ABSTRACT
Life is impulsive, and thought arises as a definition of impulse and of the means to its satisfaction. But in human society life’s strongest and most universal impulses are suppressed by a standard of ideality and respectable virtue that is an automatic product of social intercourse and self-consciousness. In short, Marx anticipated in his doctrine of ideologies the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud. The psychoanalyist, because he is trying to cure individual disorders, emphasizes those distortions of consciousness which arise from suppressed motives of sex. “The reflection of economic relations in the form of legal principles is accomplished in such a way that this process does not reach the consciousness of the agent. The law-maker imagines that he is acting from a priori principles, when in reality it is all a matter of economic reflection and that distortion, when it is not conscious, authors call the ideological outlook.”.
