Abstract

To present psychoanalysis as social theory is unusual. Psychology and sociology seem far apart, and especially in the bourgeois age they appear to belong to opposite dimensions. In the struggle of “world views” the tendency is to regard humanly relevant reality as constituted either by inner drives or by capital use and class war. Anything between the two is rejected. In the following I will argue that, first, Freud's psychology, the core of which is a biographical theory of neurotic disturbance, necessarily implies a theory of society; second, that Freud, thirty years after his decisive psychological discoveries, also explicitly developed this latent social theory (1927); third and finally, that Freud's therapeutic procedure is homologous with the (critical) theory of natural socialization—the dialectic of alienation and assimilation.