from the inside with what gets genuinely articulated. One might claim, then, that the ambiguous, self-contradictory nature of the ideology springs precisely from its not authentically reproducing the real contradiction; indeed were it really to do so, we might hesitate about whether to term this discourse 'ideological' at all.

There is a final parallel between ideology and psychical disturbance which we may briefly examine. A neurotic pattern of behaviour, in Freud's view, is not simply expressive of some underlying problem, but is actually a way of trying to cope with it. It is thus that Freud can speak of neurosis as the confused glimmerings of a kind of solution to whatever is awry. Neurotic behaviour is a strategy for tackling, encompassing and 'resolving' genuine conflicts, even if it resolves them in an imaginary way. The behaviour is not just a passive reflex of this conflict, but an active, if mystified, form of engagement with it, just the same can be said of ideologies, which are no mere inert by-products of social contradictions but resourceful strategies for containing, managing and imaginarily resolving them. étienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey have argued that works of literature do not simply 'take' ideological contradictions, in the raw, as it were, and set about lending them some factitious symbolic resolution. If such resolutions are possible, it is because the contradictions in question have already been surreptitiously processed and transformed, so as to appear in the literary work in the form of their potential dissolution. ⁴⁰ The point may be applied to ideological discourse as such, which works upon the conflicts it seeks to negotiate, softening', masking and displacing them as the dream-work modifies and transmutes the 'latent contents' of the dream itself. One might therefore attribute to the language of ideology something of the devices employed by the unconscious, in their respective labour upon their 'raw materials': condensation, displacement, elision, transfer of affect, considerations of symbolic representability, and so on. And the aim of this labour in both cases is to recast a problem in the form of its potential solution.

Any parallel between psychoanalysis and the critique of ideology must necessarily be imperfect. For one thing, Habermas himself tends in rationalist style to downplay the extent to which the psychoanalytic cure comes about less through self-reflection than through the drama of transference between patient and analyst. And it is not easy to think up an exact political analogy to this. For another thing, as Russell Keat has pointed out, the emancipation wrought by psychoanalysis is a matter of remembering or 'working through' repressed materials, whereas ideology is less a question of something we have forgotten than of something we never knew in the first place. ⁴¹ We may note finally that in Habermas's view the discourse of the neurotic is a kind of

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