Crítica e patologia social: ambivalências da relação entre psicanálise e teoria social

Highlighting the appropriation of psychoanalysis in the context of critical theory, the present paper discusses the ambivalences in the relation between psychoanalytic concepts and social theory. Therefore, I develop my argument in four steps. Initially, I intend to show how Adorno, at the same time that he finds in Freud the advantages of a perspective of a decentered subjectivity, he also develops a critique of a possible inflating of psychoanalytic categories in sociological field (1). In view of this brief reconstruction, I discuss to what extent the link between psychoanalytic and social categories can stay productive, considering the problem of the epistemological status of psychoanalysis (2). In a third step, I briefly present the recent interlocution with psychoanalysis proposed by Axel Honneth, suggesting that concepts such as recognition and social pathology point to a specific sense of limits to a social theory (3). Finally, I conclude by suggesting a distinction between three meanings of suffering and therapy, the typology of which exemplifies paradigmatically a reciprocal delimitation between psychoanalysis and social theory (4).