The Damaged Subject: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between critical social theory and psicoanalisis. Critical theorists were devoted to set up an análisis of the ways of socialization in late capitalism. Thereby, they discovered in Freud?s Psychoanalysis a fundamental key to decipher the internalization of social constraints. As modern society may only guarantee self-preservation at the price of renouncement and fear, the psychoanalytical approach to the „dark side of civilization? provides truly privileged insights into the internal dynamics of the damaged subject. Accordingly, the analysis of the repressed instincts and desires proves to be crucial to understand the genesis of „false consciousness? in the subjects? psyche, not as a typological description of the authoritarian personality, but rather as a „crooked cure? of the scars which the process of socialization imposes and re-imposes on the living subjects.