Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences

What can psychoanalysis, a psychological approach developed more than a century ago, offer us in an age of rapidly evolving, hard-to-categorize ideas of sexuality and the self? Should we abandon Freud's theories completely or adapt them to new findings and the new relationships taking shape in modern liberal societies? In a remarkably prescient series of lectures delivered in the early 1960s, the French philosopher Louis Althusser anticipated the challenges that psychoanalytic theory would face as politics moved away from structuralist frameworks and toward the elastic possibilities of anthropological and sociological thought.
Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences translates Althusser's remarkable seminars into English for the first time, making available to a wider audience the origins and potential future of radical political theory. Althusser takes the important step in these lectures of distinguishing psychoanalysis from psychology and especially psychiatry, which long resisted Freud's analytical concepts of the unconscious and overdetermination. By freeing psychoanalysis from this bind, Althusser can then apply these analytical concepts to the social and the political, integrated with Marxist theory. The result is an enlivened methodology for comprehending social organization and change that had a profound influence on the Frankfurt School and scholars who continue to work at the forefront of radical thought today: Judith Butler, tienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou.
"THESE TWO talks given by Louis Althusser in 1963–1964, in the context of an ENS seminar on the question of psychoanalysis seen from Jacques Lacan’s perspective, deal with the topic of the problematic scientificity of the human sciences in general. They are of strategic interest not only because they first reveal, just before the article “Freud and Lacan” was published in 1964 1965,1 the deep intellectual influence exerted by Lacan’s thought on Althusser’s own theoretical task in these years the return to Marx, which involved a struggle against psychologism as well as against any philosophy of consciousness, but also because they involve a concept at stake in Althusser’s philosophical program of elaborating a theory of ideology in general the concept of the subject."