ABSTRACT
As the purpose of psychoanalysis is not to cure isolated symptoms of neurosis but to modify the life of people entirely, the problems of ideology acquire increasing importance in the process of analysis. Since the ego of a civilized human being is expressed though certain ideological attitudes, the patient’s ideology becomes “analytic material” even before we know the exact meaning of this material. This chapter examines the psychic function of ideology, whether or not it is “appropriate” in its relationship with the ego. Every ideology, whatever its “truth” or “validity”, is, therefore, in the character of a psychic phenomenon, liable to be reduced to more elementary psychic phenomena. The ego, in its functions of cognition and action, appears as the privileged centre of the ideological process. The contradiction between the superego and the ego-ideal is always revealed to a certain extent in the opposition between the conscious ideology and the unconscious ideology of the individual.
