ABSTRACT
In recent decades, the theory and analysis of ideology has been dramatically transformed by the impact of modern psychoanalytic thought. The strength of this impact is due partly to the attention psychoanalysis has generated concerning the complex and problematic links between ideology and unconscious desire. Alert to the shortcomings of the traditional rationalist view of ideologies as conscious, well articulated sets of beliefs and thoughts, many authors have sought to widen the concept of ideology toward a broader focus on the ways it constitutes the affective, unconscious dimensions of lived experience. They have, in differing theoretical ways, sought to analyse the reproduction of modern ideologies of nationalism, class, race and sexism within the context of our more primary attachments, drives, fantasies and desires. In general terms, this attention to the internal, unconscious structuring of ideological forms has not sought to displace sociological, economic and political analyses of such phenomena. On the contrary, this broadening of the concept of ideology has tended to stress that it is only in conjunction with such approaches that the complex ideological tissues of subjectivity can be adequately conceptualized. However, if, as Freud argued, all rationality is internally framed within desire, it would seem clear that the distortions and deformations traditionally associated with ideology are not just an automatic effect of objective social structures. Seen in this light, rather, the forces which Freud discovered at work within psychical life - mechanisms such as repression, disavowal, introjection and sublimation - are also central in the regulation and stabilization of ideological conflict. In short, ideological forms resemble what Freud called the 'psychopathology of everyday life', the complex ways in which the affective dynamics of pleasure and unhappiness are invested in the social field.
