Images of desire and ideology

Towards a dialectical interpretation of culture

Abstract

This article defends the thesis that Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams had a significant influence on the ideas of the interpretation of cultural production presented by important critical theorists of culture in the 20th century. The Freudian conception of dreams as hallucinatory manifestations of suppressed desires held the key to the vision of cultural products as holding deep utopian contents, despite their explicitly ideological character. In this way, the conception analyzed herein formed the basis of a dialectical interpretation of culture exemplified in the works of such authors as Walter Benjamin, Susan Buck-Morss and Fredric Jameson.