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In psychoanalysis the key to the patient's inner world is often seen to lie in what is other, what has been forgotten. Absences tell us what is important in structuring the patient's psychological being. What is marginal and seemingly other can point us in the direction of what is hidden and essential. Critics from within organized psychoanalysis have often charged that it has repressed its critical foundations almost entirely. Two important exemplars of such critiques are the Lacanian and the Marxist, each of which emphasizes what is now missing in established psychoanalysis. They go further: what is missing is what is most important.
Both the Lacanians and the Marxists are concerned with the lack of the social dimension in orthodox psychoanalysis. The Lacanians point to our fundamental embeddedness in a social language which “speaks us” and constitutes us as alienated subjects. The Marxists focus on the socioeconomic framework which determines so much of our individual being and ideology. The social is so much a part of our taken-for-granted world that we do not notice how deeply it penetrates. It seems to have been “read out” of psychoanalysis.