provided by the standard 'progressive' criticism of psychoanalysis. The reproach here is that the psychoanalytic explanation of misery and psychic suffering through unconscious libidinal complexes, or even via a direct reference to the 'death drive', renders the true causes of destructiveness invisible. This critique of psychoanalysis found its ultimate theoretical expression in the rehabilitation of the idea that the ultimate cause of psychic trauma is real childhood sexual abuse: by introducing the notion of the phantasmic origin of trauma, Freud allegedly betrayed the truth of his own discovery. ³ Instead of the concrete analysis of external, actual social conditions -- the patriarchal family, its role in the totality of the reproduction of the capitalist system, and so on -- we are thus given the story of unresolved libidinal deadlocks; instead of the analysis of social conditions that lead to war, we are given the 'death drive'; instead of the change of social relations, a solution is sought in the inner psychic change, in the 'maturation' that should qualify us to accept social reality as it is. In this perspective, the very striving for social change is denounced as an expression of the unresolved Oedipus complex . . . . Is not this notion of a rebel who, by way of his 'irrational' resistance to social authority, acts out his unresolved psychic tensions ideology at its purest? However, as Jacqueline Rose demonstrated, ⁴ such an externalization of the cause into 'social conditions' is no less false, in so far as it enables the subject to avoid confronting the real of his or her desire. By means of this externalization of the Cause, the subject is no longer engaged in what is happening to him; he entertains towards the trauma a simple external relationship: far from stirring up the unacknowledged kernel of his desire, the traumatic event disturbs his balance from outside. ⁵

The paradox in all these cases is that the stepping out of (what we experience as) ideology is the very form of our enslavement to it. The opposite example of non-ideology which possesses all the standard features of ideology is provided by the role of Neues Forum in ex-East Germany. An inherently tragic ethical dimension pertains to its fate: it presents a point at which an ideology 'takes itself literally' and ceases to function as an 'objectively cynical' (Marx) legitimization of existing power relations. Neues Forum consisted of groups of passionate intellectuals who 'took socialism seriously' and were prepared to risk everything in order to destroy the compromised system and replace it with the Utopian 'third way' beyond capitalism and 'really existing' socialism. Their sincere belief and insistence that they were not working for the restoration of Western capitalism, of course, proved to be nothing but an insubstantial illusion; we could say, however, that precisely as such (as a thorough

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