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The study of ideology has usually been considered the province of political scientists and sociologists, and their contributions to our understanding of the concept have been considerable (Birnbaum 1962). Psychoanalysis can make a unique contribution to the study of ideology, and it is essential that it do so, to understand the dynamics of ideology as it operates in the psychodynamics of the patient and in the theory and practice of the psychoanalyst.
The concept of ideology pertains to patterns of belief—those quasi-conceptual, quasi-affective sets assumed to be truth. Psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the relationships of both thought and affect to individual systems of meaning, and its understanding of the dynamics of the distortions and skews that enter into human mental life, is admirably equipped to add to the epistemological study of ideology. Because ideology has been primarily significant within the context of its adherents, who are an ideological community sharing the interests and beliefs of the cognitive system and operating within its cognitive framework, examination of the subject has been weighted toward the group rather than the individual phenomena. Psychoanalytic study of the individuals and of their wide range of differences in relationship to both ideology and the ideological community adds to our understanding of the phenomenon. Finally, my own researches into the cognitive bases of personality and psychopathology have revealed the existence of cognitive systems within the family. I