[....] It might be thought that men and women would naturally be driven to rebel against any authority as cruel as the superego. If they do not commonly do so, it is because in Freud's view the superego has its roots in the id or unconscious, closer to the unconscious than is the ego itself. Our submission to the law, in other words, is spurred on by strong instinctual forces, which bind us libidinally to it. The paradox, then, is that the very unconscious energies which fuel the superego's despotism are also those which drive us to embrace it; and this can be seen as deconstructing the Gramscian opposition of coercion and consent. What makes the law so coercive – the powerful unconscious impulsions behind its brutality – belong with the erotic drives which lead us to consent to it.If 'culture' in Freud's eyes is a matter of sublimation, compensation and imaginary resolution, then it is really synonymous with one influential concept of ideology. But Freud's view of civilization is also ideological in a different sense. For him, as much as for Thomas Hobbes or Jeremy Bentham, there is an eternal enmity between the ruthlessly self-gratifying individual and the demands of society. Men and women are naturally self-seeking, dominative and aggressive, monstrous predators who can be dissuaded out of mutual injury only by the prohibitions of authority, or by the bribery of some alternative yield of pleasure. Freud has little or no conception of human society as nourishing as well as constraining – as a place of reciprocal self-fulfilment as well as a mechanism for keeping us from each other's throats. His view of both individual and society, in short, is classically bourgeois: the individual as an isolated monad powered by its appetites, society as some mere contractual device without which libidinal anarchy would be let loose. Given this cynical market-place morality, it is hardly surprising that the 'culture' which is meant to regulate and reconcile individuals is revealed as alarmingly fragile in contrast to their insatiable lust to plunder and possess. Freud's psychoanalytic theory is not finally dissociable from the politics of his social class, and like bourgeois political economy is inscribed at key points by these prejudices. It universalizes a particular view of 'man' to global status; and much the same can be said of the later version of the theory which is the school of Jacques Lacan. Whatever striking insights Lacan's work has undoubtedly to offer, there is surely no doubt that its view of the human subject as a mere effect of some inscrutable Other, its scorn for the whole concept of political emancipation, and its contemptuous dismissal of human history as little more than a 'sewer', has had its part to play in that jaundiced, disenchanted post-war ethos which goes under the name of the 'end of ideology'.Whatever Freud's final trust in human reason, he is plainly not a rationalist as far as psychoanalytic practice goes. He does not believe that a patient could ever be cured simply by offering him a theoretical account of his ills. To this extent, Freud is at one with Marx: the point is not to interpret the world, but to change it Neurosis is to be dispelled not by displacing its 'falsity' with some intellectual truth, but by tackling the material conditions which give birth to it in the first place. For him as for Marx, theory is pointless unless it comes to intervene as a transformative force within actual experience. For Marx, the opposite of an oppressive ideology is not in the end theory or an alternative ideology, but political practice. For Freud, the alternative to psychic disorder is the scene of analysis itself, within which the only truth that matters is that which gets constructed in the interplay between analyst and analysand. Like political practice, the scene of analysis is an active 'staging' or working through of conflicts, a 'theatricalizing' of certain urgent real-life issues in which the practical relations of human subjects to those problems is crucially transfigured. Both revolutionary practice and the scene of analysis involves the painful construction of a new identity on the ruins of the old, which is to be recollected rather than repressed; and in both cases 'theory' comes down to an altered practical self-understanding. Marxism and Freudianism have due respect for analytic discourse, in contrast to those modern irrationalisms which can afford the luxury of not needing to know. But for both creeds, the proof of emancipatory theory lies in the performance; and in this process theory and practice never form some neatly symmetrical whole. For if theory is a material intervention, it will alter the very practice it takes as its object and so stand in need of transformation itself, in order to be equal to the new situation it has produced. Practice, in other words, becomes the 'truth' that interrogates theory; so that here, as in the play of transference and countertransference between analyst and patient, it is never easy to say who exactly is analysing whom. A 'successful' theoretical act is one which substantially engages with practice and thus ceases to remain identical with itself, ceases to be 'pure theory'. Similarly, an ideological practice is no longer identical with itself once theory has entered it from the inside; but this is not to say that it now attains to a truth of which it was previously just ignorant. For theory can only successfully intervene in practice if it elicits what glimmerings of self-understanding the practice already has. If the analyst is a 'pure' theoretician, then she will be incapable of deciphering this particular form of mystified speech; and if the neurotic patient were not already unconsciously in search of some self-understanding, there would be no neurosis in the first place. For such disturbances, as we saw earlier, are ways of trying to encompass a real dilemma, and so contain their own kind of truth.
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