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“Thirst for Obedience”: a Freudian Analysis of the Father-Leader in Adorno and Beauvoir

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“Thirst for Obedience”: a Freudian Analysis of the Father-Leader in Adorno and Beauvoir Ostro 0 “Thirst for Obedience”: A Freudian Analysis of the Father-Leader in Adorno and Beauvoir By Jules Ostro Professor Andrew Arato Contemporary Sociological Theory Spring 2019 © 2019 Jules Ostro Ostro 1 I. INTRODUCTION Theodor W. Adorno’s 1951 essay, “A Freudian analysis of Fascist Propaganda,” is a fertile ground for comparison with the work of feminist existential philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The ​ Second Sex, which was published just a couple of years earlier in 1949. The following exposition of ​ Adorno’s essay and the “Introductory" and “Independent Woman” chapters in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex ​ examines how Adorno’s application of Freudian psychoanalytic theory of mass psychology and the modern authoritarian state aligns with Beauvoir’s theoretical dialectic of the man as transcendent Subject versus the woman as immanent Other. The connective thread in both contexts is a hegemonic teleology of dominance. This hegemony is the apparatus and function of both predominately male fascist dictators and sexist social actors who pander to collective entities of followers captivated by the ostensible auspices of the Father-Leader. The following use of the term Father-Leader will be used as a symbolic gesture and catch-all term to simplify the analogy between Adorno’s fascist dictator and the historically paternalistic man. The symbolic authority of the Father-Leader lies in his ability to generate an affect-driven, hypnotic libidinal bond through the mechanisms of identification and idealization with a mass ancillary entity, in this case either a fascist following of a nation or a large majority of the population, thus maintaining social and political privilege, influence, and control. II. ADORNO AND THE PATTERN OF FASCIST PROPAGANDA Theodor W. Adorno’s theoretical project on fascist propaganda is rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis, specifically that derived from Sigmund Freud’s 1922 text, Group Psychology and the ​ Analysis of the Ego. What is compelling to Adorno, and the impetus behind his application of Freud, is ​ psychoanalysis’s capacity to unearth the psychological mechanisms that underlie social phenomena, in this case fascist propaganda. Adorno begins his argument by distinguishing between rational political aims and the intentionally calculative aims of the fascist dictator. The fascist dictator, or “agitator,” uses © 2019 Jules Ostro Ostro 2 manipulative, psychological strategies, or “devices” that impart a rhetoric whose basis is simplicity and repetition (Adorno 119). These psychological devices are implemented mainly because fascism is unable to propagandize through rational arguments. Because fascist aims often contradict the material interests of the masses, the fascist leader must tap into the frustration and disillusionment a people have toward the heteronomy of modern society, thereby mobilizing “irrational, unconscious, regressive processes” (Adorno 134). Adorno discloses what he claims to be the secret of fascist propaganda: “[…] it simply takes men for what they are: the true children of today’s standardized mass culture” (Adorno 134). In addition, the success of a fascist agitator relies on what tends to be expected and characteristic of a group, namely, what Freud articulates as simple and exaggerated feelings and excessive extremes, with force and violence respected and kindness considered weak (Freud 15). Adorno appreciates how Freud presciently sought to make sense of the crisis of the individual within the construct of mass psychology all before the rise and mass following of Hitler and Mussolini; specifically, Freud’s foresight for “[…] the profound crisis and willingness to yield unquestioningly to powerful outside, collective agencies” (Adorno 120). Freud importunes a precise definition of a group in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the ​ Ego and how it comes to have such influence over an individual, pulling from polymath Gustave Le Bon ​ to define the self-state of the individual when transformed into a group as in possession of a “collective mind” (Freud 7). Freud writes how group dynamics can change one’s psychosocial disposition: “Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian,” with the group characteristic of that which is credulous, imperious, and self-denying (Freud 13). What Freud concludes and Adorno assents to, is that being a part of the group allows certain unconscious and formerly repressed instincts and drives of the individual to surface due to the effacement of one’s self-responsibility. Clearly, group psychology under a fascist dictator has the power to evince one’s unconscious psychic history. As Freud maintains, © 2019 Jules Ostro Ostro 3 “[the] apparently new characteristics which he then displays […] in fact the manifestations of this unconscious, in which all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition” (Freud 9). Another formative dimension to group psychology is the idea of a hypnotic contagion, which is an effect of the suggestibility of a fascist dictator. As Adorno affirms, Freud’s work pulls from the description Le Bon uses when relaying what occurs when the “mass mind” is pulled under the influence of suggestion (Adorno 120). As Freud writes, “There is no doubt that something exists in us which, when we become aware of signs of an emotion in someone else, tends to make us fall into the same emotion; but how often do we not successfully oppose it, resist the emotion, and react in quite an opposite way? Why, therefore, do we invariably give way to this contagion when we are in a group?” (Freud 27). Suggestibility is of huge import in the analysis of authoritarianism because it is one of the psychological devices that fascist agitators use to compel the masses into a specific emotional state that approximates fascination (Freud 11), likening suggestibility to the libidinal, or emotional, contagion one feels when hypnotized. Freud defines group psychology as addressing the individual as “[…] a member of a race, of a nation, of a caste, of a profession, of an institution, or as a component part of a crowd of people who have been organized into a group at some particular time for some definite purpose” (Freud 4). While Adorno generally agrees with Freud for rejecting surgeon and social psychologist Wilfred Trotter’s notion of the herd instinct when explaining mass psychology, he believes that Freud considers the social or herd instinct as indicative of the problem of the masses, not the solution (Adorno 121). However, when looking ​ ​ ​ ​ closely at Freud’s text, one finds that Freud neither considers this a solution nor a problem, for he rejects the notion of the herd instinct in its primitive entirety in lieu of “[…] a narrower circle, such as that of the family” (Freud 5). Freud again negates the notion of the herd instinct as the problem because it undermines the role of the leader in the group, and “it is impossible to grasp the nature of a group if the leader is disregarded. The herd instinct leaves no room at all for the leader” (Freud 65). Nevertheless, © 2019 Jules Ostro Ostro 4 Adorno may have construed Freud’s appropriation of Le Bon’s language differently when conveying the group as an obedient herd with a “thirst for obedience” (Freud 17). Yet, here Freud is not emphasizing the group-instinct in this respect; instead, he is rather imparting what could be called an obedience-instinct ​ and how it is initiated under an authority and is thereby a formative part of the problem of the modern authoritarian state. According to Freud, a group wants to obey: “It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters. Fundamentally it is entirely conservative, and it has a deep aversion to all innovations and advances, with an unbounded respect for tradition” (Freud 15). This “thirst for obedience” is a fitting segue into the problem of the fascist leader as articulated vis-à-vis the symbolic authority of the Father-Leader. III. ADORNO, FREUD AND THE MAKING OF THE FATHER-LEADER Which traits facilitate the fascist leader’s ostensibly seamless transcendence into the almighty Father-Leader figure? One of the most significant aspects of a leader is his ability to control by means of fascination, by hypnotic contagion and the use of his prestige and “strong and imposing will, which the ​ ​ group, which has no will of its own, can accept from him” (Freud 17). As mentioned earlier, Freud suggests it is force and not kindness that allures the group, with Adorno notably adding how any reference to love is largely excluded from fascist masses; in fact, Adorno astutely assimilates Hitler with the authoritarian father instead of the loving father, with any notion of love directed toward Germany through National Socialist aims (Adorno 123). The only love that the leader purposes is his love for himself and whatever impregnable ideological edifice he believes in and exacts onto his subjects. As Adorno writes, ​ ​ the image of the fascist leader “[reanimates] the idea of the all-powerful and threatening primal father” (Adorno 124). This Father-Leader has the aptitude to tap into the capaciousness of one’s “archaic inheritance,” or what Freud terms the “archaic heritage” (Freud 76) of the unconscious, that is, to personalize fascist propaganda through a “reawakened irrationality” (Adorno 124). Freud believes that the © 2019 Jules Ostro Ostro 5 individual derives pleasure from awakening formerly repressed instincts and inhibitions, for “in obedience to the new authority he may put his former ‘conscience’ out of action” (Freud 23). Another dimension of the Father-Leader that encourages obedience is how he befits the portrait of Superman (Freud 71). However, while the fascist leader may be idealized as Superman, he is also necessarily just an average person, “[…] a great little man […] just as Hitler posed as a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber” (Adorno 127). Gino Germani may not have disagreed here, for what ​ ​ Adorno is speaking to vis-à-vis Freud is an activating and mobilizing energy fascist dictators instill in their citizens through their authoritarian political ideology.
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