ABSTRACT
Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia is considered a classic text, equally for the sociology of knowledge and for the theory of ideology as a distortion of knowledge by social and political interests. It is grounded in a theoretical approach based upon unmediated contemplation which opens up an irrational chasm between the subject and object of knowledge, the same “dark and empty” chasm that Fichte described. “The Unit Act of Action Systems,” from Structure of Social Action, may be difficult reading, but it is an important sample of Parsons’s theoretical intention to define the elements in a theory of social action: the actor, the social situation, and the structured relation among these elements. Psychoanalysis, in contrast to some other schools of psychology, can claim that it has understood this fact from the beginning. The problem of the relations between psychoanalysis and sociology has two sides. The first is the application of psychoanalysis to sociology, the second that of sociology to psychoanalysis.
