The linguistic turn and the abandonment of psychoanalysis: in replacing the philosophy of consciousness with a theory of speech, did you lose the depth dimension — the drives, the unconscious — that made critical theory critical?

Jürgen Habermas, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Inquiry is never disinterested. In Knowledge and Human Interests I argued that the empirical-analytic sciences are constituted by a technical interest in prediction and control, the historical-hermeneutic sciences by a practical interest in understanding, and the critical sciences by an emancipatory interest in freeing subjects from systematically distorted communication — and I made psychoanalysis the model of the third, because its criterion of success is the patient's own uncoerced assent.¹²³

I abandoned that framework, not that criterion. The framework was still a philosophy of the subject, and the analytic relation is asymmetrical in a way no critical theorist may be toward a public. Distorted communication remains the central concept; it is now located in the pragmatic structure of speech, where the standard is something participants have already conceded by speaking rather than something the theorist sees and they do not.⁴

Sources

1. And we can only tread this ground to the extent that we internalize these rules—as socialized participants and not as impartial observers. Reality is constituted in a framework that is the form of life of communicating groups and is organized through ordinary language. What is real is that which can be experienced according to the interpretations of a prevailing symbolic system.

   Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 195

2. They have a transcendental function but arise from actual structures of human life: from stractures of a species that reproduces its life both through learning processes of socially organized labor and processes of mutual understanding in interactions mediated in ordinary language. These basic conditions of life have an interest structure.

   Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 197

3. Tt is true, nevertheless, that the hermeneutic art remains tied to "personal virtuosity" to a greater measure than does the mastery of operations of measurement." The hermeneutic sciences are anchored in interactions mediated by ordinary language just as are the empirical-analytic sciences in the behavioral system of instrumental action.

   Knowledge and Human Interests, p. 179

4. In contrast, the forms in which the conflict is carried out, namely work, language, and power, depend on the cultural conditions of our existence. We have ascertained the structures of work, language and power not naively but through the selfreflection of knowledge, beginning with the philosophy of science, entering the transcendental dimension, and finally becoming aware of its objective context.

   Knowledge and Human Interests, pp. 288–289

Where the argument is made

• Knowledge and Human Interests (1968
• Shapiro trans. 1971), chs. 10-12 on Freud, self-reflection and the emancipatory interest, and the appendix "Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective"
• the turn in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), where rationality is relocated to the validity claims of speech and Freud recedes
• The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) on the exhaustion of subject-centred reason

How the argument was received

A shift Habermas has never described as a repudiation and his readers have generally described as one. Nearly a third of Knowledge and Human Interests is devoted to psychoanalysis; the mature theory is not. The Frankfurt psychoanalytic milieu around the Sigmund Freud Institute — Mitscherlich, Lorenzer, Brede — read the change as an abandonment, and the objection has been renewed by every subsequent attempt to put the drives back into a theory of social integration.