ABSTRACT
Lorenzer has moved away from his original theoretical agreement with Habermas towards the formulation of psychoanalysis as a materialist theory of socialization which would employ a 'materialist' hermeneutics as its method. Lorenzer, like Habermas, uses psychoanalysis as a model for a 'critical theory of the subject'. Habermas has already outlined the method of 'scenic understanding' used for the re-introduction of privatized meaning into public language. Lorenzer convincingly develops psychoanalysis as a social science by starting from Freud's insight that the kind of illness it deals with has to be seen as a conflict between nature and social norms. Lorenzer's conception of a 'materialist' hermeneutics remained within the framework of a theory of the interpretation of symbolic meaning and therefore on the level of linguistic communication and interaction. Sandkuhler considers 'materialistic hermeneutics' as a scientific sub-system of materialistic dialectics; its object is the 'intellectual reproduction of historical praxis'.
