himself, is at pains to emphasize that these idealized world-views are not just illusions: however distortedly, they lend voice to genuine human desires, and thus conceal a Utopian core. What we can now only dream of might always be realized in some emancipated future, as technological development liberates individuals from the compulsion of labour.

Habermas regards psychoanalysis as a discourse which seeks to emancipate us from systematically distorted communication, and so as sharing common ground with the critique of ideology. Pathological behaviour, in which our words belie our actions, is thus roughly equivalent to ideology's 'performative contradictions'. Just as the neurotic may vehemently deny a wish which nevertheless manifests itself in symbolic form on the body, so a ruling class may proclaim its belief in liberty while obstructing it in practice. To interpret these deformed discourses means not just translating them into other terms, but reconstructing their conditions of possibility and accounting for what Habermas calls 'the genetic conditions of the unmeaning'. ³⁶ It is not enough, in other words, to unscramble a distorted text: we need, rather, to explain the causes of the textual distortion itself. As Habermas puts the point, with unwonted pithiness: 'The mutilations [of the text] have meaning as such.' ³⁷ It is not just a question of deciphering a language accidentally afflicted with slippages, ambiguities and non-meanings; it is, rather, a matter of explaining the forces at work of which these textual obscurities are a necessary effect. 'The breaks in the text', Habermas writes, 'are places where an interpretation has forcibly prevailed that is ego-alien even though it is produced by the self . . . The result is that the ego necessarily deceives itself about its identity in the symbolic structures that it consciously produces.' ³⁸

To analyse a form of systematically distorted communication, whether dream or ideology, is thus to reveal how its lacunae, repetitions, elisions and equivocations are themselves significant. As Marx puts the point in Theories of Surplus Value: ' Adam Smith's contradictions are of significance because they contain problems which it is true he does not resolve, but which he reveals by contradicting himself'. ³⁹ If we can lay bare the social conditions which 'force' a particular discourse into certain deceptions and disguises, we can equally examine the repressed desires which introduce distortions into the behaviour of a neurotic patient, or into the text of a dream. Both psychoanalysis and 'ideology critique', in other words, focus upon the points where meaning and force intersect. In social life, a mere attention to meaning, as in hermeneutics, will fail to show up the concealed power interests by which these meanings are internally moulded. In Psychical life, a mere concentration on what Freud calls the 'manifest

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