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This is an attempt to reconstruct Gramsci’s reading of Freud through a series of fragmentary and indirect indications that nevertheless attest to an original approach, which looks at psychoanalysis from the ideological disturbance that it causes as a continuation of the Enlightenment. Evading both the conditioned reflexes of the Marxism of the interwar period (torn between the Freudian-Marxist solution and the anti-Freudian doxa) as well as the arrogant but self-serving disdain of Croce’s idealism, the “Freudian” tones to be found in Prison Notebooks reveal a little known facet of Gramscian thought, outlining a first “anthropological-philosophical” period of engagement with Freudian thought.