ABSTRACT
I argued in the introduction to this section that we need a theory of human nature that explains the persistence of human domination even as it claries the possibilities for human liberation. What is required, in other words, is an account of what it means to be a human subject that rejects both the unwarranted cynicism of the proponents of a-social man and the ungrounded utopianism of the partisans of social man in favor of a synthesis that satises both the social and the a-social sides of the human condition. I also claimed that this simultaneously realistic and optimistic synthesis can be derived from the psychoanalytic assumptions of Melanie Klein. It is now time to make good on this claim.
