ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic revisionism as worked out by Alfred Adler was already associated with a retreat to pleasantries and homilies. Sigmund Freud's link to a Hegelian tradition—with which he otherwise shares little—is in the deliberate renunciation of common sense. A half-truth is contained in the neo-Freudian revisions, as there is in all revisionism: the notion that reality is historical, and theory, if it is to be adequate to that reality, must also be historical and must also change. For Freud and critical theory, to the point that sexuality, repression, libido are revised out of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis is itself repressed. From the beginning the repression of psychoanalysis was announced as its liberalization. "The act of repression has demonstrated to people the strength of the ego, but it also bears witness at the same time to the ego's impotence and to the uninfluenceable character of the individual instinctual impulse in the id.".
