Since I started thinking of Malaysian politics in my late teens and seriously studying it, beginning in my mid-twenties, writing tons of papers on various aspects of the Malaysian problematique, there is this sense of something deeper I felt I need to explore beyond political analysis, using merely the traditional framework of the Developmental Theorists.

I wanted to go into Psychoanalysis or the Freudian analysis of it; it was the time at the end of my undergraduate year of passionate readings of the work of The Frankfurt School of Social Research, or ‘The Frankfurt School’ for short; the work of Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, Althusser, and others who blended Freudian analysis with Marxism.

It was a liberating period of my exploration, to say the least - my readings on politics became all the more enriched. My conversations revolved around the issue of cui bono? ‘knowledge-constituted interest’, ‘Ideologiekritik’, ‘false consciousness’, ‘ideological-state apparatuses’, and the ‘crisis of the object’.