Abstract

This paper proposes a psychoanalytical interpretation of Karl Mannheim’s main work, Ideology and Utopia. Our hypothesis is that a kind of “socio-pathology” that is implicit in Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge can be put explicit by the interpretation of his conception of false consciousness as a synthesis of the eponym concept of Georg Lukács and of the Freudian notion of illusion. We than show that the often pointed aporetic character of Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge can be outrun if its key element, the freely attached intellectual, is conceived of by analogy with the position of the Ego in Freud’s second topic, defined by its specific relation to the Id, the Superego and “reality”.