content' of the dream will blind us to the 'dream-work' itself, where the forces of the unconscious are most stealthily operative. Both dream and ideology are in this sense 'doubled' texts, conjunctures of signs and power; so that to accept an ideology at face value would be like falling for what Freud terms 'secondary revision', the more or less coherent version of the dream text that the dreamer delivers when she wakes. In both cases, what is produced must be grasped in terms of its conditions of production; and to this extent Freud's own argument has much in common with The German Ideology. If dreams cloak unconscious motivations in symbolic guise, then so do ideological texts.

This suggests a further analogy between psychoanalysis and the study of ideology, which Habermas himself does not adequately explore. Freud describes the neurotic symptom as a 'compromise formation', since within its structure two antagonistic forces uneasily coexist. On the one hand there is the unconscious wish which seeks expression; on the other hand there is the censorious power of the ego, which strives to thrust this wish back into the unconscious. The neurotic symptom, like the dream text, thus reveals and conceals at once. But so also, one might claim, do dominant ideologies, which are not to be reduced to mere 'disguises'. The middle-class ideology of liberty and individual autonomy is no mere fiction: on the contrary, it signified in its time a real political victory over a brutally repressive feudalism. At the same time, however, it serves to mask the genuine oppressiveness of bourgeois society. The 'truth' of such ideology, as with the neurotic symptom, lies in neither the revelation nor the concealment alone, but in the contradictory unity they compose. It is not just a matter of stripping off some outer disguise to expose the truth, any more than an individual's self-deception is just a 'guise' he assumes. It is, rather, that what is revealed takes place in terms of what is concealed, and vice versa.

Marxists often speak of 'ideological contradictions', as well as of 'contradictions in reality' (though whether this latter way of talking makes much sense is a bone of contention amongst them). It might then be thought that ideological contradictions somehow 'reflect' or 'correspond to' contradictions in society itself. But the situation is in fact more complex than this suggests. Let us assume that there is a 'real' contradiction in capitalist society between bourgeois freedom and its oppressive effects. The ideological discourse of bourgeois liberty might also be said to be contradictory; but this is not exactly because it reproduces the 'real' contradiction in question. Rather, the ideology will tend to represent what is positive about such liberty, while masking, repressing or displacing its odious corollaries; and this masking or repressing work, as with the neurotic symptom, is likely to interfere

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