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Introduction

In this article we will aim at questioning Althusser’s attempts to assess the relations between marxism and psychoanalysis through an analysis of the differences and similarities of their objects, i.e. ideology and unconscious. We will show how Althusser’s position varies between the affirmation of a tendencial unification of ideology and unconscious, and the affirmation of their radical distinction. Recognising that it is only by choosing this second option that their real articulation can be determined, Althusser abandons the lacanian idea of a subject of the unconscious and relegates the category of the subject in the field of ideology without however confusing it with the conscious I. This will lead him to outline, although in a fragmentary and allusive way, a conception of the unconscious whose recovery could allow us in return to shed some new light on some of his best-known positions concerning ideology.