Hegel with Freud: psychoanalysis, subjectivity, and social critique in the Frankfurt School

The Frankfurt School has often been associated to the project of “marrying” Freud’s psychoanalysis with a Marxian critique of capitalist societies. This article offers however another version of the link between Critical Theory and psychoanalysis. After having briefly sketched the notion of a “critical theory of society”, the Author shows how a critique of modern capitalist societies and Freudian psychoanalysis actually meet at a “methodological” level for which the marriage between Hegel and Freud seems to be the relevant one. As a conclusion, the Author contrasts two kinds of social critique that can be found in the Frankfurt School, which are deeply linked with the first and the latest generation of the Frankfurt School considered in their relation to psychoanalysis