5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
of social relations. From this angle, some critics have suggested that Marcuse’s
conception of the relation between repressed desire and social transformation is
individualistic and asocial in character (see Held, 1980; Chodorow, 1989).
CONTEMPORARY CRITICAL THEORY: HABERMAS’S READING OF FREUD
AND THE THEOREM OF DISTORTED COMMUNICATION
An attempt to overcome some of the core theoretical and political limitations of the
Frankfurt School, while also retaining Freudian psychoanalysis as an exemplar for
critical social theory, is to be found in the writings of the contemporary German
philosopher, Jürgen Habermas. Influenced by Marcuse in particular, Habermas
uses psychoanalytic theory to supplement and enrich critical theory as concerns the
analysis of social power and ideological domination. Habermas, like Marcuse, agrees
with Freud that the development of social organization and productive economic
forces has required a certain amount of psychological repression. But in conditions
of late modernity, says Habermas, as the constraints of economic scarcity are
overcome, we begin to witness the radicalizing possibilities of the transformation
(and perhaps eradication) of social repression.
Perhaps somewhat strangely, most of Habermas’s major contributions to a radical
appropriation of psychoanalysis for social critique—stemming from the late 1960s
especially, but also through the 1970s and into the 1980s—fail to profit from the
pivotal research conducted by the first generation of critical theorists on the
psychopathologies of European rationalism and the Enlightenment. Rather than
seeing the substantive claims of psychoanalysis as a political resource for critical
social theory, Habermas instead develops a methodological interpretation of
Freudian psychoanalysis as linked to the objectives of critical theory. In one
important sense, as will be highlighted in subsequent discussion, Habermas’s
reconceptualization of Freud has many elements in common with Lacanian
psychoanalysis, though the final result is radically different. Like Lacan, Habermas
conceives of psychoanalysis as a theoretical and methodological structure which
traces public, intersubjective communication. Also like Lacan, Habermas argues that
the unconscious is essentially linguistic in character. In contrast to Lacan, however,
Habermas argues for the possibility of emancipation through the recovery of the
repressed unconscious. By developing a literalist understanding of psychoanalysis as
the ‘talking cure’ —that is, that the unconscious can be made conscious via speech
—Habermas seeks to link the overcoming of social repression to transformations in
structures of communication and public political discourse.