The relations between psychoanalysis and social thought find their roots in the early developments of Freud's work. He took on this question and dedicated a considerable part of his production on the so-called sociological texts, published after the World War I. Social theory and his final conception of the drives represent the most compromising aspects of Freud's inheritance, to which only a few authors, such as Jacques Lacan, have been willing to return. Freud takes a pessimistic view in these texts and criticizes the optimistic reading of the metaphor of power-expression, which establishes the unilateral action of power on something that cannot be expressed freely. It is from these coordinates that the author of this article endeavors to update the Freudian conception of mental health and explore how the law is in a paradoxical relationshipwith the drives and with pathological satisfaction. This conception has important effects for the rhetoric of personal and political liberation.
Psychoanalysis; Freud; Freudian pessimism; civilization and its discontents