Although the implications of Marxism were great for political and economic (i.e., elite) history, the importance to Marx to social and cultural history is relevant to modern experience. From Marx's perspective the personality that the modern world has created is a highl...