ABSTRACT
Habermas's reading of Freud in Knowledge and Human Interests has often been criticized both in its role as a plausible model for a critical theory of society and as a reading of Freud. Habermas believes that the 'critical' element can be sustained only if a universalistic and transcendental moment is presupposed by depth-hermeneutical practice. Habermas's model of a depth hermeneutic adds to hermeneutic's interpretive procedure an explanatory dimension. According to Habermas, psychoanalytic self-transformations work through the operation of the Hegelian causality of fate. The relation between the patient's ordinary language and the language of the theory hence corresponds most closely to the Gadamerian notion of a fusion of horizons. Self-knowledge proceeds through the adoption of another framework of self-understanding which allows different attitudes towards oneself to be adopted. Freud and Marx are the tragedians of modernity; and the overcoming of modernity would be a kind of rebirth of tragedy.
