Psychoanalysis and the Methodology of Critique

In his introduction to Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse distinguishes his philosophy of psychoanalysis from psychoanalytic therapy by explaining that the former aims “not at curing individual sickness, but at diagnosing the general disorder.”1 With this claim, Marcuse expresses a thought that has run through first, second, and third generation critical theory in different ways; namely, that the methodology of critical theory can be understood as being somehow analogous to psychoanalytic technique. This analogy holds that the critical theorist stands in relation to the pathological social order as the analyst stands in relation to the analysand, and that the aim of critical theory is to effect the diagnosis and, ultimately, the cure of social disorders or pathologies. This idea was famously developed in careful detail in Jürgen Habermas’s early work, Knowledge and Human Interests (KHI).2 There, Habermas defined psychoanalysis as a science of “methodical self-reflection” (KHI, 214), that is, as a form of depth hermeneutics that aims to analyze those aspects of the self that have been alienated from the self and yet remain part of it. In other words, it aims to analyze what Freud once referred to as the “internal foreign territory” of the unconscious.3 In KHI Habermas understood the individual psyche in communicative terms; hence, for him, unconscious wishes are those that have been “exclude[d]from public communication,” or “delinguisticized” (KHI, 224), but that continue to disrupt the subject’s communication with him or herself in the form of dreams, slips of the tongue, and other interruptions (KHI, 227). The job of the analyst, on this way of understanding analysis, is to teach the subject to “comprehend his own language” (KHI, 227), and, in so doing, to restore a broken internal dialogue. Psychoanalysis, for Habermas, aims at a self-reflective act of understanding, specifically of those portions of our life history that have been split off or repressed; its goal is thus that of making the unconscious conscious (KHI, 242). While Habermas acknowledges that self-reflection is both a cognitive process of coming to understand the resistances to making the unconscious conscious and an affective process of dissolving those resistances, and while he discusses the role of transference and workingthrough in Freud’s understanding of these processes, his account of psychoanalysis nonetheless emphasizes the role of linguistic interpretation and rational insight in the process of self-reflection. Indeed, he famously — and controversially — rejects Freud’s distinction between thing-presentations and word-presentations and argues that all unconscious contents can be translated into linguistic terms. Such translation work is, for Habermas, central to the work of analysis (KHI, 241–2).4 Habermas concludes from his discussion that