Proceeding from Freud's dictum about the three “impossible” professions—psychoanalysis, teaching, and politics—the author charts the latitudes and longitudes of the specific domain in which both psychoanalysis (as work on the autonomy of the individual) and politics (as work on the autonomy of societies) meet and condition one another. He contends that there can be no individual autonomy without the existence of an autonomous society which practices a form of collective self-reflection enabling it to see through the laws by which it lives. By the same token, there can be no social autonomy without individual subjects giving free rein to their imagination rather than suppressing and controlling it. Freud's precept that where there was id there should be ego is supplemented by the author's suggestion that it is equally necessary to ensure that where ego is there should also be id.