ABSTRACT
A harmonious synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis presupposes that society is without the antagonisms that are its essence. "True pluralism," wrote Max Horkheimer, "belongs to the concept of a future society." To Marxists schooled in psychoanalysis, it is the very cleavage between the dimensions of history and psychology that seems questionable; it openly ignores any dialectic between a psychological and historical consciousness. The critical edge of psychoanalysis is rooted in the dialectic: it pierces the sham of the isolated individual with the secret of its socio-sexual-biological substratum. Sociologism prematurely cuts off an exploration of subjectivity in the name of society, which it can no longer understand without subjectivity; critical theory, drawing upon psychoanalysis, sinks into subjectivity till it hits bottom: society. Negative psychoanalysis is "twice" objective in that it traces at first the objective content of subjectivity, and second, discovers there is only an objective configuration to subjectivity.
