The desire to know what really goes on in the minds of working-class people is as old as the intellectual struggle for more democratic rights. In my own political experience in Switzerland, especially in the early 1970s — when we tried to build up new revolutionary parties — it was a great disillusionment to realize that the proletarians did not act as they should have done according to orthodox Marxist thinking. After the general breakdown of our leftist groups, it seemed important to ask ourselves what had been wrong in our attitude towards policy in that period. Since I was a student of psychoanalysis at the time it seemed to me quite natural to think about how psychoanalysis could contribute to such an investigation. The first idea was given to me by the example of my training analyst, Paul Parin, and his group, who had demonstrated the usefulness of psychoanalysis as a research method in different