The Freudian Turn in Western Marxism

- Psychoanalysis and Politics in the work of Theodor W. Adorno

 

 

Frederik van Gelder

 

 

 

"As far as my own work for the Zeitschrift is concerned, I would like, for once, to say something in principle about the whole complex of psychoanalysis, with which I'm constantly involved. I would like to take the themes of Reich as my point of departure, which have a lot to recommend them (e.g., in my view, that he's right in his arguments against Fromm, in as much as he rejects the seamless transfer­ence of individual psychology to social theory) but at the same time make most instructive errors, invoking the dangers of Feuerbachianism, ("healthy sensuality") fake immediacy - in short: romantic anarchy - from an entirely new angle. For the reason namely, and that's most interesting, of a failure in the psychological theory itself. (Since he absolutises as it were genital libido and sets this up as a measure of all else, on the basis of a most dubious biology.) At the political level his nonsense becomes obvious. My own reflections keep returning to the problem of the media­tion of society and psychology, which is no doubt at the centre of it all. And it seems to me not possible simply to take the lack of genital satis­faction as the point of departure (just as it is not possible, as a Marxist, to take one's point of departure, statically, from poverty) but instead of this invariant libido one would have to try to understand it in its societal phases - meaning, above all, probing the problem of psychic reification, if one does'nt want to sink back into an undialectical anthropology. (The Nazi who tortures prisoners isn't acting out of suppressed genital libido, which often enough doesn't need to be repressed at all, but out of re­pressed sadism; the partial drives also could be repressed, and are not themselves to be characterised as repressed in any immediate sense, but as, rather, historical stages, of - in itself a very murky notion - libido in the class society.) You will see from this, I think, in which direction I'm going, and wherein I distin­guish myself from Reich, but also from Fromm. (Who, in a different way, namely by choosing the individual as model, does not sufficiently take commodification [Warencharakter] into account.) I would like to try, on occasion, to formulate these things as 'Ideas regarding a dialectical psychology'; here I can of course be tentative only."

 

 

 

Ladies and gentlemen,

 

since the death of Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the systematic exploration of the relationship of Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis has, at least in the english-speaking world, more or less disappeared from view. There are the relevant chapters in Martin Jay and Rolf Wiggershaus, there is the excel­lent book of Russell Jacoby, there is Jürgen Habermas' Knowl­edge and Human Inter­ests, but from the point of view of the origi­nal inten­tions of the Frankfurt School, it cannot really be said that the pro­gram of a 'Science of Reflection', which would merge the critical impulses of a post-Hegelian social theory with a scientific study of the anthropological foundations of this bipedal, bi-gendered, linguistically-oriented higher primate now addressing you here in Melbourne, that this pro­gram was ever fulfilled. We speak, we cogitate, we work, we love and hate, we try to make sense of our individual and collective histories, we try to come to terms as best we can with the bleak knowl­edge that one day we shall die a biological death - but it cannot really be said that the systematic exploration of the relationship of psychology to society, as this was envisaged by the authors of the Dialec­tic of Enlighten­ment, has had much success. The unhappy marriage of Marx and Freud - if a variation on this now rather dusty metaphor from the sixties be permitted - ended in acrimo­nious divorce, and the rebellious teenagers which issued forth from this brief un­ion - abstract critique in Soci­ology, bio­logical determinism in Psychiatry - are on speaking terms neither amongst them­selves nor with the intel­lectual legacy they are doing their best to disown.

But where did this fascination with Psychoanalysis in the thirties come from in the first place?

 

 

Freud had - from the point of view of the Horkheimer group - several things going for him: he'd embarked on an analysis of consciousness which was truly universalistic, which was (un­like academic psychology) genetically oriented in its ap­proach, (an ego-structure develops gradually, from childhood onwards) and yet was not in need of those teleological ele­ments of Hegel-Marxism which the realities of WWI and the Nazis were so painfully putting into question. It left the way open for a serious study of anthropology and phyloge­ny, while it's medical framework ensured that the emphasis would remain on the practical emancipation of concrete indi­viduals from societally imposed 'pseudo-aprioris' - rather than degenerate into one more 'abstract' academic theory.

 

For the theorists pondering the newly discovered texts of the 'early', 'humanist' Marx, (the 1844 Manuscripts were pub­lished in 1932, coinciding with the first volume of the Zeitschrift) Freud seemed to hold out a promise at several levels: a scien­tific study of consciousness which would nei­ther (Hegel) ignore the biological foundations of subjectivi­ty, nor (Dar­win) reify it, while at the same time explode the reactionary, ego-disintegrative aspects of dogmatic material­ism. (Not to mention, as Jay put it, the "desire to go beyond the instru­mental utilitarianism that permeated vulgar Marx­ism." [DI 87])

 

I would like to deal with what I call the 'Freudian Turn' in Critical Theory under three headings: Politics, Epistemology, Culture.

 

A) Politics: the analysis of the causes of the success of Fascism in Europe, and the fear that it would spread to the rest of the industrialised world

 

For the generation which had come to age during the First World War, which had experienced the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the break-up of the Habsburg empire, the mass unemployment of the post-war years, the humiliation of the Versaille treaty, the stock market crash of 1929, the ominous electoral successes of the Nazis, for this generation the term 'social theory' was not a description of the output of academ­ics far removed from the world outside of the university campus. Since we have become accustomed to the scepticism of postmodernism and the various other 'isms' of our own contem­porary cultural landscape, since we are discussing these things in any case from within the mean­ing-horizon of the English language, with its deeply ingrained empiricism and pragmatism, we need to make, it seems to me, a special effort to put ourselves in the shoes of Horkheimer and his co-workers.

This is not as difficult as it seems, although it does demand of us that we suspend the usual 'history of ideas' approach to these things. The core institutions of the bour­geois state were coming down about their ears - vio­lence, poverty and civil war were looming on a continental scale, and hence 'theory' was not something different from the agonizing 'why?' we have now grown used to hearing in the context of the debate about the causes of the Holocaust, about the 'reasons' underlying this genocidal century we are about to bid farewell.

 

If one looks at it this way, then the cultural ferment of Expressionism and Marxism, Psychoanalysis and German Idealism, political activism and secularised Judaism - which made up the cultural coordinates within which the Horkheimer group moved - was not an expression of a 'dialectical imagination', teutonic irration­alism, the 'melancholy science' of post-Hegelian historicism, 'the tragedy of enlightenment', or the 'romantic anti-capitalism' of those who threatened the Open Society and its democratic values. The world was in crisis, and the point was, for the generation of Horkheimer and Adorno, Benjamin and Lukács, Korsch and Bloch, Marcuse, Fromm and so many others, to find out why. For the intellectuals pondering the defeat of the Spanish Republic , the Nazi-Soviet pact, the fall of France , there was no other question worth the asking.

 

The first aspect, then, of the 'Freudian turn' in the work of the Horkheimer group was immediately political: they wanted to know what the organisational and social‑psychological reasons were for the suc­cess which the Nazi party had had in bullying and cajoling a majority of the electorate into voting their own execution­ers into power. A success based (as Franz Neumann's Behemoth was later to document in detail) on two factors: mass organisation, an unscrupulous political machine, and a clearly visible scapegoat group to channel the powerful, collectively pent‑up aggres­sions which had accumulated since the Versaille treaty of 1918, through to the Depression a decade later. Horkheimer and the IfS turned to the newly emerg­ing discipline of Psychoanaly­sis (together with the Gallup Poll methods imported from the US) to probe the subjective reasons for the success of Nazi propaganda, because they saw here the point where Marxism had failed them.

 

The crux, as they saw it, was that the new mass communication and organisation methods enabled something which Marx and the 'Enlightenment' thinkers a century earlier had not, perhaps could not, have foreseen: namely that the 'public sphere' could be 'struc­turally changed' (to use Habermas' terminology) - to the point that it itself would become an instru­ment of domination and repression.

 

How does one turn an ordinary voter into a maniac screaming for someone else's blood? The Nazis had shown that it could be done, and it was this nemesis which haunted the Horkheimer group during the refugee years in the USA. Walter Benjamin had been hound­ed to his death, Andries Sternheim (from the Geneva office of the Institut f ür Sozialforschung ) and Karl Landauer (Horkheimer's psychoana­lyst) died in Nazi concentra­tion camps. Innumerable friends, family, col­leagues had been forced to flee. The USA studies of the Horkheimer group hence all revolved around a central theme: what is the connection between Psy­chology (as a de­scription of subjective states of mind) and politics? Could studies which highlight this con­nection help counter the spread of Nazi‑type politics to the rest of the industri­alized world?

It was this then which was the focus for much of the work upto and beyond the The Authoritarian Personality. The titles speak for them­selves: Prophets of Deceit ‑ A study of the Tech­niques of the Ameri­can Agitator (Lowenthal and Guterman); Anti‑Semitism and Emo­tional Disor­der ‑ A psychoanalytic Inter­pretation (Ackerman and Jahoda); "Freud­ian Theory and the pattern of Fascist Propaganda" (Adorno); Studies in Prejudice (the general title of the whole program, edited by Horkheimer and Samuel Flowerman); The psychological technique of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Adresses (which is an analysis, by Adorno, of the rhetoric of a radio agitator); "The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column" (Adorno). Psychoanal­ysis and Poli­tics. (Marcuse: 1968)

The table of contents of the interim report Studies in An­tisemitism (dated 1943) some of which appeared in some of the titles in the Studies in Prejudice series edited by Horkheimer: (Three volumes, close to 1000 pages) bears this out:

 

I. The Danger.

The Unique character of Antisemitism as an Instrument in Domestic and Foreign Politics.

Deterioration of the Economic Position of the Jews in Capital­ist Develop­ment.

Notes on the Image of the Jew in Modern Civilization.

Joseph E. McWilliams: An American Discipline of Adolf Hitler.

Antisemitism as a Possible Political Instrument in Postwar America.

 

...

 

III. American Antisemitic Agitators and their Followers.

Martin Luther Thomas.

George Allison Phelps.

Conversations with Antisemites.

 

IV. Potential Allies.

Potential Foci of Resistance.

Catholicism and Antijudaism.

The Policy of the Catholic Church toward the Jews.

Labor and Antisemitism.

 

V. Laboratory of Defense.

On Content Analysis.

Sample of a Preparatory Study for a Manual of Hate Propaganda.

On Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methods.

A Scale for the Measurement of Antisemitism.

 

In short, as far as the early phase of the work of the Frank­furt School is concerned, one could put it like this: they wanted to know why the hate propaganda of the Nazis could undermine what on Marxist prin­ciples many had confidently predicted, namely that working class opposi­tion to the Hitlerites would be decisive, and would carry the day. The discovery that this assumption was unfounded was, for the Horkheimer group, quite liter­ally lifesaving: it meant that, unlike so many other intellec­tuals during the thirties (not to mention the USPD, the KPD, the Komintern) they were not caught flatfooted by the elector­al successes of the NSDAP. (The only case on record in which opinion polling, and the new tech­niques of open-ended inter­views saved the lives of the inves­tigators. On the basis of the results "we pursued", in the words of Leo Lowenthal half a century later, with a note of relief, "a very deliberate policy of emigra­tion, several years before anyone else thought about it.")

 

But in the long run - from the point of view of the intellec­tual impact it would unfold in the post-war years - this strictly political relevance of Freud turned out to be less important than the 'emancipatory potential' which the 'Left Freudians' de­tected in the new discipline of Psychoanalysis. As the 'Left' in 'Left Freudians' already indicates, this was not devoid of political implications, and the attitude to Freud turned out to be a litmus test for the differences between the 'Western' Marxists and their East European oppo­nents. But the theo­reti­cal issue was the question of the 'emancipation' of the bour­geois (and proletar­ian) 'Subject', and the relation of all this to the utopian aspects of 'dialectical' thought. If bourgeois theory was becoming in­creasingly 'positivistic' and ahistorical (and the communist kind an ever thinner pre­text for the 'Gulag' praxis of the then Soviet Union) then the whole no­tion of an 'immanent critique of bour­geois idealism' (which, on the methodological side, had been the basis for the "Cri­tique of Political Econo­my" sixty years earlier) had to be thought through again from scratch. It was a case of: back to the drawing board. That's the pro­gram which starts with Horkheimer's "Traditional and Criti­cal Theory" (1937), passes through the Dialectic of Enlighten­ment, concludes with Adorno's Negative Dialectics and Aesthet­ic Theory.

 

Adorno's most well-known contribution to this part of the program is the work already referred to above, The Authoritar­ian Per­sonality - co-authored with Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, R. Nevitt Sanford - first published in 1950 by the American Jewish Committee. "Why" - to quote the fore­word by Horkheimer and Flowerman - "does an individual behave in a 'tolerant' manner in one situation and in a 'bigoted' manner in another situation? To what extent may certain forms of intergroup conflict, which appear on the surface to be based upon ethnic difference, be based upon other factors, using ethnic dif­ference as content?" (p. viii)

The arguments in favour of a connection between psychological dispositions on the one hand (as revealed by depth psychology, content analysis, clinical psychology, projective testing) and political leanings of a "destructively nihilistic nature" on the other carry weight to this day, and were to play a con­siderable role in the discussion of popular culture which would start at about the same time.

 

"If a potentially fascistic individual exists, what, precisely, is he like? What goes to make up antidemocratic thoughts? What are the organizing forces within the person? If such a person exists, how commonly does he exist in our society? And if such a person exists, what have been the determinants and what the course of his development?" (p. 2)

 

 

Since the very notion of a connection between psychoanalytic typologies on the one hand, aesthetic and 'cultural' phenomena in the broadest sense on the other is hotly contested to this day (vide the pro and contra re Adorno on Jazz) it is worth dwelling on Adorno's arguments here. Long before the Positi­vist Dispute of the sixties, or the current debate about 'media violence' and its effects on children, or the cur­rent emphasis on the gender-specific aspects of perception, Adorno intro­duces a difference between typologies which are 'subsumptive', in which the objects of experience are subsumed under abstract categories in order to "facilitate diagnosis and prognosis" (p. 744) and typologies which are plau­sible because they express something which is "dynamic and social". (747)

Since this is a philosophy congress, rather than a congress for psychoanal­ysts or sociologists, it seems the appro­priate venue to be analysing the logic of the argumenta­tion which Adorno unfolds here.

 

Epistemological digression.

Subjective states of mind: causal analysis or the understand­ing of intentionality?

 

At issue is the question whether - and if so, on the basis of which assumptions - it is possible to set up a typology of subjective states of mind at all.

 

One obvious way of doing so is to use what is nowadays called the 'evidence-based' methods of the natural sciences, as these have been adapted by the medical profession since Kraepelin and Lom­broso. One takes a trait like 'introversion' or 'extro­version', defines it, sets up a scale for its mea­sure­ment, works out a standardised questionaire, and then describes the results, i.e. tries to give both a quantitative and epide­mio­logical answer to what factor 'x' 'is'. This is the so-called noseological approach within Psychiatry, and its valid­ity, if not entirely unchallenged, is as dominant today in medicine as it is in aca­demic psy­cho­logy.

 

Adorno had already rejected this 'atomistic' approach very decidedly a quarter of century years earli­er, in his Habili­tationsschrift Der Begriff des Unbewußten in der trans­zen­dentalen Seelenlehre, from which it is worth quoting the following:

 

"It is this fact of neglecting the internal aspects of con­sciousness [Bewußt­seinszusammenhanges] as the constitutive condition of all experi­ence which brings Freud to a critique of Psychiatry and hence to the inauguration of the psycho­analytic method in the first place. Psychiatry, a byproduct of experimental Psychology - in as much as it does not simply live off the uncertain legacy of the medical profession - was entirely atomistic: and this in an area where the atomistic mode of thinking was quite unable to deal with the problems with which it was confronted. With regard to those mental diseases whose physical causes are not obvious, for instance the paralyses, it knew no other - and today still knows no other - way of proceeding than to name symptoms and then to classify and collect these as ob­servations; which it then seeks to unify, but whose related­ness to the unity of personal conscious­ness escapes it com­pletely. The symptoms, taken in the way that Psychiatry treats them, are meaningless and isolated. The Psychiatrist is indeed able to confront the symptoms with the external world and then to classify them according to the way in which they are related to this exter­nal reality; he can, for instance, speak of illusions [Wahnideen] whenever he meets, in his patients, ideas which are not internally contradictory (but which need to be reject­ed on the basis of experience) but he is never able to contra­dict these illusory ideas by recurring to the patient, even if he [the psychia­trist] is quite prepared to understand them. With that how­ever the explanatory power of conventional psy­chiatry is exhausted. The question: why, when the illusions have no substrate in the material world, they should exist at all; why they should exist in this particu­lar way and not in an entirely arbitrary way, the Psychiatrist cannot answer. He will perhaps, as Freud puts it in his 'Introductory lec­tures in Psychoanalysis' (whose explanation of the psycho­analytic method we here follow) counter with: 'Illusions occur in such persons in whose families similar and other psychic dis­tur­bances have frequently re­curred'; - i.e. he will invoke in turn conditions which have nothing to do with the sub­jective world [Bewußtseinszusammenhanges] of the patient and on the basis of which neither the particular symptom nor the entire condition of the patient makes sense. Since there is no knowledge of the condi­tions on which the symptoms are based, it is not possible for a law-like expecta­tion of future changes to derive from a description of the clinical facts, and the prospect of successful treatment is already hopeless on this basis. The psychiatrist 'has to content himself with the diagnosis' (i.e. a classi­fication of the symptoms) 'and a most uncertain prognosis regarding further development', (since it's based on vague analogies) despite a great deal of expe­rience.' (Lectures: Freud) Here 'Psychoanalysis can do more. It proceeds on the assumption that psychic pheno­mena have a meaning...'"

 

Not bad for a young musician in his twenties.. This he writes, after all, two decades be­fore Wittgenstein's Philo­soph­ical Investiga­tions (1953), thir­ty years before Charles Taylor's The Expla­nation of Behaviour (1964), fourty years before Ricoeur's Freud and Phi­losophy (1970), fourty years before Von Wright's Explana­tion and Under­­stand­ing (1971), half a centu­ry before John Searle's In­tention­ality (1983). Not to mention: fourty years before the sociological debate about 'Verstehen', stimu­lated by the trans­­­lations of Max Weber's work.

 

For all that, the Adorno of "Types and Syndromes" (In The Authoritarian Personality, 1950) had left this position far be­hind. The 'historicisation of psychoanalysis', as he had once called it in a letter to Horkheimer, was something quite different from the confrontation of a 'natural science' ap­proach with that of the 'understanding' of the humanities. This was not an adumbration of the nomothetic/ideographic debates in Sociology fifty years later. The point of depar­ture is, for Adorno, nothing of a conceptual nature at all (which he rejects as 'Standpunktphilosophie'): it is some­thing real.

 

To explain what could be meant by this we need to take a closer look at the findings on which the Authoritarian Person­ali­ty were based.

 

Syndromes found amongst high scorers

1) Surface resentment.

2) The conventional syndrome.

3) The authoritarian syndrom.

4) The Rebel and the Psychopath.

5) The Crank.

6) The Manipulative type.

Syndromes found amongst high scorers

1) The 'rigid' low scorer.

2) The protesting low scorer.

3) The 'impulsive' low scorer.

4) The 'easy-going' low scorer.

5) The genuine liberal.

 

By 'low' and 'high' scorers here are meant of course the scores on the 'F'-scale calculated for the different questionaires and interviews which had been conducted on specific population groups during and after WWII in the US. (list them ......)

 

When one reads the interview material on which this typology is based the feeling of familiarity is uncanny. This is the generation of our parents and grand-parents, it is limited to the USA, but in a peculiar way we all 'know' such people, or have been in situations in which we have encountered them. (Not to mention the half-guilty attitude which is also diffi­cult to deny: they're talking about us, they're talking about me. "There but for fortune go you or I".)

The examples given to illustrate the various types are fasci­nating vignettes in their own right. Time precludes me from delving into this in the detail it deserves, but a few quotes are in order. I confine myself to the descriptive material for three categories: a) The Authoritarian Syndrome, b) The Crank, c) The genuine Liberal

 

a) The Authoritarian Syndrome

 

p. 477 ff.:

"Well, my father was a very strict man. He wasn't religious, but strict in raising the youngsters. His word was law, and whenever he was dis­obeyed, there was punishment. When I was 12, my father beat me prac­tic­ally every day for getting into the tool chest in the back yard and not putting everything away ... finally he explained that those things cost money, and I must learn to put it back." ... (Subject explains that his carelessness led to a beating every day, as promised by the father, and finally after several weeks, he simply quit using the tools altogether, because "I just couldn't get 'em all back") ... "But, you know, I never hold that against my father‑I had it coming. He laid the law down, and if I broke it, there was punishment, but never in uncontrolled anger. My father was a good man ‑ no doubt about that. Always interested on boys' activities.

 

"My father was a great fraternal man; was out practically every night. Took an active part always on committees ‑ a good mixer, everybody liked him . .. a good provider. We always had every­thing we needed, but no unnecessary luxuries ... no whims provided for. ... Father felt they were luxuries that probably ‑ felt they were unnecessary.... Yes, rather aus­tere...." (Which parent closest to?) "I think my father. Although he beat the life out of me, I could talk to him about anything." ... (Subject emphasizes that his father always gave everyone, including himself, a square deal.)

 

The subject has been "broken" by the father: he has been overadjusted. It is exactly this aspect which bears the main emphasis in his anti‑Semitism. He who admires brute force blames the Jews for their recklessness in practical matters.

 

"The Jews seem to be taking advantage of the present‑day situation, I think. Now, they want to ‑ they're bringing these Jews in from Europe, and they seem to click together, somehow, and they seem to be able to corner capital. They're a peculiar people ‑ no conscience about anything except money." (Subject apparently meant, here, no conscience about money, although maybe about other things.) "If you stand in the way of their making money, they'll brush you aside."

 

Rigidity of the image of the Jew, visible already in the "Conventional" syndrome, tends to become absolute and highly vindictive:

 

"To me a Jew is just like a foreigner in the same class as ‑ say, oh, I was gonna say a Filipino. You would be pointed out . . . they observe all these different religious days that's completely foreign to me and they stick to it ‑ they don't completely Americanize...." (What if there were less prejudice against them?) "I don't know ‑ I can't help but feel that a Jew is meant to be just the way he is ‑ no change possible ‑ a sort of instinct that will never lose ‑ stay Jewish right straight through." (What ought to be done?) "They have the ability to get control ‑ now, how we're gonna stop 'em ... probably have to pass some regulation prohibiting them."

 

Again the idea of authority is the focal point: the Jews appear dangerous to him as usurpers of "control."

 

One last feature of the "Authoritarian" syndrome should be mentioned. It is the psychological equivalent of the "no-pity-for-the-poor" ideology discussed in Chapter XVII.[13] The identification of the "authoritarian" character with strength is concomitant with rejection of everything that is "down." Even where social conditions have to be recognized as the reason for the depressed situation of a group, a twist is applied in order to transform this situation into some kind of welldeserved punishment. This is accompanied by moralistic invectives indicative of strict repression of several desires:

 

He went on to emphasize that you should segregate Negroes and whites, that by all means give equal opportunities and everything instead of "evading the problem" as he called it. He refers to high prevalence of venereal disease among Negroes, which he blames on their low morals and, under further questioning by the interviewer, he finally attributes it to "congested conditions of living" and tries very hard to explain what he means. This leads to a lack of modesty and respect for privacy ‑ everybody's thrown together ‑ "lose the distance that is supposed to be between people," etc., etc.

 

The emphasis on "distance," the fear of "close physical contacts" may be interpreted as corroborative of our thesis that, for this syndrome, the ingroup‑outgroup dichotomy absorbs large quantities of psychological energy. Identification with the familial structure and ultimately with the whole ingroup becomes, to this kind of individual, one of the main mechanisms by which they can impose authoritarian discipline upon themselves and avoid "breaking away" ‑ a temptation nourished continuous­ly by their underlying ambivalence.

 

b) The Crank

 

F 124

 

is a woman over 50 years of age, tall, heavily built, with sharp features, prominent gray‑blue eyes, a pointed nose, thin lips, straight mouth line. She had a bearing which was meant to be impressive.

 

This "impressiveness" actually implies a pathological sense of inner superiority, as if she belonged to a secret order, at the same time being surrounded by people whose names she does not want to mention, since otherwise she might divulge too vulgar or dangerous implications:

 

She doesn't care for her fellow‑workers. Some have all the degrees but no common sense. She wouldn't like to mention names, but she'd like to tell me what goes on. Some just spend their time gossiping together. She doesn't believe she could do more than just speak to her fellow‑workers. Very scornful of them, feels superior and aloof.... They don't know her at all ‑ no indeed ‑ implies she's a very special somebody and could reveal her gifts to them but doesn't.

 

Her interest in internal and as far as possible external status is strongly colored by an overemphasis on "connections," which suggests "ideas of reference":

 

She has been a "governess" in the home of President X's family ... and in President Y's son's family ‑ first the older son, then the younger. Talked to Mrs. Y on the phone when she was in the White House at the time of the birth of the third child. And her sister worked for S. who later was governor of a southwestern state.

As to her spurious "inner world," semi‑erudition, and pseudo-intellectuality, the following account is highly characteris­tic: She reads a great deal ‑ "good" books ‑ went through the schools in her Texas home town about equal to seventh grade now. She also draws and writes and was learning to play an instrument. One picture she drew here at school but never showed it to anyone. It was of two mountains and the sun in between shining on the valley in which the mist was rising. This just "came" to her, too, though she had never had any training. It was really beautiful. She writes stories, too. When she was left a widow, instead of chasing after men like some women, she wrote stories. One was a fantasy for Mary Pickford. It would have been just right for her to play in, but of course, she'd never shown it to anyone. It was called Little May and O'June and had come to her once when she had her children on a picnic. A love fantasy about Little May (the girl) and O'June (the boy). Her daughter was very gifted, too. An artist ... who drew Texas Blue Bonnets ‑ "the state flower, you know." _ saw her daughter's work and said, "You've got a real genius there." He wanted to give the daughter lessons, but she refused, saying, "No, Mother, he would just spoil my style; I know how to draw what I want to draw."

 

With regard to race questions, her hatred shows the paranoid tendency towards stopping nowhere ‑ in principle she would be willing to stigmatize every group she can lay her hands on and only reluctantly confines herself to her favorite foes.

 

She thinks the "Japs, Jews, and Niggers should go back where they came from." ... "Of course, then the Italians should go back where they belong in Italy, but ‑ well, the three main ones who don't belong here are the Japs, Jews, and Niggers."

 

Her anti‑Semitism shows strong traces of projectivity, of the fake mysticism of the "blood," and of sex envy. The following statement reveals her attitudinal pattern:

 

"The Jews feel superior to Gentiles. They wouldn't pollute their blood by mixing it with Gentiles. They would bleed us of our money and use our women for mistresses, but they wouldn't marry among us, and they want their wives spotless. The Y's entertained Jews quite often. I don't know if it was their money or what. That's why I didn't vote for Y the second time. I'd seen too many fat Jew women and hooked‑nose men at their house. Of course, I've heard Pres. Roosevelt's mother had some Jewish blood, too." Left the B's because they were Jews. They had a home like a palace and wanted her to stay. They said, "We knew it was too good to be true" . . . when she was leaving.

 

Striking is the similarity between the subject's way of thinking and a certain kind of crackpot religious movement, based on readi­ness to hear "inner voices" which give both moral uplifting and sinister advice:

 

The Catholics have been wonderful to her, and she admires them but wouldn't join their church. There was something inside her that said "No." (She gestures her rejection) She has an individ­ualistic religion. Once she was out walking in the early morning ‑ the birds were singing ‑ she raised her hands and her face to the sky, and they were wet.... (She considered it a supernatural phenomenon.)

 

c) The genuine Liberal

 

F 515

 

is a 21‑year‑old college student. She is a handsome brunette with dark, flashing eyes, who exudes temperament and vitality. She has none of the pretty‑pretty femininity so frequently seen in high subjects, and would probably scorn the little feminine wiles and schemes practiced by such women. On the contrary, she is extremely frank and outspoken in manner, and in build she is athletic. One senses in her a very passionate nature and so strong a desire to give intensely of herself in all her relation­ships, that she must experience difficulty in restraining herself within the bounds of conventionality.

 

Apart from a semiprofessional interest in music she also "enjoys painting and dramatics." As to her vocation, however, she is still undecided. She has taken nurses' aid training. She liked helping people in this way. "I enjoyed it. I feel that I could now take care of a sick person. It didn't bother me to carry bedpans and urinals. I learned that I could touch flesh without being squeamish. I learned to be tactful about certain things. And then it was patriotic! (slightly joking tone). People liked me." (Why did they like you?) "Because I smiled, and because I was always making cracks ‑ like I'm doing now."

 

Her views with regard to minorities are guided by the idea of the individu­al:

 

"Minorities have to have just as many rights as majorities. They are all people and should have just as many rights as the majority. There should be no minorities; there should only be individuals and they should be judged according to the individu­al. Period! Is that sufficient? "

 

(Negroes) "Same thing! Still as individuals. Their skin is black, but they are still people. Individuals have loves and sorrows and joys. I don't think you should kill them all or liquidate them or stick them in a corner just because they are different people. I would not marry one, because I should not want to marry a person who has a trait I don't like, like a large nose, etc. I would not want to have children with dark skins. I would not mind if they live next door to me." (Earlier in the interview subject had brought out the fact that she had also to care for Negro patients during her nurses' aid work, and that she had not minded at all having to give baths to them, etc.)

 

(Jews?) "Same! Well I could marry a Jew very easily. I could even marry a Negro if he had a light enough skin. I prefer a light skin. I don't consider Jews different from white people at all, because they even have light skins. It's really silly." (What do you think are the causes of prejudice?) "Jealousy." (Explain?) "Because they are smarter and they don't want any competition. We don't want any competition. If they want it they should have it. I don't know if they are more intelligent, but if they are they should have it."

 

The last statement shows complete absence of any aspect of guilt feelings in her relation to the Jews. It is followed up by the joke:

"Maybe if the Jews get in power they would liquidate the majority! That's not smart. Because we would fight back."

 

Her views on religion, with a slightly humorous touch, are centered in the idea of Utopia. She mentions the word herself, when referring to her reading of Plato. The gist of her religion is contained in the statement: "Perhaps we will all be saved." This should be compared with the prevailing "anti‑Utopian" attitude of our subjects.

 

The description of both her parents contains elements of her own ego ideal, in quite an unconventional way:

 

"Father has been employed for 25 years in the freight complaint department of the_ R. R. Co. His work involves the hiring of many men. He has about 150 people working under him." (Subject described her father as follows:) "He could have been vice‑president by now ‑ he has the brains ‑ but he does not have the go‑get‑it nature; he is not enough of a politician. He is broad‑minded ‑ always listens to both sides of a question before making up his mind. He is a good 'argumenter' for this reason. He is understanding. He is not emotional like mother. Mother is emotional, father factual. Mother is good. She has a personality of her own. She gives to all of us. She is emotional. She keeps Daddy very satisfied." (In what way?) "She makes a home for him to come home to ‑ he has it very hard at the office. It's living. Their marriage is very happy ‑ everybody notices it. Their children perform too ‑ people notice them! Mother is very friendly. Understanding. She gives sympathy. People love to talk to her. Someone calls her up on the telephone and they become lifelong friends just from having talked on the telephone! She is sensitive; it is easy to hurt her."

 

Her attitude towards sex is one of precarious restraint. Her boy friend wants to have sexual intercourse everytime that they have a date in fact he wanted it the first time he dated her ‑ and she doesn't want it that way. She cries every time he tries some­thing, so she supposes it cannot be right for her. She thinks that friendship should precede sexual relations, but he thinks that sex relations are a way of getting to know each other better. Finally she broke with him three days ago (said with mock tearfulness). He had said, "Let's just be friends," but she didn't want that either! The sex problem bothers her. The first time she danced with him he told her that he thought she wanted intercourse; whereas she just wanted to be close to him. She is worried because she didn't mean it the other way, but perhaps unconscious­ly she did!

 

It is evident that her erotic character is connected with a lack of repression with regard to her feelings towards her father: "I would like to marry someone like my father."

 

The result of the interview is summed up by the interviewer:

 

The most potent factors making for the low score in this case are the open‑mindedness of the parents and the great love subject's mother bore all her children.

If this can be generalized, and consequences be drawn for high scorers, we might postulate that the increasing significance of the fascist character depends largely upon basic changes in the structure of the family itself.

 

These 'syndromes' are 'caused' in some way, by which is meant that, from the point of view of the suitably qualified (psy­choanalytically competent) observer, some kind of 'dynamic' or 'causal' relationship can be seen between a particular mode of ego-integration on the one hand, a specific kind of childhood experience on the other. It is not at all difficult to exem­plify each of the categories used in this study in a similar way that I have done above, i.e. by means of a narrative, which is at the same time a kind of 'potted pen' picture of someone's else's life and views. For all that, to say that we 'understand' such vignettes in terms of a causal relationship between a particular mode of ego integration and a particular kind of childhood and family experience is not only mislead­ing, but it automatically uses the very terminology ('causal relationship') which has been the bone of contention both with regard to psychoanalysis and with regard to Critical Theory. Whatever it is that we mean when we say that the kind of biographies described above are 'real', it seems clear that this is a different reality from the one we mean when we invoke the methods and terminology of the experimental scienc­es.

Adorno here confronts the empirical findings of 'stereotypical thinking', rigidity, lack of cathexis - found in a great many people in the modern world (something objective) - with Empiricism's (subjective) emphasis on analytic categories as the sole way of dealing with this reality. It is expressed in the distinction between analytic categories which do no more than divide the world "into sheep and buck", (a 'ticket'- or 'identity'-thinking which, when it becomes reified, "belongs to the basic constit­uents of the potentially fascist charac­ter") and a typology which reflects the historical reality of "social repres­sion".

 

"In other words, the critique of typology should not neglect the fact that large numbers of people are no longer, or rather never were, "individu­als" in the sense of traditional nineteenth‑century philosophy. Ticket thinking is possible only because the actual existence of those who indulge in it is largely determined by "tickets": standardized, opaque, and overpowering social processes which leave to the "individual" but little freedom for action and true individua­tion. Thus the problem of typology is put on a different basis. There is reason to look for psycho­logical types because the world in which we live is typed and "produces" different "types" of persons. Only by identifying stereotypical traits in modern humans, and not by denying their existence, can the pernicious tendency towards all‑pervasive classification and subsumption be chal­lenged."

 

Here already, (to sum up this section) in Adorno's contribu­tion to the study The Authori­tarian Personality, are to be found all of the themes which he will later elaborate in Negative Dialektik.

 

Kulturindustrie

 

The epistemological issues I touched on above were more than an 'immanent critique' of what Horkheimer at about the same time had called 'instrumental reason'. In the Dialektik der Aufklärung the two of them had anticipated that a day would come when the hate propaganda of the Nazis could be replaced ‑ in the industrialised West, starting with the Anglo‑Saxon countries ‑ by more subtle mechanisms which would have the same emo­tional and psychological effect as the German ideology of the thirties, and that this would play a major destabilising role within the democratic process, compa­rable in some ways to what had happened in Weimar.

 

I quote here from On the Relationship of Sociology and Psy­chology:

 

"If psychoanalysis once wanted to be corrective education, psychoanaly­sis turned upon its head becomes quite literally a return to the world of early childhood, in order to reverse the development of the ego altogeth­er. Such integrated domina­tion of the soul carries through crassly that tendency towards deliberate regression as we are beginning to see it in the cumulative effect of the socalled mass media, and which is probably harmless compared to what lies ahead. Individual and society become one, in that society breaks into the indi­vidual at a point beneath its individuation and thus prevents the latter from developing at all. That this unity is by no means a higher form of the Subject, but instead throws it back to an archaic stage, is shown by the barbaric repression which this exercises. The form of identity now dawning upon the world is not the reconciliation of the universal and the particular, but the universal as an absolute in which the particular disappears. The individu­al is deliberately pushed in the direction of blind biological behaviour, and in this comes to resemble characters from the novels and stage plays of Beckett. The allegedly absurd theater is realistic."

 

But perhaps the prior question, when we are speaking about mass culture and the mass media, is: why invoke psychoanalysis at all? Here I quote Christopher Lasch in his book The Minimal Self - Psychic Survival in Troubled Times:

 

"... those who did turn to Freud, in the years following World War II, did so for good reasons. His work ... seemed to speak more directly than any other intel­lectual tradition to the question that haunted the postwar world: Why is it precisely the highest civili­zation that has developed and unleashed unprecedented powers of de­struction?" 227

 

 

There is here, then, a particular way of looking at society in which the findings of psychoanalysis and an analysis of 'culture' in the widest sense of the term mutually reinforce one another. Anyone interested in pursuing this train of thought should look at Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism - American Life in an Age of Dimin­ishing Expecta­tions, (1979) Russel Jacoby's "Nar­cis­sism and the Crisis of Capitalism", in Telos 44 (1980).

 

I quote Stephen Frosh on this, from his Identity Crisis ‑ Modernity, Psycho­analysis and the Self, (1991)

 

"As Kleinians have powerfully shown, the ability to feel depres­sive feeling - to experience loss, guilt and reparation - is a central desi­gnator of mental health, because it presupposes abilities to form com­mitted relationships and to experience others as integrated, ambivalent objects. It is also dependent upon a reasonably succesful negotiation of the paranoid-schizoid position, that is, upon an encounter with a mater­nal reverie that enables the infant's destructive impulses to be contai­ned and that facilitates the projective-introjective processes des­cribed above. Saying that someone is incapable of experiencing depressive feelings is saying that she or he can only relate to others as imagos, as split-off, idealised or denigrated, reflec­tions of a depreciated and unintegrated inner world. Moreover, at least in Kernberg's description, what lies behind the gran­diosity and empty superficiality of the narcis­sistic person­ality is a rage characteristic, in Kleinian terms, of the earliest paranoid-schizoid levels of functioning. That is, it is not the case that narcissists have no object relationships, but that 'their interactions reflect very intense, primitive, internali­sed object rela­tionships of a frightening kind and an incapacity to depend on inter­nalised good objects'. [Kernberg ref ...] The superficiality of the narcissist, the lack of dependency on, and closeness to, others, is a defence against this agonising rage, a rage that, once mobilised, threa­tens to devour the fragile self.

So there is a mode of functioning, arguably characteristic of many individuals in the contemporary western world, designated by mirroring, by concern with surfaces, self-aggrandisement, manipulation of others, control. This mode of functioning re­flects, feeds into, and is reci­procally produced by, those cul­tural conditions that emphasie the image, the superficiality of things (including relationships) and the inter­changeability of objects of all kinds. Behind this mode of functioning, however, lies a different reality: of a dissolving self characterised by splitting, projected aggression and violence, and all-consuming rage. 75/76

...

Narcissism begins to appear here as just one example of the violence that contemporary culture perpetrates upon human poten­tial, a violence with which each of us has to struggle in order to survive. The particu­lar nature of the violence expressed in narcissistic pathology is moder­nity's disruption of the condi­tions in which the growth of a secure self might be rooted - conditions which in this discussion, following Klein and Bion, have been called reverie and containment." 77

...

"The account above of the work of Kohut and Kernberg has produ­ced a view of narcissism as rooted in the failure of the early social and parental environment to support the development of an integrated self, defined either in libidinal or in object rela­tional terms. The link between narcis­sistic pathology and nar­cissistic parenting means that a culture that valorises narcis­sism, or at least enmeshes its subjects in webs of superfi­ciali­ty and glamorous but empty exteriors, will be registerd psychi­cally and reproduced intergenerationally. One cannot read off culture and politics automatically from psychopathology, but when di­sturbances resonate with normal functioning to the extent that narcissi­stic disturbanc­es do, then social organisation is likely to be at the core of both. Com­modity substitution and person replacement, literally object exchange; everything is the same, only what glitters can be mistaken for gold." 113

 

By way of conclusion, a word about my own work. Narcissism and trauma.

 

 

"Socialised narcissism, as exemplified by contemporary mass move­ments and mass dispositions, unifies the ruthless partial rationality of self-interest with those irrational monstrocities of a destructive and selfdestructive kind, whose interpretation Freud had sought on the basis of the material of MacDougall and Le Bon. The introduction of narcis­sism is one of his greatest discoveries, without [psychoanalytic] theory being really upto the task of assimilating this."

 

 

Fifty years after the end of WWII, on the threshold of a new millenium, it behooves us to look back on a group of theorists who had made it their life's work to establish the causes of the unprecedented frenzy of destruction and warfare which marks the century we are about to bid farewell.

 

 

Notes

 

Adorno, Theodor W. (1927): Der Begriff des Unbewußten in der transzendentalen Seelenlehre. Cronberg i. T., August 1927. (Dissertation). Jetzt in: Ges. Schriften I (Philosophische Frühschriften), Frankfurt 1973, S. 79322.

 

‑ (1942a): Reflexionen zur Klassentheorie. In: Ges. Schriften 8 (1972), 373‑391.

 

‑ (1942b): Thesen über Bedürfnis. In: Ges. Schriften 8 (1972), 392‑396. ‑,und Max Horkheimer (1944): Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente. Amsterdam 1947.

 

‑ (1944‑47): Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. Frankfurt 1951

 

‑ (1946a): Die revidierte Psychoanalyse. Dt. 1951. In: Ges. Schriften 8 (1972), 20‑41.

 

‑ (1946b): Anti‑Semitism and fascist propaganda. In: Ges. Schriften 8 (1972), 397‑407

 

u. a. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. New York, London. (Studies in Prejudice‑Series, hg. von M. Horkheimer und S. H. Flowerman.)

 

‑ (1950): Democratic leadership and mass manipulation. In: A.W. Gouldner (Hg.), Studies in Leadership, New York 1950, S. 418‑438. (1951).Freudian theory and the pattern of fascist propaganda. In: Ges. Schriften 8 (1972), 408‑433. Dt. in: Psyche, XXIV, Jg., 1972, 486‑508. u. a. (1953): Studien über Autorität und Vorurteil. (Gekürzte dt. Fassung der Bände I‑III und V der »Studies in Prejudice«.) Bd. 1 und 2, Amsterdam 1968, 169.

 

‑ (1954): Bemerkungen über Politik und Neurose. In: Ges. Schriften 8 (1972), 434‑439

 

‑ (1955a): Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. München 1963.

 

‑ (1955b): Zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie. In: Ges. Schriften 8 (1972), 42‑85.

 

, und M. Horkheimer (1962): Sociologica II. Reden und Vorträge. Frankfurt.

 

‑ (1963a): Sexualtabus und Recht heute. In: Eingriffe (1963b), 99‑124(1963b): Eingriffe. Neun kritische Modelle. Frankfurt.

 

‑ (1966a): Postscriptum. In: Ges. Schriften 8 (1972), 86‑92. (1966b): Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt.

 

u. a. (1969): Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie. Neuwied.

 

‑ (1969): Dialektische Epilegomena. (Zu Subjekt und Objekt; Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis.) In.‑ Stichworte, Kritische Modelle 2, 149‑191. Frankfurt.

 

‑ (1970): Ästhetische Theorie. Ges. Schriften 7, hg. von Gretel Adorno und R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt.

 

‑ (1971): Gesammelte Schriften 5, hg. von Gretel Adorno und R. Tiedemann. (Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, 1956; Drei Studien zu Hegel, 1963.) Frankfurt.

 

‑ (1972): Gesammelte Schriften 8 (Soziologische Schriften I). Hg. von R. Tiedemann. Frankfurt.

 

‑ (1973): Studien zum autoritären Charakter. (Vorrede von L. v. Friedeburg.) Frankfurt.

Letter from T.W. Adorno to Max Horkheimer. Oxford, 21.11.34. Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften 15, 275/6.

Rolf Wiggershaus, 1986: "Das Antisemitismus-Project", & "Stud­ies in Prejudice" in: Die Frankfurter Schule - Geschichte, Theoretische Entwicklung, Politische Bedeutung Munich, p. 390 ff.

Russell Jacoby, 1975: Social Amnesia - A critique of Conform­ist Psychology from Adler to Laing

KHI

Horkheimer quote: !in­terview.

The best bib­liographic overview of the whole debate in Christopher Lash: The Minimal Self, p. 263 on­wards; Mass culture.

Quite different from Goldhagen's ideas, the Frankfurt group never believed for a moment that 'eliminatory anti‑semitism' was somehow unique to German culture, or that it would miracu­lously disappear after 1945

T.W. Ador­no, Else Brunswick, Margaret Edelhei, Joseph Freeman, A.R.L. Gurland, M. Horkheimer, Otto Kirchheimer, Heinz Langehans, Daniel Levison, Leo Lowenthal, Robert MacIver, Paul Massing, Franz Neumann, Henry Paechter, George Peck, Frederick Pollock, John Porter, Fred Roberts, R. Nevitt Sanford, Paul Tillich, Felix Weil.

Leo Lowenthal, in Greffrath, ed: Die Zerstörung einer Zukunft, p. 208, 1979.

Russell Jacoby: Dialectic of defeat 1981.

check!

Horkheimer's preface: p. xi

David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd appeared in 1950, Theodore Roszak, Christopher Lasch, through to Marcuse's One-dimensional Man.

ref.

GS 1, 229 ff. Written in 1927, pub­lished posthumously. [Translation fvg]

William Outhwaite: Understanding Social Life - The Method called Verstehen, 1975

"The main problem with the manuscript is that it reduc­es Freud onesidedly to the epistemological school of Mach and Avenarius, and that the materialist moment in Freud, which is represented in him by the notion of organic desire [Organlust], is neglected." Thus Adorno himself, looking back on his early work a few week before his death, in a letter to his editor Rolf Tiedemann.

24.11.34. TWA to MH

Gerard Radnitzky: Contemporary Schools of Metascience, 1968

GS 1, 382

457

ibid.

458

459

Max Horkheimer: Eclipse of Reason, 1947

Postscriptum , 40.

N.Y. 1984

Zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie 26 ff.

Reference to Borkenau.

The briefly considered meeting never materialised.

Marcuse: Eros and Civili­zation.