Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences

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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, Étienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou.

Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan

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With several never-before published writings, this volume gathers Althusser's major essays on psychoanalytic thought - documenting his intense and ambivalent relationship with Lacan, and dramatizing his intellectual journey and troubled personal life.

Louis Althusser - Quotes

"In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible."
Althusser, Louise Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists & Other Essays.

"A man of nothing who has started out from nothing starting out from an unassignable place: these are, for Machiavelli, the conditions for regeneration."
Althusser, Louis. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987.

"Marx was constrained to think within a horizon torn between the aleatory of the Encounter and the necessity of the revolution."
Althusser, Louis. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987.

"There exists a word in German, Geschichte, which designates not accomplished history, but history in the present, doubtless determined in large part, yet only in part, by the already accomplished past; for a history which is present, which is living, is also open to a future that is uncertain, unforeseeable, not yet accomplished, and therefore aleatory. Living history obeys only a constant (not a law): the constant of class struggle. Marx did not use the term 'constant', which I have taken from Levi-Strauss, but an expression of genius: 'tendential law', capable of inflecting (but not contradicting) the primary tendential law, which means that a tendency does not possess the form or figure of linear law, but that it can bifurcate under the impact of an encounter with another tendency, and so on ad infinitum. At each intersection the tendency can take a path that is unforeseeable because it is aleatory."
Althusser, Louis. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings,

"One of the goals of philosophy is wage theoretical battle. That is why we can say that every thesis is always, by its very nature, an antithesis. A thesis is only ever put forward in opposition to another thesis, or in defence of a new one."
Althusser, Louis. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987.

"However much an ideologue tries to bury [Lenin] beneath a proof by historical analysis, there is always this one man standing their on the plain of History and of our lives, in the eternal 'current situation.' He goes on talking, calmly or passionately. He goes on talking about something simple: his revolutionary practice, the practice of class struggle, about what makes it possible to act on history...not to demonstrate that revolutions are inevitable, but to make them in our unique present."
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.

"Ideology has very little to do with "consciousness".... It is profoundly unconscious."
Althusser, Louis. For Marx. 1962.

"…what is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations which they live."
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: La Pensee. 1970.
Althusser, Louis and Ben Brewster (Translator). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971.

"…an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material."
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: La Pensee. 1970.
Althusser, Louis and Ben Brewster (Translator). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971.

"…those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denial of the ideological character of ideology by ideology." He goes on to say, "It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. . . . ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)."
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: La Pensee. 1970.
Althusser, Louis and Ben Brewster (Translator). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971.

"This last note gives us the meaning of this ambiguity, which is merely a reflection of the effect which produces it: the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e., in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself."
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: La Pensee. 1970.
Althusser, Louis and Ben Brewster (Translator). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971.

Mapping Ideology

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For a long time, the term ‘ideology’ was in disrepute, having become associated with such unfashionable notions as fundamental truth and the eternal verities. The tide has turned, and recent years have seen a revival of interest in the questions that ideology poses to social and cultural theory, and to political practice.

Mapping Ideology is a comprehensive reader covering the most important contemporary writing on the subject. Including Slavoj Žižek’s study of the development of the concept from Marx to the present, assessments of the contributions of Lukács and the Frankfurt School by Terry Eagleton, Peter Dews and Seyla Benhabib, and essays by Adorno, Lacan and Althusser, Mapping Ideology is an invaluable guide to the most dynamic field in cultural theory.

With contributions by Nicholas Abercrombie, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Michèle Barrett, Seyla Benhabib, Pierre Bourdieu, Peter Dews, Terry Eagleton, Stephen Hill, Fredric Jameson, Jacques Lacan, Michel Pécheux, Richard Rorty, Göran Therborn, and Bryan Turner

See also

Mapping the Nation 

Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial