The Lorenzer Effect on Habermas’s the Theory of Communicative Action: Language, Symbol and Scenic Understanding

The thinkers of the Frankfurt School - Critical Theory - such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, whilst revolving around criticising the themes of positivism, modernity and fascism, stayed strictly away any normative-political projection. However, Jürgen Habermas sought to fill in this normative-intellectual gap by means of the theory of communicative action. Habermas argues that the liberating potential of modernity is embedded in the rationality of communicative action; actors in public sphere are capable of constructing ideal discourses to render consensus and agreement but so long as they are free from any constraint. Yet the inter-subjective communication is far from distortion; there may be either conscious-manipulative or unconscious systematic distortions in communications. This article suggests the role of Alfred Lorenzer’s linguistic psychoanalysis and in eliminating systematic distortions: Scenic understanding and in-depth hermeneutics make understandable the de-formed and de-symbolised inter-subjective language games. The Lorenzer’s psychoanalysis holds significance in the formation of the theory of communicative action as a normative-intellectual enterprise in the tradition of Critical Theory.