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The purpose of this paper is to review the vicissitudes of the ideology concept in representative samples of psychoanalytic literature and re-examine its place in the theory of neurosis.
The social aspect of the phenomenon, the institutionalized collective ideologies, are not the subject of this paper. They are a domain of the sociology of knowledge. The focus will be upon the role and function of ideologies for the individual personality only.
This paper endeavors to demonstrate that viewing ideologies—value-pattern orientations—from their psychopathological aspect only is logically and psychologically unjustified, as it overlooks their potential integrative and adaptive aspects for the person.
These theoretical efforts grew originally from problems and concern with some puzzling clinical findings. In an empirical-clinical study of former concentration camp prisoners, it was a strong clinical impression (subject to further statistical validation and qualifications) that most of the “true-believers” of any of the main “belief systems” (Christian, Orthodox-Jewish, Communistic and Witnesses of Jehovah) not only endured those experiences better, but seemed also to have manifested far fewer “after effects” in the course of their readjustment. These findings seemed to coincide with observations made by other independent observers.5
As will be documented, ideologies have mostly been referred to in the earlier psychoanalytic literature from only their negative aspect and seen as a resistance against the therapeutic change of personality or even as pathological defenses. One author, Maetze,12 even considers