ABSTRACT
In the history of psychoanalysis, as in the history of Marxism, reformist practices threatened to supplant and suppress theory. Revisionism of both schools—psychoanalytic and Marxist—crept toward a pragmatism impatient with a nonutilitarian theory and reflection. Critical theory resists pragmatic or Marxist calls for the instant identity of theory and practice; this is to be quickly attained only by the suppression of theory. The identity of theory and practice is to be achieved in a nonantagonistic society; till then the relationship can only be one of conscious contradiction. Psychoanalysis is a theory of society and civilization as a whole, as well as immediate practice, therapy for the individual. The serious objection of the Frankfurt School to the neo-Freudians turned exactly on the point: they weakened the theory of psychoanalysis in favor of therapy. The acuteness of Sigmund Freud as bourgeois thinker is again glimpsed; he unflinchingly articulated contradictions and refrained from blurring them in the name of therapy or harmony.
