/SOCIAL AMNESIA ^

A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing

by Russell Jacoby n

Beacon Press Boston FEB 241994 « Contents

Copyright © 1975 by Russell Jacoby Introduction copyright © 1975 by Beacon, Press Introduction by Christopher Lasch vii Beacon Press books are published under the auspices Preface xvii of the Unitarian Universalist Association First published as a Beacon Paperback in 1975 ^ r Social Amnesia and the New Ideologues 1 All rights reserved n Revisionism: The Repression of a Theory 19 Printed in the United States of America m Conformist Psychology 46 (hardcover) 9876S4321 IV Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism 73 (paperback) 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 V The Politics of Subjectivity 101 VX Theory and Therapy 1: Freud 119 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data vn Theory and Therapy II: Laing and Cooper 131 Jacoby, Russell. Social amnesia. Notes 153 Includes bibliographical references and index. Indéx 185 1. Psychoanalysis — History. I. Title. BF175.J3 335.43'8'15019509 74­16664 ISBN 0­8070­2964­5

Chapter V, Politics of Subjectivity," appeared in slightly different form in Telos, 9 (Fall 1971), and New Left Review. 79 (May­June 1973).

J7S' .J3 c 3 I

Social Amnesia­and the New Ideologues

The history of philosophy is the history of forgetting: so T. W. Adorno has remarked. Problems and ideaá once ex­ amined fall out of sight and out Of mind only to resurface later as novel and new. If anything the process seems to be intensifying; society remembers less and less faster and faster. The áign of the times is thought that has succumbed to fashion; it scorns the past as antiquated while touting the present as the best. Psychology is' hardly exempt. What was knówn to Freud, half­remembered by the neo­Freúd­ lans, is unknown'to their successors.­The forgetfulness itself 'is driven by an unshakable belief in progress: what comes later is necessarily better than what came before. Today, without romanticizing the past, one could almost state the reverse: what is new is worse than what is old. The celebration of the présent is iaided by instant 'his­ tory. Todây's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of­the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. Fevi^ can resist introducing stock criticism of Freud — be it of the left or right — without the standard observation that Freud was a ninetéenth­century Viennese. The endless repetition of such statements suggests the decline of criti­ cal'thinking; the modem mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of think­ ing decays to the passivity of classifying. Freud is explained away by positioning him in a nineteenth­century Vienna. Tdday, bred and fed on twentieth­century urbane and lib­ eral feed, we have apparently left behind history itself and can view the past with the pleasure of knowing that we are 1 2 Social Amnesia 3 Social Amnesia and the New Ideologues no longer part of it. Yet little bears the imprint of the present the knowledge of cultural processes" which is common historical period more than this fake historical conscious­ knowledge today.'' ness: the argument that past thought is past because it is It. should be iaoted that the recent insight that psycho­ past is a transparent alibi for the present. To accuse such analysis is a product of nineteenth­century Vienna is as reasoning with its own logip, it is the contemporary form recent as 1914, when it was already old. Freud wrote then: of relativism; debased sociology of knowledge seeks to avoid thought by mechanically matching it with specific We have all heard the interesting attempt to explain psy­ social strata and historical eras. Its awareness of historical choânalysis as^ product of the peculiar chaiacter of Vienna transformation ideologically stops short of itself; its own as a city.... This inspiration runs as follows;,psychoanalysis, viewpoint is considered neutral and absolute truth, outside so far as it consists of the assertion that the neuroses are — not inside — history. traceable to disturbances in the sexual life, could only have The critique of Freud as hopelessly situated in Vienna come to birth in a town like Vienna... and it simply contains and the nineteenth century unites cultural anthropologists, a rei^ection, a projection into theory, a'S it were, of these neo­Freudians, and theoreticians of women's liberation. peculiar Viennese conditions. Now honestly I am no local Aside from those who joyfully or maliciously rewrite his­ patriot; but this theory about psychoanalysis always seems tory and have it that Freud was merely the vanguard of the to me quite exceptionally stupid." sexual mythology of his time — or worse' — it is,repeated endlessly that he was a genius, but like all geniuses bound JFurther, Freud glimpsed the future in which calling him a and blinded by his era. "Not even a genius," wrote Karen genius would be the password for easing.him into the club­ Horney of Freud, "can entirely step out of his time." He house of common seröse. He is recorded as saying, "Calling was part of his era in,that "in the nineteenth century there me a genius is the latest way people have of starting their was little knowledge regarding cultural differences." Freud criticism of me First they call me a genius and then ascribed to biology what today we know is due to "culture." they proceed to rejeçt all my views." ^ Or as Clara Thompson wrote, "Although a genius, Freud Today criticism that shelves the old in the name of the was in many respects limited by the thinking of his time, new forms part of the Zeitgeist; it works to justify and de­ as evçn a genius must be." Specifically, "Much which fend by forgetting. In making only a fleeting gesture Freud believed to be biological has been shown by modern toward the past, or none at all, social and psychological research to be a reaction to a certain type of culture."® thought turn apologetic. The heroiQ period of militant, Patrick Mullahy wrote, "Freud could not surmount certain materialistic, and enlightened bourgeois thought, if there limitations of his culture and of his own nature. This was ever was one, is no more. The "law" once enunciated on inevitable. Even a genius can do only so much." In par­ "the dwindling force of cognition in bourgeois society" can ticular, "Freud's intellectual framework, his whole orienta­ be confirmed daily.® In the name of a new era past theory tion ... is a mechanistic­materialistic one.... Freud grew is declared honorable but feeble; one can lay aside Freud up in the sècond half of the nineteenth century when sci­ and Marx — or appreciate their limitations — and pick up entific men generally espoused a philosophy of mechanistic­ the "latest at the drive­in window of thought. materialism." ^ Or more recently, Betty Friedan remarked The syndrome ,is a general one. In brief, society has of Freud that "even his genius could not give him, then, lost its memory, aná with it, its mind. The inability qr re­ 5 Social Amnesia and the New Ideologues 4 Social Amnesìa fusai to think back takes its toll in the inability to think. ïSflSs of memory assumes a multitude of forms from a "radical" empiricism and positivism that û^Jp^ds p^t °d" 'Äy bÎiî Ktteïït rules thought like so much "intellectual bagga^ to hip tW sdute the giants and geniuses of the past as unfor­ iunatefborfti The ktter. more important m the Woe —society's own past. It is a psychic commodity context of this book, in the impatience to contrive »ew and novel theories, hustle through the past as if it ^^e the ]unk the h°"°5Lugh, is not to P™« ^ SS vid of wrecked ideas. "In every era," wrote Walter Ben­ jamin, "the attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overcome it. The general loss of memory is not o be explained solelv psychologically; it is not simply childhood amnesi^ Tliere is an irony here wUch is part of the tÉ!evT¿socÍl alesia­memory driven out of mind rtie vere incepts formulated so as to comprehend this by the social and economic dynamic of this society. The nLure of the production of social amnesia can ^^rely be Miffsested here* such an explanation would have to draw SSESS­ÄSS upon the Marâist concept of lost meaning and because an examination of ite meamng Marxism refers to an illusion that is objectively manufac­ turS by society. This social illusion works to th® status quo by presenting the human and Social relation­ as natoal­ and unchangeable ­ relations behveen things. What Is often ignored in expositions of the concept of reification is the psychological dimension, am­ nesia — a forgetting and repression of the hum^ and so­ cial activity that makes and can remake society. The social los of Sory is a type of reification ­ better: it is the nrimal form of reification. "All reification is a forgetting. ology possessed a distinct content and to To pursue this for a moment: this form cou?t of the history of the concept rooted in the necessities of the tensification of the drive for surplus value and Pjont ^ 'i wi?h oThèrs sulïÏÏH°annahTendt, ideology is associ­ celerates the rate at which past goods are liquidated to ated with abstract sloganeering, political Pf ^ ¿ make way for new goods; planned obsolescence is eve^­ f a­nA it is contrasted with nonviolent, good­natured where frL consumer goods to thinking to sexuality. Mt­ in obsolescence exempts neither nor humans, m is heralded as new or young m things^, i^ndsm is masks the constant: this society. Inherent in Marxism the notion that dead labor dominates living, things domi­ 6 Social Amnesia 7 Social Amnesia and the New Ideologues The method rather to be followed must be "an empirical tion of ideology was conveniently forgotten because it in­ one." Arendt's argument is shimmed up in a chapter titled conveniently did not exempt common sense and empiricism "Ideology Terror" in her basic text of the cold war, from the charge ,of ideology. The subsequent theory of Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt links ideology with ideology was directed solely against theoretical and philo­ violence and evil, and contrasts it with common sense and sophical concepts — concepts which could possibly defy empiricism. Ideologies are "isms which to the satisfaction common sense and empirical reality. Such concepts, not of their adherents can explain everything and every oc­ by chance, are inseparable from a radical social analysis. currence by deducing it from a single premise." Ideologies Dubbed "ideology" and saddled with all the ills of "to­ claim "total explanation," "independent of all experience." talitarianism," they are contrasted with a healthy and godly "All ideologies contain totalitarian elements." In the con­ common sense that harms no living things. "Ideologies," cluding section of the main part of her book, she tells us Arendt tells us, "are never interested in the miracle of that the "aggressiveness of totalitarianism springs not from being," as if the miracle ingredient of the no­nonsense logic lust fot power ... nor for .profit... but only for ideological of the market were love itself. This argument promoted the reasons:, to make the world consistent, to prove that its pragmatic and antitheoretical consciousness already sus­ respective supersense has been right." picious of theory and philosophy. The irony is that the Several things could be said about these formulations: Marxist notion of ideology was originally directed toward the first, that they have been highly successful; they are elucidating and articulating consciousness. But picked up deeply ingrained in the liberal consciousness which is con­ by the practitioners of the sociology of knowledge and vinced that ideology is a form of abstract nonempirical purged of its critical elements, it effected the "sabotage of logic that issues into violence and terror. Secondly, despite consciousness" and not its restoration.'® With Bell, Arendt, the pretense of scholarship, they are false. The history of and a host of others its meaning was repressed, and a con­ the concept of ideology has recently been told and need not formist one, openly or implicitly celebrating the common be recounted here.'* It must sufiice to recall that ideology, sense of the "West," was introduced. aside from its factual origins in the idéologues of the French Revolution, derives from Marx. Crucial in this context is The domestication and social repression.of critical concepts that in Marxism ideology is in no way restricted to what such as ideology is the formula on which influential recent in Anglo­American tradition is considered abstract thought; works — Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, Theodor Roszak's rather it refers to a form of consciousness:' fabe conscious­ The Making of a Counter Culture — are built. They are ness, a consciousness that has been falsified by social and marked by a refusal or inability to theorize in the name of material conditions. As a form of consciousness it could a new era that has left behind traditional political cate­ include any type of knowledge — idealism, empiricism, or gories. More exactly, new theories are advanced — "end of positivism. Indeed, the latter was considered the ideology ideology," "future shock," "counter­culture" — but these par excellence of the bourgeois market and culture: Eng­ turn out to be substanceless inasmuch as they are con­ land. What determined if a consciousness was "false" was structed out of only a sham confrontation with past theory. not an a priori categorizing of the type of knowledge, but In their anxiety to leave .behind the dated past they unwit­ an examination of its truth: its relationship to the concrete tingly fall into it, advancing new labels for old ideas. social reality. Future Shock can be considered the theoretical defense of The relevant point here is that the original Marxist no­ this mode of operation, as well as its refutation. Its argu­ 10 Social Amnesia 11 Social Amnesia and the New Ideologues righted the term for the exckisive use of their dealers arid nerve of Marxism. The neo­Freudians and their successors customers. The reified categories that Roszak has made his no doubt willingly accept the designation insofar as they own paralyze any critique that would undo reification; perceive the alternative as that between an authoritarian even his critique of the madness of science, for all its just­ orthodoxy and creative humanistic revisions. Erich Fromm ness, ends up in madness. The romantic critique of capi­ sees it exactly in these terms; in an essay entitled "Psycho­ talism has its truth; but it is to be articulated as a social analysis — Science or Party­Line?" he does not shrink from critique, not departmentalized and fetishized."" The magi­ labeling Freud and the orthodox Freudians "Stalinists" cal consciousness, the "wisdom of the sensitive soul" that out to "conquer the world." Of course the alternative is then he champions as a response to a technocratic society* is its clear:, psychoanalysis "must revise, from the standpoint refuse, not its negation. In accepting the bourgeois form of of humanistic and dialectical thinking... many of his reason as Reason itself, Roszak does his bit to perpetuate [Freud's] theories conceived in the spirit of nineteenth­ its. reign. century physiological materialism." But the blank alternatives of orthodoxy and revision­ The critique of sham novelty and the planned obsolescence ism, or nineteenth­century materialism and twentieth­cen­ of thought cannot in its turn flip the coin and claim that the tury humanism, are not to be retained. In question is not old texts — be they of Marx or Freud — are as valid as dogma versus change, but the content of the change; the when written and need no interpretation or rethinking. latter defines orthodoxy or revisionism, not the former. It Rather to be pursued is the very relationship between the can hardly be maintained that the orthodox Freudians have original thought and the conteml^ary conditions, ^e simply been content to repeat Freud, fleeing any change as blind*choice of oTne or thè ótfier each has itTadherênts, and heresy—nor that Freud himself suppressed innovations. has respectively revealed its consequence^.'' Mechanical "I am defending Groddeck energetically against your re­ repetition has proved lethal to a Marxism that was not re­ spectability," wrote Freud to the clergyman Oskar Pfister. thought but only restated; and it has brought bourgeois "What would you have said had you been a contemporary social theory to the thriving activity of publishing and for­ of Rabelais?" From Ernest Jones's work on Hamlet and getting. The relationship between the texts of the past and nightmares, to Georg Groddeck's ahd Sandor Ferenczi's the present society is one of tension. Within Marxism the .studies, and more recently to Marcuse's Eros and Civiliza­ nature of this tension is a recurring problem, surfacing in tion and Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death, Freudian discussions on revisionism and orthodoxy. concepts are developed and unfolded. Next to these, the The Frankfurt School has dubbed the neo­Freudians revisions, commencing with Adler's, through to Homey's "revisionists." The term itself cannot be abstracted from the and Fromm's, and sustained by the myth of Freud as history of Marxism. To those outside a Marxist tradition, the authoritarian in theory and person, have been marked by a terms revisionism and orthodoxy lack resonance; and even monotonous discovery of common sense. within Marxism the terms have had such a tortured history Once the false opposition between orthodoxy and re­ that their present meaning is in doubt. Historically revi­ visionism as that between obsolete dogma and contem­ sionism in Germany was centered around Eduard Bern­ porary insight is avoided, the notion of orthodoxy must be stein. To the orthodox it signified a refashioning of Marx­ reformulated. To the point that the theories of Marx and ism, which in the name of improvement junked its essence Freud were critiques of bourgeois civilization, orthodoxy as dated: the revision was an incision that cut out the living entailed loyalty to these critiques; more exactly, dialectical 12 Social Amnesia 13 Social Amnesia and the New Ideologues loyalty. Not repetition is called for but articulation and de­ Freudîànism. Yet Freud and his students are clear enough velopment of concepts; and within Marxism — and to a as to what in psychoanalysis is to be preserved — not by degree within psychoanalysis — precisely against an Offi­ thoughtless repetition but by reworking: the concepts of cial Orthodoxy only too happy to freeze concents into fnt;; repïessioft, sexuality,­unconscious, Oedipal complex, infan­ mulas. Revisionism was indeed change, but change that tile sexualityIt is no accident that two books heretical diluted and dissolved critical insights already gained. It in their scope and argument but orthodox in their alle­ capitulated to a reality that proclaimed itself as new and giance to the concepts of Freud begin almost identically. dynamic while statically serving up more of the same. The "According to Freud," runs the second sentence of Mar­ outline of the nature of revisionism within both Marxism cuse's Eros and Civilization, "the history of man is the his­ and psychoanalysis already emerges: in both forms it is tory of his repression." And Norman O. Brown's Life associated with a decline of theorv per se. a refusal or in­ Against Death begins: "There is one word which, if we only ability to conceptualize. In both forms it edged toward understand it, is the key to Freud's thought. That word is empiricism, positivism, pragmaticism. and a rejection of 'repression.'"^" Brown footnotes this sentence of Freud: theorv — either of the philbsophical and Hegelian content "The doctrine of repression is the foundation stone 'on of Marxism or the metatheorv of psvchoanalvsis. In both which the whole structure of psychoanalysis rests, the most forms it sought immediate gains, one in political reforms, essential part of it." the othfer in therapy, at the expense nf a nnnimmediate Not to be forgotten — indeed to be explained — is theory.. that the push toward immediate reforms and gains, the im­ To a great extent the critique of revisionism within patience with past theory, is humanist in motivation. Marxism — at least in the pre­Stalin years — and within Within psychoanalysis exactly those who sought to make it psychoanalysis turned On this point: the revisionists were more liberal and social cut its strength. So far as the post­ accused of suppressing thé theory in favor of momentary Freudians make claim to a humanity and sensitivity that gains and reforms. Rosa Luxemburg observed the "hostility they find lacking in psychoanalysis and behaviorism, they to 'theory' " of the revisionists. "It is quite natural for'people àre to bé* taken seriously; open and undisguised apologies who run after immediate practical' results to want to free for a lethal social order are self­critiques. The promises of themselves from ... our 'theory.' " In different tefms, to liberation, hovi^ever, are to be scrutinized. be discussed below, the same is true about psychoanalytic An illustration of this dynamic of humanist reforms revisionism. Marcuse found that the tension between theory versus theory is seen in the Fromm­Marcuse dispute. In and therapy in psychoanalysis, analogous to the tension 1955 Fromm called Marcuse a nihilist because unlike him­ between theory and praxis in Marxism, is lost by the revi­ self, the humanist, Marcuse did not designate the concrete sionists; and in losing this, the revolutionary and critical immediate îlinks and gains that tied the present to the fu­ edge of psychoanalysis is blunted. ture.^^ To Fromm, Marcuse seemed more committed to the­ If revisionism is marked by a decline of theory, dialec­ ory than practical reforms. The .logic of Fromm's argument tical orthodoxy reworks and rethinks. In Freudian thought, caused him tox;ast off (as illogical) the theory that seemed however, it is difficult to find a conceptual center that lo­ impractical,' so as to praise immediate gains and reforms cates which concepts are worthy of reformulation and as Utopia itself. This becomes evident in a recent work in which are inessential. What Georg Lukács did for Marxism which in slightly different terms he renews his charge that in "What Is Orthodox Marxism?" has not been done for Marcuse is a nihilist. "Marcuse is not even concerned with 14 Social Amnesia 15 Social Amnesia and the New Ideologues politics; for if one is not concerned with steps between the a­ prepaid envelope; the reason follows from what is said present and the future, one does not deal with politics, in the book. Even the first small step requires initiative at radical or otherwise." Fromm,adds a bit of psychoanalytic least to address the envelope yourself and spend the wisdom to explain this situation. "Marcuse is essentially an money for a stamp." Social change for the cost of a stamp example of an ahenated intellectual who presents his per­ is the >visdom of the humanist denouncing as nihilism the sonal despair as a theory of radicalism." theory exposing the post­card mentality. The revolution of Fromm, on the other hand, unalienated and hopeful, hope is a Walt Disney production. "'Nihilism,'" wrote has no diíBculty finding the practical "steps." The irony is Marcuse, "as the indictment of inhuman conditions ­may that the steps that Fromm designates are not only more im­ be a truly humanist attitude.... In this sense I accept practical than anything Marcuse ever discussed, but are Fromm's designation of my position as 'human nihilism.' " ®' steps which even if practiced do less than reform; the loss of theory takes its revenge by confounding the practice And the new or not­so­new left? It is imdoubtedly part of that leads deeper into this society with the practice which the injustice of this book that it considers as related phe­ leaves it. "After a few more years of this practical policy" nomena nonpolitical psychologies that at best claim to be wrote Luxemburg about the reformists, "it is clear that it liberal and hiunanist, and a political left and the psychol­ is least practical of all." "I submit," writes Fromm, "that ogy of R. D. Laing and David Cooper ^that claim to be if people would truly accept the Ten Commandments or revolutionary. Certainly they are not equal phenomena. the Buddhist Eightfold Path as the effective principle to A discussion of Laing and Cooper will be deferred to the guide their Hves, a dramatic change in our whole culture final chapter. As for the political left, no matter how con­ would take place." If this "dramatic change" seems un­ fused, it is not to be equated with psychologies serving likely or impractical Fromm has some other ideas on how indifferently big business during ihe week and employees to reach the future more quickly and efiBciently. "The first on the weekends. Yet they are not unrelated. Both have step could be the formation of a National Council which gravitated toward subjectivity — the person and his or her could be called the 'Voice of American Conscience.* I immediate emotions — as a response to a callous and in­ think of a group of, say, fifty Americans whose integrity different society. In taking the person as the patient they and capability are unquestioned.... They would delib­ have followed society's own patent remedy: the individual erate and issue statements which, because of the weight of with>a little help from friends can heal the wounds. If the those who issued them, would be newsworthy."®" This is prescription seems double strength with the addition of a only the first step. Fromm explains how Clubs will be sexual ingredient, it is only a variant of an old home medi­ formed to help the Council, then Groups, and so on; all of cine. this will alter the nature of society. The advocate of im­ That American business and its negation — the left mediate practice, impatient with critical theory, turns into — have come to agrqe on some points as to how to assuage the homespun philosopher promoting the miracle effects of the discontent is an irony that suggests the potency of a little elbow grease. The last page of this book. The bourgeois society: there is no escape, not even for those Revolution of Hope, is a tear­out to be sent in with proposed who resist. Society ineluctably coerces everyone to attend candidates for the National Council of the Voice of Ameri­ to the remaining fragments of self and subjectivity. It is no can Conscience. The page, however, lacks a prepaid en­ secret that at least since World War I, and increasingly velope, for as Fromm tells the reader: "I have not provided since the Hawthorne experiment at Western Electric in the 16 Social Amnesia 17 Social Amnesia and the Neto Ideologues 1930s, industrial soçiology and psychology have turned this ^development. One of the original purposes of the to studies of small groups and the subjective condition of T­groups was to train participants in human "skills" so the workers."'® In concentrating on the subjective attitude of they could become effective leaders of social change, par­ the workers and not the conditions of the workers, the in­ ticularly racial integration, in their own communities. Yet tent was to increase production. Hugo Münsterberg wrote to the disappointment of some of the originators, even this in 1913 that scientific management sought to organize limited social goal became lost, absorbed by ­the process of work so that "the waste of energy will be avoided and the social interaction. The outside and social issues seemed greatest increase in efficiency of the industrial enterprisè "less involving and' fascinating" than the "here­and­now will be reached." This is to be done not by "excessive driv­ happenings which of necessity focused on personal, inter­ ing of the workingmen ... on the contrary, the heightening personal, and group levels." "Emphasis upon organization of the individual's joy in the work and of the personal and community structures in the back­home situations of satisfaction in'one's total life development belongs among members was also greatly reduced." Attention was diverted the most important indirect agencies of the new scheme." to "the interpersonal events occurring between trainer and The official statement of the American Management As­ members or between members, and in varying degrees, sociation of 1924 noted, "The day when American man­ group events " agement can afford to treat the humatì factor as 'taken for The convergence from contrasting directions on the granted' has gone by, and today emphasis must be laid on importance of the subject as an emotional and psychic en­ the human factor in commerce and industry, and we must tity points to a real development jof society; not, as the apply to it the same careful study that has been given dur­ apologists would have it, that society has fulfilled the basic ing the last few decades to materials and machinery." material needs and is moving on to the higher reaches of Again it is not just to equate developments within liberation, but the reverse: domination is reaching the American industry with those within the American left; inner depths of men and women. The last preserves of the evidently the concern of the latter with the emotional and autonomous individual are under siege. Today human re­ psychic individual is not directed toward increasing capi­ lations are irregulars and seconds at the closing days of talist production, but if anything toward transforming it; the warehouse sale of life. The lines form because every­ Yet it is the very problem that this political goal degen­ one knows the rest is junk; all that remains are the remains. erates more and more into slogans, externally attached, In any case talk of satisfaction of the basic material needs not internally united with the ongoing praxis; the slogans is obscene given the world's absolute need and suffering serve to label political groups and factions, not to märk that serve as the means for such satisfaction. Within this distinct political projects. The ongoing political praxis is context of grim necessity freedom too is grim: the des­ diverted into the exploration of the psychic life of the perate flight from the specter of misery. The smile buttons group, sapping of energy sustained political thought and seek to chase from mind the daily carnage and drudgery; praxis. Politics becomes an afterthought. It is interesting to one smiles because the living are sad. The flaunted sensi­ note, in fact, that the liberal industrial sociologists and tivity survives only by an iron indifference to the general human relations experts who pioneered the sensitivity deprivation and brutalization. The whole program, in brief, groups and T­groups in the late 1940s and early 1950s — is grin and bear it. and which parts of the left fantasized that they had in­ The subjectivity that surfaces everywhere, be it in the vented some 20 years later — were concferned with exactly form of human relations, peak­experiences, and so on, is a 18 Social Amnesia response to its demise; because the individual is being ad­ ministered out of existence — and with it individual ex­ perience and emotions — it takes more effort than ever to II kéep the last fragments alive. Psychic suffocation haunts the reified. The desperation of men and women, for good > i: reason, increases visibly. Today the process of reification Revisionism: The Repression o£ a Theory is a storm tide; and the human subject is locked in the basement. The frantic search for authenticity, experience, emotions, is the pounding on the ceiling as the water rises. Within the social and psychological thought that has "Let us make no mistake; this day arisen to explain and respond to these developments, psy­ and age has rejected me and all I had choanalysis shows its strength; it demystifies the claims to to give." liberated values, sensitivities, emotions, by tracing them to S. FREUD, 1934 ^ a repressed psychic, social, and biological dimension. In a period of renewed idealism — talk of ego conflict, moral problems, value conflict — it is unfashionably materialis­ Alfred Adler was the first to challenge the theories of "the tic; it keeps to the pulse of the psychic underground. As professor," as Sigmund Freud was known to his students. such it is more capable of grasping the intensifying social Adler's refashioning of psychoanalysis, which culminated unreason that the conformist psychologies repress and for­ in< his »break with Freud in 1911, contained all the elements get: the barbarism of civilization itself, the barely sup­ found in the later contributions of the neo­ and post­ pressed misery of ,the living, the madness that haunts Freudians. Here as later, the new formulations were exe­ society. Critical theory as critique and negative psycho­ ôuted in the name of a more humane, liberal, and social analysis resists social amnesia and the conformist ideolo­ consciousness. Here as later, a shift took place from theory gies; it is loyal both to an objective notion of truth and to and metatheory to practice and pragmatism, from a sexual a past which the present still suffers. and psychic depth and past to a nonsexual psychic surface and present. Here as later, subjectivity, in the guise of the "individual," was added to psychoanalysis. Adler later ditbbed his psychology "individual psychology." "Indi­ vidual Psychology tries to see individual lives as a whole ... [It] is of necessity oriented in a practical sense." ®

Freud's critique of Adler lay the groundwork for the criti­ cal theory critique of the neo­Freudians: Both these cri­ tiques suggest the weaknèss of the post­Freudians: Uberai revisions traded the revolutionary core of psychoanalysis for common sense. Psychoanalytic revisionism as worked out by Adler was already associated with a retreat to pleas­ antries and homilies. Freud's link to a Hegelian tradition 19 Revisionism; The Repression of a Theory 20 Social Amnesia 21 the sociological consciousness the fact that the Adlerians — with which he otherwise shares Uttle — is in the de­ were socialists.'® Yet it was exactly this shift that dulled the hberate renunciation of common sense. "A person who critical and social powers of psychoanalysis. From the be­ professes to beheve in commonsense psychology," Freud ginning the repression of 'psychoanalysis was announced is reported saying once, "and who thinks psychoanalysis is as its liberalization. 'far­fetched' can certainly have no understanding of it, for The yoimg Adler considered himself a socialist; his it is common sense which produces all .the ills < we have to cure. n o first book, in 1898, on the occupational and health hazards of the tailor trade has been called a "synthesis of socialism Orthodox psychoanalysis is orientated in the reverse and medicine." " According to a biography by a friend, direction: toward uncommon sense, exactly the farfetched. Adler was among a group of students who studied Marx, "The truth of psychoanalysis lies in its loyalty to its most^ though he was not influenced by the economic theories of provocative hypotheses."* "In psychoanalysis only exag­ Marxism; rather he studied the "sociological conception on geration is true." ® Adler and those who have followed him which Marxism is based." Another accovmt states that have labored to escape the uncommon concepts of repres­ Adler was well acquainted with Marxist literatüre.^® In any sion, infantile sexuality, and libido since they "run counter case it seems to have fallen to Adler to have written the to the prejudices of convention." ® Freud has ascribed Ad­ first paper explicitly on Marx and psychoanalysis, "On the ler's popularity exactly to his flair for the ordinary: he has Psychology of Marxism." This was delivered in Freud's created a theory which is in tune with common sense, Vienna Society in 1909 but, never published, seems to be which "recognizes no complications, which introduces no lost. It is preserved in "some form by Otto Rank's notes of new concepts that are hard to grasp, which knows nothing the session. According to the notes, Adler showed that an of the unconscious, which gets rid at a single blow of the "affective state" — sensitivity — underlies class conscious­ universally oppressive problem of sexuality." ^ Freud was ness. "Because this affective state always seeks to fend off well aware of the conformist and conservative bent of Ad­ degradation, it is impossible for the class conscious pro­ ler's revisions. He observed that the additions to or revi­ letariat to adopt an attitude of fatalistic resignation In sions of psychoanalysis contain "what is already known conclusion Adler wishes to stress that Marx's entire work from other sources or what can be most easily related to it. culminates in the demand to make history consciously." Thus ... what is selected ... with Adler [is] egoistic mo­ The drift of Adler's concern, here as elsewhere^ was tives. What is left over, however, and rejected as false is essentially confined to a conscious dimension: first organ precisely what is new in psychoanalysis and peculiar to inferiority­compensation, degradation­sensitivity, and, later, it... the revolutionary and embarrassing advances of inferiority­masculine protest. In the Vienna Society, shortly psychoanalysis." " following this presentation, Adler­ would make explicit The irony that it was exactly socialists and liberals his critique of Freud, and would leave the Freud cir­ who cut out the­ "revolutionary and embarrassing ad­ cle. Freudian notions of repression and libido, sexuality vances" of psychoanalysis is the irony of the encounter of and infantile formation made way for inferiority and its psychoanalysis with social and socialist thought. Freud compensation, a nonsexual desire to rule or be above. himself, in discussing Adler's break with psychoanalysis, Adler questioned whether the "driving force" in neurosis remarked on the importance of the "socialist element" in was Freudian repression or an "irritated psyche," and Adler." Ernest Jories also offered as an explanation for the responded by indicating the importance of "adjustment" Adlerian shift away from the repressed consciousness to 22 Social Amnesia M Revisionism; The Repression of a Theory and education. "Educational influences which smooth the medicine.... This wholeness penetrates every psychologi­ way for the child are of far­reaching significance here.... cal part­phenomenon and colors it individually...." The If one intervenes early with intelligent tactics, a condition Freudian notion of an essential antagonism between the results which might be described as one of carefree cheer­ individual and a repressive society, between pleasure and fulness. ... Mistakes in education, on the other hand ... reality, is dismissed; rather, society is in fact the best lead to such frequent disadvantages and feelings of dis­ friend of the individual, who is innately inferior and un­ pleasure that the child seeks safeguards." certain. "Social interest is the compensatory factor for the The liberal and practical bent of Adler's writing and physical inferiority feeling of man.... We can regard so­ thought is evident. Many of his early essays are concerned ciety as the most important compensatory factor for human with correct education, proper upbringing, and so forth. weaJcness." The Adlerians, in the name of "individual "The need for affection becomes the lever of education. A psychology," take the side of society against the individual. hug, a kiss, a friendly look, a loving word can only be ob­ One Adlerian accuses Freud of advancing the notion of tained when the child subordinates himself to the educa­ "Society the Oppressor"; to this Adlerian what must be tor via the detour of culture." "A great many educational faulted is not society's "hostile frustration" of the neurotic, applications follow from this."^^ It is not surprising that but the neurotic's "faikure to adapt to society."®^ socialists interested in educational reform were drawn to The distance that Adler traveled from psychoanalysis Adler. Alice Rühle­Gerstel, the wife of Otto Rühle, an anti­ can be found in nearly any passage of his writings from Stalinist communist, wrote in Freud und Adler that in­ the 1930s. Depth analysis makes way for moral rearma­ sofar as Adler sought to make men cooperative "he worked ment; neurotics and psychotics are themselves guilty of in his Individual Psychology as a democratic influence forsaking the benefits of a guiltless society. "All failures," and as a cultural preparer for socialism." wrote Adler, listing "neurotics, psychotics, criminals, Adler's early critiques of Freud removed any doubt drunkards, problem children, suicides, perverts and pros­ about his fundamental break with psychoanalysis. In The titutes," are "failures because they are lacking in fellow "Neurotic Constitution (1912) he claimed that three of feeling and social interest. They approach the problems of Freud's "fundamental views" were erroneous. The first was occupation, friendship and sex without the confidence that the "hbido is the motive force" behind neurosis; that they can be solved by cooperation." Or to take a rather it was a "neurotic goal." The second and third were more specific analysis: narcissism­signifies a "lack of social the notion of the sexual etiology of neurosis and the im­ interest" and "self­confidence." The person "has not learned portance of infantile wishes. For Adler these "infantile to do justice to the tasks with which he is confronted." wishes already stand under the compulsion of the imag­ The substance of the response of Freud to Adler pre­ inary goal."^ Neurosis develops out of "the feeling of un­ figured the response of the Frankfürt School to the neo­ certainty and inferiority and demands insistently a guid­ Freudians. Both objected to the substitution of everyday ing, assuring, and tranquilizing position of a goal." wisdom for the advances of psychoanalysis: the replace­ Later critiques by Adler would add little. In "The ment of an instinctual dynamic by social factors or interest, Difference between Individual Psychology and Psycho­ repression and sexuality by insecurity and goals, depth analysis" ( 1931 ), Adler wrote that Freud forgot the "whole­ psychology by surface psychology. For Freud and critical ness of the personality" "which [concept] represents the theory, to the point that sexuality, repression, libido are re­ essential contribution of Individual Psychology to .modem vised out of psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis is itself re­ 24 Social Amnesia 25 Reoisionism: The Repression of a Theory pressed. "Instead of analyzing sublimation," wrote Adorno face. From the beginning, Freud claimed, Adler never of the neo­Freudians, "the revisionists sublimated the evinced "any understanding of repression." Rather he analysis itself." The inner dynamic of individual and soci­ surrenderêd; to the'"jealous narrowness of the ego" which ety is severed and replaced by a mechanical model of .the was unwilling to acknowledge its own unconscious.®" In individual adjusting or maladjusting to values, norms, the New Introductory Lectures Freud restated some of goals, and so on. These "values" and "norms" are not ex­ theSe objections: no matter what the case is, the Adlerians amined as the coin of a repressive society, but àre traded will declare that thejnotive is the wish to overcome in­ and exchanged at face value. feriority? While there is "something correct" in this' "a In the discussions in the Vienna Society that preceded small particle is taken for the whole." the break with Adler in 1911, Freud denounced the revi Adler's later thought succumbs to the worst of his sions. "The whole doctrine has a reactionary and retro­ earlier banalization. It is conventional, 'practical, and mor­ grade character." Instead of delving into the unconscious, alistic. "Our science ... is based on 'common sense...." Adler sticks to "surface phenomena, i.e. ego psychology," Common sens'e, the half­truths of a deceitful society, is and succumbs to the ego's own misconceptions. The égo's honored as the honest truths of a "frank world. "The insane denial of its own unconscious is transmuted into a theory. never speak in the language of common sense which repre­ Freud designated two objectionable features of Adler's sents the height of social interest.... If we contrast the work: an antisexual and a reductionist trendy. The first judgment of common sense with private judgment, we denies the sexual basis for neuroses, while the latter ignores shall find that the judgment of common sense is usually individual and distinct forms of psychic phenomenon; nearly right." He wrote in another book, "The purpòse of rather it asserts the "sameness of all neuroses," deriving the book is to point out how' the mistaken behaviòr of the them all from the identical wish for superiority. These individual affects the harmony of our social and communal were more than minor differences. Wilhelm Stekel's comr life; further, to teach the individual to recognize his own ment that Adler's contribution was merely a "deepening mistakes, and finally to show him how he may effect a and extension" of psychoanalysis was rejected out of hand harmonious adjustment to the communal life." by Freud. "When Stekel maintains he finds no contradic­ tion between these ideas and Freudian theory, I want to Thaf it was the socialist Adler and later liberal neo­Freud­ point to the fact that two of the participants do find a ians who rendered' the psychoanalysis of Freud apologetic contradiction, namely Adler and Freud."®'"' and conformist formulates the problem. In brief, the politi­ In The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement cal coütfent­and impact of the'work of Adlèr and the neo­ Freud further elaborated his objections to Adler. Adler Freudiâns were determined by the psychological and soci­ presented a theory which was compatible and familiar to ological concepts they, employed, not by their manifest the ego. He adopted the viewpoint, of the ego instead of political attitudes. Similarly, Freud's subversiveness is de­ ' uncovering the ego's own foundation. Freud did not siln^ rived from his concepts and not from his stated political ply reject "ego psychology" — and this becomes important opinions. This disjunction is absolutely crucial to recognize: later — but argued that psychoanalysis was iniique pre­ the disjunction between the political, social, and truth cisely in passing beyond the ego and exposing what was content of concepts and the political­social outlook of those previously taboo: sexuality, unconscious, libido. Adler using the concepts. They are' not identical; they often takes the "opposite view" and stays exclusively on the sur­ stand in contradiction. The apparent mystery of Marxists 27 Revisionism: The Repression of a Theory 26 Social Amnesia to conventional sexual morality or to approve "fiv the theory of the conservative Freud against means by which society attempts to arrange the practical Iv liberai Adler and his successors is founded on this S^"ots Tf sexuaUty in life. We can demonstrate wi4 ease that what the world calls its code of morals den^^ Zre sacrifices than it is worth.­ g' ments such as this, a favorite of left Freudians. It goe without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them m focietv where it allegedly does not exist: m the pnvacy of revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasti g the individual. Freud undid the primal bourgeois d^stmc­ tinn bSwL private and public, the individual and soci­ existen^i^^ one can overstate the socialism and liberal­ Ptv­ he unearthed the objective roots of the private subject ism of the Adlerians. It seems that !!ri,^söSal œSen. Fr'eud exposed the Ue thai subject bv the later 1920s, quickly shed what there was of his was inviolate; he showed that at every point it was Si^ilhst past and affinities. Moreover according o one left Adlerian, Adler in his later years became a bitter op­ ponent of the leftists among his adherents; them vi'ith compromising his teachings, and he i tSZssible to underline them.«® This seems to be re­ flectfd in the writings of Adlerians, which m genial show imagined S more, and often less, overt left oÖ idtbgy of the pAvate and a—m those of the Freudians. As remarked above, they faciiely defend society against the individual—hardly a liberal SS'SícepK tto Steche t'et^offidepoUtioal m^ng positioh. The interest in society is transformed into a de­ fense of society. From this perspective Freud is feared as trerdlaTieLtually is. "The attack t^rSoÄFre/d one Adlerian, "must also be seen as part of Freud s larger attack upon ethical standards and social interest gene ­ ÄnSlus«Äe™S iÄe.™ ^ the loyalties of Freud himself lay with modified repression even if his concepts did not. Critical theory thinks through these concepts; it values Freud as a no^ ideological thinker and theoretician of contradictions contradictions which his successors sought to escape an ÄS be recalled that in any c^e Freud was not msk In this he was a "classic" bourgeois rtiinker, while the revisionists were "classic" ideologues. The greatness of Freud," wrote Adorno, "consists in that like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such con­ iI^S'"W?i^veÄ tt tapÔSbleT^ve oui support 28 Social Amnesia 29 Revisionism: The Repression of a Theory tradictions and disdained the assertion of "pretended har­ tion at points where classical economists naively designated "mony where the thing itself is contradictory. He revealed this antagonism." the antagonistic character of the social reality." '''' The business of harmonizing the unpleasant contra­ The characterization of Freud as a great bourgeois dictions of Freud was the joint task of Adler and the neo­ thinker illuminates the Marxist criteria foï evaluating non­ Freudians. The issue is not the direct influence of Adler revolutionary thinkers. A parallel can be established be­ on the .neo­Freudians, though that does not seem to be tween Marx's judgment on Ricardo and the post­Ricardians lacking, but a parallel effort: the logic and reasoning of and critical theory's appraisal of Freud and the post­ their argument. The close relationship has been noted by Freudians. To Marx, Ricardo was the classic and best many. Adler's loyal editor, Heinz L. Ansbacher, cites­ sev­ representative of bourgeois economics since he articulated eral textbooks indicating the aflinity. "It has to be said the contradictions of bourgeois society without glossing that Adler's influence is much greater than is usually ad­ them over. He was "scientifically honest" because unlike mitted. The entire neo­psychoanalytic school, including Malthus he did not seek to "accommodate" his science to Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan, is no less neo­Adlerian than outside "alien, external interests." Those who came .after it is neo­Freudian. Adler's concepts of sociability, self­ Ricardo sought to reconcile what Ricardo left antagonis­ assertion, self, and creativeness permeated the theories of tic. Hence, James Mill sought to systematize Ricardo^ the neo­analysts,"An article in an Adlerian­ journal, that is, to harmonize and neutralize him. "What he triés "Karen Horney and Erich Fromm in Relation to Alfred to achieve," wrote Marx, "is formal, logical consistency. Adler" argues the same point.^" Clara Thompson, herself a The disintegration of the Ricardian school 'therefore' be­ neo­Freudian, also established the parallels: that "man gins with him. With the master what is new and significant seeks to solve his problems by the­search for the way to develops vigorously amid the 'manure' of.^ contradictions feel superior" was "an important discovery" of Adler. "It out of the contradictory phenomena.... It is differeiit has much in cornmon with Horney's 'Idealized Image' with the disciple. His raw material is no longer reality, but and Sullivan's idea that maintaining an inadequate self­ the new theoretical form in which the master has sub­ system is a potential source for increasing anxiety." Fur­ "limated it." The disciple seeks "to explain away reality." ther, Horney "revised with new .emphasis Adler's idea of The necessity to synchronize the contradictions, in the importance of the patient's neurotic goals." In Homey, turn, is derived from a shift in the historical conditioiis as in Adler, the patient is sick not because of past events, which makes these contradictions more threatening; "sci­ but because in copihg with past events he or she estab­ entific" opinion is increasingly faced with the choice of lished poor 'goals and "false values." turning decisively critical or openly apologetic. Marx noted The critique of Freud that the neo­Freudians ad­ about two post­Ricardian economists, Bastiat and Carey, vanced concentrated on his nineteenth­century material­ that they understood that socialism and communism were isip that was allegedly inipervious to individual and social theoretically founded in classical political economy, which factors. To correct this, they, like Adler, added social had openly expressed the contradictions of society. "Both values and goals, notions pf self and self­image; these addi­ of them therefore find it necessary to attack, as a misun­ tions were to take into account a relationship between the derstanding, the theoretical expression which bourgeois individual and society which Freud had omitted. Critical economy has achieved historically in modern «conomic^", theory reverses this appraisal; Freud's "biologism," his .ap­ and to demonstrate the harmony of the relations of produc­ parent disregard of social values, is his strength. It consti­ 30 Sodai Amnesia 31 Revisionism: The Repression of a Theory tutes the critique of bourgeois individualism; Freud's mate­ particular to increase understanding of the real processes, rialism peels back and away the social "norms" and "values" that is to say, meta­psychologically it says nothing. But it to find the inner social dynamic. It is necessary, wrote Max is easy to believe that one is saying something meaningful Horkheimer, to follow Freud's biological materialism, "to in using it." stick to Freudian' orthodoxy in this fundamental sense." ** The "sub­individual and pre­individual factors" that Exactly what has been called the contribution of Adler define the individual belong to the realm of the archaic and the neo­Freudians, the discovery of self or person­ ahd biological; but it is not a question of pure nature. ality,"*® is the loss of the critique of the individual. The Rather it is second nature: history that has hardened into Freudian concepts exposed the fraud of the existence of nature. The distinction between nature and second native the "individual." To be absolutely clear here: the Freudian if unfamiliar to most social thought is vital to critical concepts exposed the fraud, not so as to perpetrate it, but theory. What is second nature to the individual is accumu­ undo it. That is, unlike the mechanical behaviorists, the lated and sedimented history. It is history so long unlib­ point was not to prove that the individual was an illusion; erated — history so long ihonotonously oppressive — that rather it was to show to what extent the individual did not it congeals. Second nature is not simply nature or history, yet exist. To critical theory, psychoanalysis demonstrates but frozen history that surfaces as nature.^® the degree to which the individual is de­individualized by 'Urflike the revisionists Marcuse holds to Freud's quasi­ society. It uncovers the compulsions and regressions that \ biological concepts, but more faithfully than Freud him­ maim and mutilate the individual. From this perspective self— and against Freud, unfolds them. The revision­ the formulations of the revisionists are already conces­ ists introduce history, a social dynamic, into psychoanalysis sions to liberal ideology. from, as it were, the outside — by social values, norms, When the revisionists do confront the ailment of the goals. Marcuse finds the history inside the concepts. He individual they imagine it can be healed by mere invoca­ interprets Freud's "biologism" as Second­nature, petrified tion. Instead of dissecting the self to search for the ihternal history. The chapter in Eros and Civilization "The His­ and social injury, they appeal to its goodness and whole­ torical Limits of the Reahty Principle" is a historical read­ ness. Freud's analysis moves on another plane. Freud un­ ing of Freud's concepts. Marcuse attempts to show that dermines, wrote Marcuse, "one of the strongest ideological the "repressive organization of the instincts" is "due to fortifications of modem culture — namely, the notion of exogenous factors"— exogenous in the sense that they are the autonomous individual." "His psychology does not focus not inherent in the 'nature' of the instincts but emerge on the concrete and complete personality as it exists in its from the specific historical conditions under which the private and public environment, because this existence instincts develop."*" conceals rather than reveals the essence and nature of the This is no arbitrary construct tacked onto Freud. personality." Rather he dissolves the personality and "bares Rather Freud himself in his metatheory — exactly what the sub­individual and pre­individual factors which (largely the neo­Freudians reject — derived the instinctual biology unconscious to the ego) actually make the individual: it from a prehistory of violence and force. This is where reveals the power of the universal in and over the in­ Freud comes closest to Nietzsche: civilization is a scar dividuals." "Personality," wrote Freud, .. is a loosely tissue from a past of violence and destruction. This is the defined term from surface psychology that does nothing in authentic materialistic and historical core of Freud's 32 Social Amnesia 33 Revisionism: The Repression of a ­Theory thought. "In the last resort it may be said that evçry in­ that higher nature, in this ego ideal or super­ego, the ternal compulsion which has been of service in the de­ representative of our relation to our parents. When we velopment of human beings was originally, that is, in the were little children we knew these higher natures, we ad­ evolution of the human race nothing but an external one," mired them and feared them; and later we took them into wrote Freud in a small essay "Thoughts for the Times on ourselves." War and Death." " In an extract from a letter that Jones As Freud himself knew this was the cutting and revo­ prints this is stated even more succinctly. Responding to lutionary edge of psychoanalysis: the refusal to accept an inquiry by Jones on the "true historical source of re­ social and individual values abstracted from the concrete pression," he wrote, "every internal barrier of repression struggle of men and women against themselves and nature. is the historical result of an external obstruction. Thus: Here critical theory follows Freud; he is revolutionary in the opposition is incorporated within [Verinnerlichung that his theory is critical and materialistic. Psychoanalysis der Widerstände]; the history of mankind is deposited in piills the shrouds off the ideology of values, iiorms, and the present­day inborn tendencies to repression."^® The ethics which is the stuff of Adler and the post­Freudians. whole of Marcuse's. historical reading of Freud is con­ For this very reason Freud considered the efforts of Lud­ tained in thesé sentences. wig Binswanger to add values to psychoanalysis "conserva­ For Freud the "higher" civilized "values" are grounded tive." The values that the neo­ and post­Freudians esteem in "lower" ones. Social, right is condensed social violence. are pieces of history scrubbed clean of their carnal and "Right is the might of a community. It is still violence, visceral origins. They prize them because they have for­ ready to be directed against any individual who resists gotten their corporal origins. Marcuse is correct: "Fromm it.... The only real difference lies in the fact that what revives all the time­honored values of idealistic ethics as prevails is no longer the violence of an individual, but that if nobody had ever demonstrated their conformist and of a community."*" Internalized in the individual, values repressive features." d.erive both from the archaic conflict of the sons against The tweiltieth­century modernizers confidently leave the father and from the reenactment of the Oedipal con­ Freud behind as a bad memory from the nineteenth cen­ flict. The superego is founded on guilt rooted in the failure tury. Yet as Adorno has remarked, it is the revisionists and of the uprising against the fàther­oppressor. "It must be modernizers who witlessly reproduce nineteenth­century said that the revenge of the deposed and re­instated father theories. In their insistence on the role of values, morals, has been very cruel; it culminated in the dominance of and milieu, they have upheld a dated, mechanical and authority." "The dead now become stronger than the liv­ pre­Freudian schema. There is nothing new or novel about ing had been, even as we observe it today in the destinies the idea of the individual as an autonomous monad which of men. What the father's presence had forjnerly prevented is affected by outer forces. they themselves now prohibited jn the psychic situation of 'subsequent obedience.' " pt in the less provocative While they [the revisionists] unceasingly talk of the language of The Ego and the Id: "We can give an an­ influence of society on the individual, they forget that no.t swer to all those whose moral sense has been shocked and only the individual, but the category of individuality is a who have complained that there must surely be a higher product of society. Instead of first extracting the individual nature in man. 'Very true,' we can say, 'and here we have from the social process so as then to describe the influence 34 Social Amnesia 35 Revisionism: The Repression of a Theory which forms it, an analytic social psychology is to reveal slightly different from those of critical theory, the political in the innermost mechanism of the individual the decisive meaning of the difference can be discerned in the Fromm­ social forces.®* Marcuse dispute. Both claim the dialectical construction. In this exchange, the nature and social consequences of The revisionists, rather, posit the individual as an in­ the "productive" "happy" individual that Fromm pre­ dependent unity which is influenced from without. In scribed were at issue. Marcuse, in his critique of the neo­ bestowing on the individual autonomy and values, the Freudians and Fromm, posed an either/or. Marcuse wrote neo­Freudians accumulate ideology. The critical path lies "Either one defines 'personality' and 'individuality' in elsewhere; it entails burrowing into the individual and in­ terms of their possibilities within the established form of dependent subject; it means penetrating the categories of civilization, in which case their realization is for the vast individual and society, not merely juggling them. The majority tantamount to successful adjustment. Or one de­ individual, before it can determine itself, is determined by fines them in terms of transcending content." This would the relations in which it is enmeshed. "It is a fellow­being "imply transgression beyond the established form of civi­ before it is a being." liza.tion, to radically new modes of 'personality' and 'in­ dividuality' incompatible with the prevailing ones To shift terms for a moment: critical theory pursues the This would mean 'curing' the patient to­become a rebel." dialectic of the particular and the imiversal. Following To Fromm these words are proôf that Marcuse forgot "his Hegel, it finds the whole is the truth; that is, the particular own dialectical position to the extent of drawing a black is formed and informed by this whole: society. To discover and white picture." Rather there are "important qualifica­ society within the psyche of the individual — the universal tions" to make. The "qualifications" are that there are ex­ within the particular — is to discover the objective nature ceptions. "I agree with Marcuse that contemporary capi­ of the prevailing subjectivity; it is to strip away the floss of talist society is one of alienation." "But I disagree entirely the autonomous individual. Exactly this was the program with the view that as a consequence these qualities [of of psychoanalysis; it revealed the sway of the universal — happiness and individuality] exist in nobody." Though, society — within and over the individual. Psychoanalysis, .to'be sure, they are "rare."®® wrote Horkheimer, "discovers the historical dynamics of Yet to the extent that one addressed oneself to the society in the microcosm of the monad, as it were, in the exceptions, as exceptions, to that extent the social whole is mental conflicts of the individual." ®® Psychoanalysis, wrote Repressed and forgotten. The alleged exceptions redefine Marcuse, "elucidates the imiversâl in the individual ex­ and reformulate the totality of the whole society: they perience. To that extent, and only to that extent, can restrict and delimit it. The inner and depth dynamic of the psychoanalysis break the reification in which human rela­ individual­society relation.is forsaken for a take­it­or­leave­ tions are petrified," it attitude; with skill and effort a destructive society can This was unacceptable to the neo­Freudians. The re­ be safely ignored. Marcuse notes that the neo­Freudian lation of the particular and the universal, the individual distinctions between good and bad, constructive and de­ and society, was not presented as one of mutual mediation; structive, productive and unproductive are "not derived rather they presupposed a simple model of individual­ from any theoretical principle, but simply takeri from the society interaction that operated on the surface. ïf their prevalent ideology.... The distinction is ... tantamount formulations on the individual­society relation seem only to the conformist slogan 'accentuate the positive.' Freud 36 Social Amnesia 37 Revisionism: The Repression'of a Theory was right; life is bad, repressive, destructive — but it isn't is shifted to the individual, persortal,. and psychological so bad, repressive, destructive. There are also constructive, which are qnly loosely in contact with society. The excep­ productive aspects. Society is not only this, but also that." tions that Fromm discovers and promotes are the excep­ Left out is how "under the impact of civihzation the two tions that liberal society has always flaunted as proof of aspects' are' interrelated in the instinctual dynamic itself, its essential beneficence; with a little effort at home anyone and how the one inevitably turns into the other by virtue can be spared a deadly and loveless world. Love and hap­ of this dynamic."®" The .point is not. that "love and happi­ piness are repairs for, the do­it­yourselfer. Yet to critical ness" are mere ideology. Crucial, wrote. Marcuse in a re­ theory these exceptions are confirmations of the very bru­ joinder to Fromm's response, is the "context" in which tality and injustice they ideologically leave behind. Sen­ they are defined and proclaimed. "They are defined by sitivity and warmth for the few, and poldness and brutality Fromm in terms of positive thinking which leaves the for the rest^.is «ne of the stock notions and realities that negative Where it is — predominant over the human ex­ feed the ongoing system. Love within a structure of hate istence." ®' and violence decays or survives only as resistance. The If the difference between the two positions seems like neo­Freudians escape the social contradictions that sink a minor philosophical quarrel, thè result is not. The year into the very bowels of the individual by repressing them. following Eros and Civilization (1955) and this exchange. Fromm published The Art of Loving, a book that suggests A half­truth is contained in the neo­Freudian revisions, as the distance separating the neo­Freudians from critical there is in all revisionism: the notion that reality is his­ theory. Fromm opens on the same note made in his re­ torical,, ¿and theory, if it is to be adequate to that reality, joinder to Marcuse; he acknowledges the negative power must also be historical and must also change. This returns of society and advises that the "art" of loving is rare. "In.a tO! the problem of orthodoxy and revisionism; again what culture in which these qualities are rare, ­the attainment of is in question in defining these terms within both Marxism the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement." and Freudiänism is not change per se, but the quality or Only on the last four pages does "an important question" content of change. There is no repudiation of change arise: "How can one act within the framework of existing psynhn^nalvsis.'Sut it is change that remains loval society and at the same time practice love?" Footnoting to the content of ^he nrig;inal concepts. This dialectical Marcuse, Fromm repeats his argument: "One must admit loyalty demands both fidelity to the critical edge of the that 'capitalism' is in itself a complex and constantly concepts and allegiance to a historical reality. changing structure which still permits a good deal of non­ To critical theory, psychoanalytic cpncepts undergo conformity and of personal latitude." However "people change in direct relation to their object: the individual. capable of love under the present system are necessarily Psychoanalysis as a theory is embedded in the same his­ the exceptions." ®® torical dynamic that created as well as mutilated the in­ The either/or that Fromm objected to in Marcuse is dividual. Adofno's statement­that the "prebourgeois order found in his own thought. In Marcuse it is defined by the does not yet know psychology, the oversocialized one political and social whole; its meaning derives from its knqws it no longer,'' ®® is incomprehensible if psychoanal­ place within the social contradictions — an either/or of ysis is abstracted from the fate of the individual. Psycho­ complying or resisting society. With the neo­Freudians it analvsis as a science of the individual survives exactly as 38 Social Amnesia 39 Revisionism: The Repression of a Theory long' as the individual survives: it is historically situated sist in the individual, no longer appear as decisive forces where" the individual is situated. It was unknown where of the social process." The psychology of the individual, the individual was yet to emerge as a semiprivate being, according* to Adorno, has lost its emphatic meaning and and it is becoming unknown and forgotten in the "post" substance.®® bourgeois order where the individual is superfluous. The Yet "That which is obsolete is not, by this token, story of the rise, fall, and forgetting of the individual is false." "" Insofar as the psychoanalytic concepts are wedded the tale of the rise, fall, and repression of psychoanalysis. to a "classic" capitalist model, they can throw into relief "Some of the basic assumptions of Freudian theoiy... the subsequent historical evolution of a psychic and extra­ have become obsolescent to the degree to which their ob­ psychic reality: the erosion and corrosion of the individual ject, namely the 'individual' as the embodiment of id, ego, and the immediate context of the individual, the family. and super­ego has become obsolescent in the social re­ These are decisive secondary changes of the transforma­ ality." tion from "free" to monopoly capital. The family is one of The ' individual of "classic" psychoanalysis managed the "cmcial terms. Social changes are refracted through to eke ân existence out of the relatively underdeveloped the" family and in turn aflFect the formation of the in­ market; this was the truth in the early bourgeois theories of dividual. The "mental" household of the individual is con­ the free individual and the free and competitive market structed out of the family household; as the latter shrinks — a truth, that is, which was confined to the middle to an efliciency unit, so does the former. classes. For the proletariat the notion of the free individual The single most important fact in the transformation was always a sham. With the centralization and syn­ of the family is the decay of the economic significance of chronization of the market, the individual lost its rela­ the father as the relatively independent provider and tively independent and private sources of sustenance. Fi­ power. As the father loses the remnants of independent nance capital, unlike liberalism, "abhors the anarchy of authority and individuality, the family loses its resiliency. competition and seeks organization." It wants direct If there are poiiitive and democratic features of this process, domination. The individual that had subsisted in the re­ there are also negative ones; the child ego once nurtured cesses and corners of the market is eliminated by or­ and scarred by the family is no longer nurtured but simply ganized capital. "Under monopoly capitalism the individual integrated. has only the chance of a short reprieve." As the early forms of competition pass into direct The actual weakness of the father within society, which in­ control and manipulation, the individual exits. "The social dicates the shrinkage of competition and free enterprise, power structure," Adomo wrote, "hardly needs the medi­ extends into the innermost cells of the psychic household; ating agencies of the ego and individuality any more.""" the child can no longer identify with the father, no longer Mediation turns into immediate command and sugges­ ^ can accomplish that internalization of the familial demands, tion; the very notion of individual psychology becomes which with all their repressive moments still contributed de­ problematic. "In a thoroughly reified society, in which cisively to the formation of the autonomous individual. virtually no immediate contacts exist between men and Therefore there is today actually nd longer the conflict be­ in which every man ... is reduced to a mere function of the tween the powerful family and the no less powerful ego; collective, the psychological processes, although they per­ instead the two, equally weak, are split apart,'^" 40 Social Amnesia 41 Revisionism: The Repression of a Theory Critical and psychoanalytic theory cannot be indifferent tained from the first, referring to the Adlerians, "Psycho­ to such developments — developments which here can analytic ego psychology differs radically from 'surface only be stated not demonstrated. The concepts of ego and psychologies.' " superego are themselves affected by the restructuring of Yet substantively, if not factually, the Adlerians may the family. The reformulating of the concepts, in particular be correct; the prevailing ego psvchologv. even in its psy­ to account for the ego, has in fact characterized much of choanalytic form, dnfis' nnt differ essentially from surface psychoanalytic and neopsychoanalytic literature ^or the psychology^For this reasonit is Adlerian (and pre­Freud­ past thirty years. It is hardly accidental that ego psy­ ian ) in its lack of interest in the libido and the imconscious. .chology — psychology that predominantly explores the Brleri'vl'rieinz Hartmann — probably the most important ego — emerges just when the ego as an autonomous unit of tke Freudian ego psychologists — detached the ego, or turns openly suspect. part of the ego, from the unconscious and libidinal drives; Yet the particular readings and interpretations, of the he dlibbed this the "conflict­free ego sphere." "Not every ego diverge widely. Ego psychology of the psychoanalytic adaption to "the environment, or every learning and matura­ revisionists took up the ego as a welcome reliçf from tion process, is conflict." The critical edge of Freud is Freud's excessive attention to the id and unconscious^, like bkmted: the aim of psychoanalytic therapy is "to help the rest of their program it promised to neutralize Freud's men achieve a better functioning synthesis and relation materialism and biologism. Furthermore this ego psy­ to the environment."^* As Adorno wrote of Anna Freud's chology fit in well with the newer psychologies of self, book it evinces "the reduf^^'on of psychoanalysis to a self­image, and so on. Critical theory reverses this ap­ conformist interpretation of the reality principle." In ego proach; the ego is studied not as an advance over orre­ psychology the same expurgation of psychoanalysis takes pression of psychoanalysis, but as an inner development of place as .with the neo­Freudians, who themselves draw p'^choanalvsis. Attention to the ego does not demand upoñ psychoanalytic ego psychology. As with Adler, the blindness toward the instinctual and social dimensions "socializing" of psychoanalysis, in seeking to account for that constrict and choke the ego. the reality of society, drains psychoanalysis of its blood. Where one dates the emergence of ego psychology With Hartmann, even if he is alert to the dangers of­ soci­ I depends on one's loyalties. The Adlerians would date it ologism; the "indwelling tendency" of his concepts, to I from Adler — "the father of ego psychology" " — and draw follow a recent critique, is one of "reduction." I direct and indirect hnks to the later developments of Those who laud these theoretical developments within I psychoanalysis and the neo­Freudians. "The first pioneer­ and outside psychoanalysis have told the unpleasant truth / ing steps toward ego psychology within psychoaijalysis pleasantly. Ego psychology grinds down the cutting edge / were taken by Alfred Adler." " The Freudians, of course, of psychoanalysis­ it refashions the outlandish quality of 'N are anxious to deny this origin, and usually date ego p^choanalysis In conte;nporary> garb. "Just as conflict is psychology from Freud's own later works, e.g.. The Ego the central notion in Freud's work, adaption is central in and the Id (1923), or from works by Freudians, especially Hartmann's.... Compared to Freud, Heinz Hartmann is Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanism of Defence another breed altogether; not a rejjolutionary, but a prac­ ^ (1937), Heinz Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Prob­ tical earth­bound traditionalist."(S) Another sympathizer ^ lem of Adaption (1939), and Herman Nunberg's "Ego candidly admits, "There was a radicalism, even a shocking Strength and Ego Weakness" (1939). As Hartmann main­ quality, to many of the early psychoanalytic formulations; 42 Social Amnesìa 43 Revisionism: The Repression of a Theory contemporary ego psychology has a tamer, more 'healthy­ phenomenon — the ego as dialectical. Within a positivist minded' quality." Or in a similar vein it has beeiTnoled consciousness, attention to ego psychology proceeded only that without the revisions which the neo­ and post­Freud­ at the cost of id psychology. It remained imprisoned in ians have brought to psychoanalysis, one mav doubt the either/or logic. Freud sought to retain both moments whether it could have been as attractive IrTlñlddÍSclas.«; and, moreover, foresaw clearly that a turn to ego psy­ Americans." ^ Finalîyr"ône theorist who draws the links chology would entail a renunciation of the specific gains of between psychoanalytic ego psychology, the neo­Freud­ psychoanalysis. Ego psychology formed the prehistory of ians, and the post­Freudians, sums up the contribution of psychdanalysis; hence ego psychology within psychoanal­ what he calls ego psychology's " 'great departure' from ysis must "have a different look" from nonpsychoanalytical classical doctrine." With Freud, the scope of the ego was ego psychology.**® A letter of Freud to Jung in 1909 is a "minimized" and was held in "low esteem." But "ego testament to Freud's insight, showing him keenly aware of psychology... paves the way for a positive appreciation the dangers of an either/or mentality, and of the threat — of the human ego." This is joined with the "rediscovery in Adler and Jung — of ego abstracted from depth psy­ and the rehabilitation of the old­fashioned idea of the self" chology. by the neo­Freudians."" Critical theory does not join the general approbation. We have already agreed that the basic mechanism of neuro­ The "positive appreciation" of the ego is the song and sogenesis is the antagonism between the instinctual drives— dance of social amnesia; it forgets the pain by whistling in the ego as the repressing [force], the libido as the repressed. the dark. What is crucial, however, is not to ignore the ... It is remarkable though, that we human beings find it so study of ^he ego, but to denounce the presupposition that difficult to focus attention equally on both of these opposing the study of the ego is inseparable from its praise. While drives.... Thus far I have really described only the repressed, undeniably there was a shift in the later Freud toward the which is the novel, the unknown, as Cato did when he sided ego, this was a shift that occurred within a psychoanalytic with causa'vieta. I hope'I have not forgotten that there also framework. The unconscious, libido, and so on, were not exists a victrix. Here Adler's psychology invariably sees only surrendered; rather they were explored within the ego it­ the repressing agency, and therefore describes the "sensi­ self. Freud did, in The Problem of Anxiety (1926), dis­ tivity," this attitude of the ego toward the libido, as the basic sociate himself from those psychoanalysts who, following cause of neuroses. Now I find you "On the same path ... that his earlier work, made into a Weltanschauung the theory is because I have not sufficiently studied the ego, you are run­ of "weakness of the ego in relation to the id." While Fretld ning the risk of not doing justice to the libido which I have eschewed all Weltanschauung, several pages latef one can evaluated."'' find a statement that seems luirepentant. "The act of re­ pression has demonstrated to üs the strength of the ego", Critical theory is löyal to both dimensions. It accepts and but it also bears witness at the same time to the ego's im­ studies psychoanalytic notions of the "wèak" ego; this, potence and to the uninfluenceable character of the in­ however, is situated in a social dynamic that turns into an dividual instinctual impulse in the id."®^ instinctual one."* A repressive society drives the ego to re­ Adorno has remarked that the defect of neo­Freudian gression and unconsciousness so as to irrationally subsist. and positivist thought is that it is unable to comprehend Critical consciousness and the autonomous ego, inextrica­ the ego as simultaneously a psychic and an extrapsychic bly linked, dissolve under the impact of a massified society. 44 Social Amnesia 45 Revisionism; The Repression of a Theory Marcuse uses a term of Franz Alexanders, "corporealiza­ assuage' the pain of the unfamiliar: psychoanalysis. The tion of the psyche," to suggest the psychic process: the notions that he, and the neo­Freudians, would champion translation of psychic energy into "uriconscious automatic were borrowings from everyday prattle: the self, values, reactions." "The reality principle asserts itself through a norms, insecurities, and the like. They were offered as shrinking of the conscious ego in a significant direction: antidotes to Freud's illiberalism. Yet just this constituted the autonomous development of the instincts, is frozen, and Freud's strength: his refusal to bow to reigning wisdom; their pattern is fixed at the childhood level." his exploration of a tabooed and erotic psychic under­ The psychoanalytic concept of narcissiism captures ground that officially did not exist. The subjectivity and the reality of the bourgeois individual; it expresses the social factors the revisionists added to correct Freud's ex­ private regression of the ego into the id under the sway of cesses did the trick; they brought psychology back into the public domination. Adorno considers it one of Freud's fold. "most magnificent discoveries." It is no accident, accord­ ing to Adorno^ that Freud turned to ego psychology and narcissism in such works as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego; that is, in direct reference to mass'and social phenomena.®^ The drive of this small work —which is­one of the most cited by the Frankfurt School — is to show the inseparable relationship between the individual and mass psychology. "From the very first individual psy­ chology ... is at the same time social psychology as well." Narcissism comprehends the dialectical isolation of the bourgeois individual — dialectical in that the isolation that damns the individual to scrape along in a private world derives from a public and social one. The energy that is directed toward oneself, rather than toward jothers, is rooted in society, not organically in the individual. "Nar­ cissism means in psychoanalysis: libidinally cathecting of one's own ego instead of the love for other men. The mechanism of this shift is not the least the society that puts a premium on the hardening of each individual — the naked will to self­preservation."®" Narcissism is the stuff not only of the irrational mass movement but of the irra­ tionality of everyday life, because it is unconscious. The ego regresses, making "its supreme sacrifice, that of con­ sciousness." If the history of psychology is the history of forgetting, Adler was the first, but by no means the last, to forget. His revision of psychoanalysis was a homemade reme.dy to 72 Social Amnesia the self­actualizing personality, Maslow, advice on how to / defeat the Russians, praise of the capitalist entrepreneur, / and more. He tells us in Eupsychian Management, a book i an admirer jsalls "Maslow's reply to Das, Kapital"" how. IV to figure out whether a job with a higher salary which en­ tails leaving one's home and friends is worth the move. "I have asked myself how much money is it worth to me to Negative Psychoarialysis and Marxism give up my friendship with my best friends...­. If, for instance, I arbitrarily assign a value, of $1,000 a year tOL having an intimate friend (which is certainly a naodest figure), then this new job which has been »offered at a A beggar dreamt of a millionaire. As raise of, let's say, $2,000, or $3,000 or $4,000 a year simply he awoke he met a psychoanalyst. The is not what it looked like at first. I may actually be losing latter explained to him the millionaire value, or dollar value."*® This is the thinking, language, Was a symbol for his father. "Curious," and style of domination. Values are dolte values, how r

73 74 Social Amnesia 75 Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism task is not to homogenize the insokibles, but, as it were, subjective, human, and philosophical content of Marxism. to culture the differences. The efforts of Lukács and Korsch, and after them others such as the Frankfurt School, were toward salvaging this To culture the differences entails pursuing two different lost dimension of Marxism: subjectivity. logics simultaneously, the logic of society and the logic of The attempt of Marxists to "think Freud" has been the psyche. As noted in the preface, the history of this defined by the continued failure of the European revolu­ effort has not been a happy one. Those seeking to work tion, or the "continued success of bourgeois society. The out the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis objective conditions for revolution seemed "ripe" long ago. have not been immune to the intellectual division of labor "For the revolutionary conditions have always been ripe." ® that severs the life nerve of dialectical thought. The vari­ The weak hnk in Marxism was the iron link in bourgeois ous efforts to interpret Marx and Freud have been plagued society: subjectivity. "In the fateful months after Novem­ by reductionism: the inability to retain the tension between ber 1918, when the orgarfized political power of the bour­ individual and society, psychology and political economy.® geoisie was smashed and outwardly there was nothing else Even Wilhelm Reich, the most dedicated of the Marx­ in the way of the transition from capitalism to socialism," Freud theoreticians, did not escape reductionism. What is wrote Karl Korsch about the brief revolutionary period in necessary is the preservation without reification of this post­World War I Germany, "the great chance wás never tension. "Psychoanalysis and historical materialism must seized because the socio­psychological preconditions for co­exist." * They are fractured pieces of a fractured society. its seizure were lacking." ® It was these "socio­psychological The reduction of a social constellation to an individual and preconditions" — the subjective moment — that became instinctual one is as inadmissible as the reverse, the oblitera­ the focus for the left Freudians such as Reich. tion of the individual in a supraindividual sociology. More From the start the pursuit of subjectivity within West­ precisely this supraindividual sociology is the reverse; ern Marxism was couched in the negative: it was directed psychologism and sociologism are different sides of the toward fathoming why subjectivity did not show, why the coin of exchange value. "great chance" Was lost, aiid bourgeois society kept grind­ The two logics, the logics of society and psyche, begin ing on. It sought to explain, as it wère, why there was to intersect in the 1920s because the logic of Marxism it­ "no" subjectivity, and, at the same time, to awaken the self was then in the process, of being rethought and re­ subject to thought and action. To do this necessitated ex­ formulated. The story of this rethinking of Marxism can ploring the nature of the subject, not dismissing it, as doc­ only be suggested here; it was spurred by the collapse of trines of automatic, mechanical social change did and do. the Marxist party and movement — especially German Insofar as these doctrines are subject­Zess, they could not Social Democracy — in the years following World War 1. comprehend the dialectic of social change. Reich wrote The analysis of this collapse and failure was inseparable in an autobiographical account of an abortive demonstra­ from an analysis and critique of the failure of Marxism it­ tion of some two hundred Communists in Vienna in 1928: self. As crystallized in the works of Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch this critique suggested that the lethal defect These two hundred Communists believed that when industry in the prevailing Marxism was its "mechanical" or "auto­ objectively collapses, when wages are objectively reduced matic" quality; it had conceived of social change as the and when the simplest freedom strivings are objectively changing of blueprints. Exactly what was lacking was the repre.ssed — that these things must automatically and self­ 76 Social Amnesia 77 Negative Psychoanaíysis and'Marxism evidently incite the people to revolutionary indignation. The If Lukács grants the existence of a psychic dimension, whole of revolutionary politics in Germany and Aystria until it is only so as to dismiss it. He strictly separates a philosophi­ 1933 was built upon this idea. This thinking was wrong." cal from a psychic dimension, giving a political reading of the psychid one as contingent and empirical; as such he As is well known, to the Russian Communist orthodoxy considers it the source for revisionism and opportunism. the imofficial project, of Western Marxism of revitalizing a To Lukács a psychological consciousness is an immediate lost moment of Marxism — subjectivity and­philosophy — and positivist one — a consciousness that remaiils within smacked' of heresy. Those who were part of this effort the grip of bourgeois society; it lacks theory. "Class con­ such as Lukács and Korsch were forced to submit or forced sciousness is identical with neither the psychological con­ out. The Russian reaction to Freud and Freudians, after sciousness of individual members of the proletariat nor the an initial period, was no more friendly.® What is more, (mass­psychological) consciousness of the proletariat as a the conscientious defenders of Soviet Marxism discovered whole; but it is, on the contrary, the sense become, con' an internal relationship between the heretics. W. Jurinetz, scious of the historical role of the class." It is exactly revi­ in one of the first substantial Russian critiques of Freud, sionism and opportunism that confused the two. "Oppor­ in 1925, mentioned Lukács's errors and in the'samé breath tunism mistakes the actual psychological state of conscious­ denounced the Freudians for subjectivity. Jurinetz charged ness of the proletariat for the class consciousness of the tl^e Freudians with subjectivity, decadence, and aestheti­ proletariat." It seeks to "reduce class consciousness.. .of cism; he observed that the subjective and intellectual style the proletariat to the level of the psychologically given." " of the aesthete was also "noticeable in Lukács.... All his To Marxists schooled in psychoanalysis, it is this very other errors have their roots here."" cleavage between.the dimensions of history and psychology Jurinetz was on to something; yet the similarity ôf the that seems questionable; it openly ignores any dialectic efforts is as important as the distinction. If the similarity between a psychological and historical consciousness. If is .derived from an exploration of subjectivity, the distinc­ this is the heretical introduction of subjectivity into Marx­ tion is defined by two dimensions of subjectivity: the ism it remains too traditional; stripped of its psychic con­ philosophical (or historical) and the psychological. Neither tent it is a paper­thin subjectivity. Lacking a psychic di­ Lukács nor .Korsch studied this second dimension. The mension, the subject turns abstract, distant from the actual above citation from Korsch on the absent "socio­psycho­ carnal and psychic individual. To be sure, these formula­ logical preconditions" for revolution is misleading; these tions were also Lukács's strength: the deliberate repudia­ preçonditions are interpreted by Korsch in nonpsychologi­ tion of a nonhistorical psychological consciousness bearing cal or only neopsychological terms. According to him, the imprint of bourgeois society. But it was also his weak­ what is lacking is the "belief" in the practicability of ness; the nondialectical flight from the empirical and psy­ socialism; this in turn is derived from the "backwardness chológical subject exhausted itself in bad abstractions. The of socialist theory vis­a­vis all problems of the practical abyss between the abstractions and the empirical reality realization" of socialism.'" Even within the heresy, Korsch could only be bridged by the party. Hence it has recently here remains orthodox in the allegiance to a nonpsycho­ been argued that Lukács's fetish of the party follows from logical dimension of subjectivity. The psychic dimènsion. his neglect of the psychological subjective moment.*® is lost or, at least, diluted in its translation into theoretical Critical theory does not know a sharp break between questions on the practical content of socialism. these two dimensions; they are neither rendered identical 78 Social Amnesia 79 Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism nor absolutely severed. In its pursuit of this dialectical A convergence takes place between the liberal psycho­ relationship it has resisted the two forms of positivism that analytic revisions of the neo­Freudians and the antipsycho­ lose the tension: psychologism and sociologism. If the spe­ analytic Marxism. Both suffer from sociologism, the former cific tendency of bourgeois and liberal thought has beén unwittingly and the latter knowingly. The Russian ortho­ toward psychologism — the Teduction of social concepts doxy exorcised subjectivity; the psychoanalytic revisionists to individual and psychological ones — the specific tend­ deliberately add it. Both, however, lose it. Soviet Marxism, ency of socialist and Marxist thought has been toward the dismissing subjectivity from the start, ends with a con­ opposite: the reduction of individual concepts to a desic­ tentless notion of society. The neo­Fieudians in their eager­ cated notion of history and society. Both flatten out a ness to find the tole of society do not get past the surface society­individual antagonism, the former in favor of an and end with a vapid notion of society. Again, regardless abstract notion of the individual, the latter, of an abstract of their own politics, it has been Fieud and his followers notion of society. To be sure, psychologism remains false who, in their stubborn pursuit of the genesis and structure in all its forms, while sociologism at least pays respect to of the individual psyche, have testified to the power of society as the determining structure. "In the face of tlve society in and over the individual. This is the authentic present impotence of the individual — all individuals — dialectic of psychoanalysis; apparently the opposite of the what is primary in explaining social processes 'and tend­ universal (society), psychoanalysis rediscovers society in encies is society and sciences concerned with society: the individual monad. The critical edge of psychoanalysis sociology and economics."*® is rooted in this dialectic: it pierces the sham of the iso­ Yet if sociologism does not err at first in underestimat­ lated individual with the secret of its socio­sexual­biologi­ ing the force and power of society, it errs at second. In cal substrâtum. "Freudian psychology does not so much sidestepping the psychic structure of the individual, it capitulate to the appearance of individuality, as it funda­ photographs without penetrating society; it does not peel mentally destroys it as only a philosophical and social away so as to reach society's deeper reign over the in­ concept can do." Depth psychology, by its own logic, dividual. It gets the picture but not the essence. A specific turns into sociology and history. " problem for Western Marxism is the perpetuation of an Sociologism prematurely cúts off an exploration of obsolete social system; to be analyzed is why a revolu­ subjectivity in the name of society, which it can no longer tionary subject does not act or appear. "Since the market imderstand without subjectivity; critical theory, drawing economy was shattered, and patched up provisionally until upon psychoanalysis, siijcs into subjectivity till it hits bot­ the next crisis, its laws do not suffice­ for its explanation; tom: society. It is here where subjectivity devolves into other than by psychology, in which the objective compul­ objectivity; subjectivity is pursued till it issues into the sion is continually and ne\Vly internalized, it is not under­ social and historical events that preformed and deformed standable either why men passively adjust to a condition the subject. This constitutes the sübject­object dialectic of unchanged destructive irrationality or why they enroll — a dialectic which is a violation of the logic of positivism, in movements whose contradiction to their own interests shared by both psychological behaviorists and their op­ is in no way difficult to perceive." " Sociologism underesti­ ponents, 'humanist" psychologists. This positivist logic mates the primacy of society by not exploring its depth alternatively proscribes subjectivity (as nonscientific) or relations with and over the individual; it banalizes society recommends it (as nonscientific, a human value). Both to a surface phenomenon." variants of positivism accept a vacant notion of the subject. 80 Social Amnesia 81 Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism only they appraise it differently. Before the gaze of critical from becoining a subject, hinders it just so from knowledge theory the illusion that the subject is purely subjective be­ of the object." This overpowering by a brtital reality comes transparent; it sees through to the objective contenf which has left the individual numb and dumb is to be of subjectivity. "Subjectivity itself is to be brought to ob­ overcome, at ­least in thought and theory, before subjec­ jectivity; its movements are "not to be banished from­cog­ tivitj' can be realized: insight into the very material and nition." " To bring subjectivity to objectivity entails teaching social conditions that mutilate it. Before the individual it how to speak about what it bespeaks: society and history. can exist, before it can become an individual, it must Such an effort is an objective, theory of subjectivity. recognize to what extent it does not yet exist. It must shed An objective theory of subjectivity is "twice" objec­ the illusion of the individual before becoining one. Sub­ tive; not only does it explore subjectivity till it reveals its jectivity must be brought to objectivity so it can be realized. social and objective determinants, but it reveals a society This is thè nub of the matter. "Criticism has plucked the that had administered the subject ovit of existence. Again, imaginary flower from the chain not so that man will wear Marxism, at least since Lukács and Korsch, explores sub­ the chain without any fantasy or consolation, but so that jectivity; but a (revolutionary) subject that does not ap­ he will shake off the chain and cull the living flower." pear. Hence the theory of subjectivity, is also a.theory of A further clarification: smuggled into the term subjec­ bourgeois society that eradic?ited­the subject. The individual tivity, as used in this chapter, is a crucial ambiguity; it is deindividualized, rendered subject­less. "In bourgeois seems to refer at the same time to two very different society capital is independent and has individuality, while phenomena: the proletariat as a (potential) subject of the living peirson is dependent and has no individuality." history ánd the bourgeois subject as the problematic in­ A critical theory of subjectivity to be adequate to this dividual tossed up by the market. This ambiguity is one reality is consciously contradictory; it pursues subjectivity óf reality, and is not merely conceptual; the very problem till, so to speak, it disappears; its psychoanalysis is nega­' is defined by the fact that the specific qualities of the pro­ tive: a theory of a subject­less subject — or a not yet lib­ letariat which, to follow Lukács, steer it in the direction of erated subjectivity. class consciousness .are (temporarily?) overlaid with spe­ .Such a theory is to be distinguished from positive cific bourgeois properties that dissolve class consciousness. psychologies — theories of ego formation, identity, growth, The concepts do span the classes, but this is caused by the and so on, that assume what is yet to be created: the­ in­ failure of the specific proletariat properties to emerge. The dividual. Negative psychoanalysis is psychoanalysis in the class with "radical chains" is also restrained by a bour­ era of synchronized, capitalism; it is the theory qf the in­ geois chain that gives it freedom of movement without dividual in eclipse. It is psychoanalysis just to its own freedom. field of inquiry, the individual, in the period of the disin­ An example may sharpen this. At first it may seem tegration of the ego tinder the impact of a massified society. misleading to, speak of the eclipse of the individual as if .Negative psychoanalysis is "twice" objective in that it this were true of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat traces at first the objective content of subjectivity, and — an eclipse of subjectivity per se. Theoretically, in Marx­ second, discovers there is only an objective configuration ism, the proletariat was never composed of (bourgeois) to subjectivity. Today there is "no" subjectivity. individuals; this was a luxury reserved for the wealthier. Here as elsewhere thé way out is through, "The over­ However, again, the very problem is that the form of in­ powering of the subject by the object, which hinders it dividuality that prevails in the bourgeoisie is not confined 82 Social Amnesia 83 Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism to the bourgeoisie; rather it seeps into the proletariat and whether alongside the socio­historical Thermidor that can cripples the process of the proletariat which seeks to con­ be demonstrated in all past revolutions, there is not also stitute itself as the historical subject. a psychic Thermidor ... Is there perhaps in the individuals Why this process occurs, and how reversible or deeply themselves already a dynamic at work that internally embedded it is in the proletariat, cannot be discussed here. negates possible liberation and gratification and that sup­ Important only is that the concepts that seem to blur the ports external forces of denial?"®® Or as Marcuse put it distinction between classes are not to be explained away, elsewhere: or denied, by the mere affirmation that capitalism is axlass society. This is true, but the concepts gain their truth from In every revolution there seems to have been a historical the dynamic of capitalism that within a class structure works moment when the struggle against domination might have to level; concretely, this means that late capitalism tends been victorious — but the moment passed. An element of to erase the specific and unique secondary qualities of the self­defeat seems to be involved in this dynamic ( regardless proletariat that seem to be the precondition for class con­ of the validity of such reasons as the prematurity and sciousness. A proletariat that is partially composed of bour­ inequality of forces).®® geois individuals is undoubtedly a contradiction, but it is a contradiction of reality, not simply of concepts. , It should be noted to what extent the reformulations that sought to introduce into Marxism a psychological moment Within the revolutionary theory as derived from Lukács of subjectivity, and implicitly or explicitly were critiques the political content of negative psychoanalysis is found; of a vulgar automatic Marxism, were enunciated by Freud to the point that a subject does not develop, the revolu­ himself. Evidently Freud was not arguing from a left posi­ tionary process is thrown into doubt, for the shift and tion; if he could write that the Russian Revolution was a reversal of bourgeois history does not take place. An auto­ "tremendous experiment," a "message of a better future," matic process — that is a mechanical one without a subject he could also state: "In spite of all my dissatisfaction with — can only update the existing society. To change direc­ the present economic system I have no hope that the road tions necessitates a historical and conscious intervention.®* pursued by the Soviets will lead to improvement. Indeed What does not derive from Lukács is an adequate explora­ any such hope that I may have cherished has disappeared tion of the failure of the subject's intervention. This may in this decade of Soviet rule. I remain a liberal of the old in part stem from the other dimension of subjectivity: the school." ®® psychological. Aside from the external social and material Yet his critique of communism had two parts. First, he conditions, counterrevolution may be embedded in the denied that the destructive drive could be practically revolutionaries themselves — a form of psychic reification. eradicated.®® The other objection, however, was directed Marcuse has stated this most emphatically: past revolu­ against the narrow materialistic base of Marxism. To tions seem to proceed to a certain point "from which the Freud the superego was rooted in parents, earlier educa­ transition to new, not only quantitatively, but qualita­ tion, etc.; it was a tool of the past anchored in the present. tively difi^erent conditions would perhaps proceed. At this point the revolution is usually vanquished and domination It seems likely that what are known as materialist views of is internalized, reestablished, and continued at a higher history sin in underestimating this factor. They brush it level." Following Freud, "We can raise the question aside with the remark thàt human "ideologies" are nothing 84 Social Amnesia 85 Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism other than the product and superstructure of their contem­ critique of social democracy as it perpetuates the father­ porary economic cqnditions. This is true, but very probably ßon relation and, further, is a defense of "councils," .which not the whole truth. Mankind never lives entirdy in the create a new ethos of brothers (and sisters?) and finally present, The past.,. lives on in the ideologies of the super­ abolish the father­son society. "All previous organiza­ ego and yields only slowly to the influences of the present tions v^;er^ organized from the leader down; the organiza­ and to new changes; and so .long as it operates through the tioJEial pyramid provided the father­son relation with an super­ego it plays a powerful part in human life, independ­  ideal form The new organization — the council — ently of economic conditions.'^^ grows out of the masses, out of the »base, and from the base it receives the impulse ancj invisibly psychic system: the The provocative extract of a 1937 letter that Jones pub­ relatipn of the brother;" lished should be" considered here; in it Freud responds to Yet Federn was pessinjistic about the possibility that a criticism of his comprehension of Marx. "I know that thß. new ethos would be^ victorious; too much of the old my comments on Marxism are no evidence either of a society worked against it. Like Reich after him, Federn thorough knowledge or of a correct understanding of the stressed the importance of the family in implanting the writings of Marx and Engels. I have since learned — rather patriarchal attitudes, and the difliculty of extirpating them. to my satisfaction — that neither of them has,denied the "The congruence of the family with the fallen patriarchal­ influence of ideas and super­ego factors. That invalidates based state of the Kaiser and its incongruence with an the main contrast between Marxism and psychoarialysis organization of brothers is the only authentic, psychological which I had believed to exist." problem in the construction of a non­patriarchal order of Probably the first and most directly political effort tò society." The very depths of this anchpring left Federn in seek out the psychological grounds of self­defeat belongs doubt as to whether a society of brothers can 'be yet to Paul Federn's work from 1919 Zur Psychologie der Revo­ achieved. He closed on a pessimistic note: "The father­ lution: Die vaterlose Gesellschaft, an interpretation of thè son complex has suffered the greatest defeat. Yet from the contemporary German revolution. Federn, who was a stu­ farnily education and inherited feeling it is deeply rooted dent of Freud and a socialist,®" suggested that a deeply in mankind; and it probably this time also will prevent a embedded patriarchal authoritarian attitude which is en­ complete victory of the fatherless society." cased even in socialist organizations has kept bourgeois Federn's analysis was not pursued, if only because the society on its tracks. "The general father complex was re­ political situation would not, again lend itself to a favorable sponsible for the < fact that the social order has *so long psychoanalytic interpretation of a revolutionary upsurge. been able to maintain itself." If this complex is not dis­ Rather the­accent fell on a psychological mechanism that solved, revolutionary progress is in doubt. "It is very pos­ sustained the ongoing capitalist system and blocked class sible that despite thç devastation by the war, the patriarchal consciousness and the historical subjectivity. As with Fe^ order will be able to solve the technical problems of re­ dern, a specific relationship was emphasized, the authori­ building a new economy if the psychic preconditions,, the tarian one of father and son; with Reich, Fromm, the unconscious subsumption under the father­son relation, Frankfurt School, t^iis­was generalized into the notion of does not cease." "character." For Marxists character seemed to concretely What is.unique in Federn's work is that he translated express the mediation between the individual instincts and these formulations into the political reality; his 'woek is a tjie social necessities. 86 Social Amnesia 87 Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism In Reich's and Fromm's work of the early 1930s, char­ is the character of their members, is constantly renewed acter is a precipitation of the intersection of the individual in connection with their role in the economic process." ®' psyche and society; a significant vehicle for imprinting Or as Horkheimer put it later, "Force in its naked form is character is the family. Psychoanalytic characterology, in no way sufficient to explain why a dominated class so wrote Fromm in a 1932 essay "Psychoanalytic Charac­ long endures the yoke; it is especially insufficient in­periods terology and Its Relevance for Social Psychology," first when the economic apparatus is ripe for a better system published in the Frankfurt School journal, "can serve as of production, the culture is in dissolution, and the prop­ the starting point for a social psychology that will show erty relations and existing forms of life in general overtly how the character traits common to most members of a become a fetter to social forces." To understand this one society are conditioned by the distinctive nature of that need know the "psychic composition of men in various society. This social influence on character formation oper­ social groups." The family is again ­crucial. "The fámily as ates first and foremost through the family." Freud over­ one of the moàt important agents of education concerns looked, Fromm wrote in the Frankfurt ­School collection itself with the reproduction of human character... and Autorität und Familie (1936), that "the family in the first largely imparts to human characters the authoritarian atti­ place represents particular social content, and through its tudes' on which the bourgeois order depends." ®® mediation... in the production of socially necessary men­ The* notion of character was carried through to later tal structure lies its most important social function." Or Frankfurt School works, most notably the more académie as Reich wrote in Character Analysis (1933); "Every so­ The Authoritarian Personality. If the questions posed dif­ cial order creates those character forms \s^ich it needs for fered from the earlier ones, both the answers settled on its preservation." In other words, "The character structure character structure ànd the family as instruments of social ... is the crystallization of the sociological process of a mediation — one in the context of a delayed revolution, given epoch."®® According to Geschlechtsreife, Enthalt­ the other in the context of potential fascism. However, in samkeit, Ehemoral (1930), the family is the specific instru­ The Authoritarian Personality the sociological and political ment of education of bourgeois society; "It is the mediator element seemed to be hidden. The danger of psychologism between the economic structure of bourgeois society and loomed. Adorno in his scientific "autobiography" noted a its ideological superstructure." ®" misconception âbout The Authoritarian Personality which The Frankfurt School followed the drift of this analy­ because of "its emphasis was no't entirely unjustified: that sis: to search out psychic mechanisms, such as character the authors had sought to analyze anti­semitism, together structure, that thwarted class consciousness. Horkheimer with fascism solely subjectively, and had fallen into the wrote in 1932, "That men preserve economic relations error that political­economic phenomena "were primarily which they have outgrown in force and need, instead of psychological." But, responded Adorno, "in contradiction replacing them through a higher and more rational form to certain economic orthodoxy" they had not been "inflex­ of organization, is possible only because the actions of a ible" toward psychology, but sought it as a "moment of liumerically significant social stratum are not determined enlightenment.... Yet we have never doubted the pri­ by cognition, but by an instinctual motive force that falsi­ macy of objective factors over psychological.... We savi' fies consciousness. In no way do mere ideological maneuvers socio­psychology as a subjective mediation of an objective form the root of this historically important moment... on social system: without its mechanism the subject would the contrary, the psychic structure of these groups, that not be able" to be held on the leash." ®" 88 Social Amnesia 89 Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism The notion of character as a necessary form of de­ psychologism; the reduction of social analysis to individual hiimanization distinguishes the Frankfurt School notion analysis,,révolu tion to therapy. Crude mechanical Marxism from that employed by the neo­Freudians and others. With found no place for the subject; it patterned social change the Frankfurt School, character participates in the dialectic on a quksi­automatic process. This was .the inner relation­ of "second nature"; it is historical as the product of a spe­ ship between the German Social Democracy and the Stalin­ cific society; and it is "natural" as an unconscious phe­ ist orthodoxy, and this is why both resisted the reinterpre­ nomenon which inexorably follows laws and patterns. tation .of Marxism centered around Lukács and Korsch Character, like personality, is a form of unfrepdom.^" that sought to save a philosophicál subjective dimension. Against the neo­Freudians, who consider character a har­ The introduction of a psychic dimension of subjectivity monious totality. Adorno interprets it as a result of a series seemed to suggest that the ills of society could be curéd of "shocks" inflicted on the individual; it ¡bespeaks oppres­ by curing the ills of the, individual. The suspicion was not sion and violence, not growth, choice, and values. "The entirély unfounded. The critique of Jurinetz that found a character which they, the revisionists, hypostatize is to a relationship between Lukács and the Freudians was in­ much greater extent the result of such shocks." The totality spired by a book by Aurel­ Kolnai, Psychoanalysis and of the character is false: "One could almost­call it ß. system Society, that reveled in psychologisms. "Anarchism is the of scars, which are only integrated — and. never entirely faithful social projection of the uterus." "Bolshevism is — under suffering." Or character is the result of ''the re­ characterized by the withdrawal of inhibitions and re­ ification of real experience." pressions." Character is another form of the suppression and Moreover, psychologism surfaced continually within molding of the autonomous individual in bourgeois society. psychoanalysis. Fritz Wittels presented to the Vienna Soci­ It refers to the same process that renders narcissism the ety a psychological analysis of a Russian revolutionary prevailing form of individualism: the egp regresses into who had recently attempted a political assassination; ab­j unconsciousness; it becomes automatic. The ego's "reac­ solutely no credence was given to a political context or tions to the outside world and to the instinctual desires motivation. Adler, then a social­democrat, protested: one emerging from the id," writes Marcuse, "become increas­ cannot "follow Wittels in his opinion that, in a real event, ingly 'automatic.' The conscious processes of wnfronta­ the ideology can be totally divorced from what we call tion are replaced to an increasingly large degree by im­ emotional life."*^ Even Freud agreed with Adler. "One mediate, almost physical reactions.... It is as though the must not condemn the assassins so harshly and unmask free space which the individual has at his disposal for his them because ' of unconscious motives. The unconscious psychic process has been greatly narrowed down; it is no motive deserves forebearance." longer possible for something like an individual psyche Jto The Marxists who were drawn to psychoanalysis were develop This reduction of t|ie relatively autonomous forced to carefully work out their theoretical positions, so ego is empirically observable in people's frozen gestures." as to avoid the specific failing of psychoanalysis: psychol­ This whole process Marcuse calls "the reification and auto­ ogism. Their formulations, while remaining alert to the matization of the ego." *' charge of subjectivism, implicitly ór explicitly criticized a vulgar Marxism that ignored the individual and subject. For orthodox and Russian Marxists a suspicion was raised Probably the most successful formulations belong to those by these formulations: the suspicion of subjectivity or of Reich and Otto Fenichel;, but they were hardly alone.*® 90 Social Amnesìa 91 Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism The efforts not only in Germany but elsewhere are nu­ transforms itself into 'ideas inside the head.' " Or psycho­ merous. Reich's are outstanding if only because he was the analysis can clarify "the way that ideologies are formed most active and prolific.*^ Reich worked to delineate the 'inside the head.' " exact place of psychoanalysis within Marxism. In the terms Other left Freudians of the period more or less followed used here, he explored the relationship betweeft a psychic Reich's fôrmulations. Fromm wrote in "Politik und Psycho­ dimension of subjectivity and a historical one: how the analyse" that psychoanalysis "can show in what manner former blocked the latter — ultimately the proletariat it­ particular economic conditions influence the psychic ap­ self— from acting within the historical reality. At least paratus of men and produce particular ideological results: in the beginning, he was very much alive to the dangers it can provide information on the 'how' of the dependence of psychologism. His 1929 essay, "Dialectical Materialism of ideological facts on particular configurations."®" Or as and Psychoanalysis" — in part a reply to Jurinetz's piece Fromm wrote in an essay for the Frankfurt School journal, — stated that psychoanalysis possessed limited validity; historical materialism could do without psychology only it was restricted to the "psychological life of man in Soci­ "where ideology was the immediate expression of eco­ ety ... It cannot replace a sociological doctrine, nor can a nomic interests." Otherwise, psychoanalysis can illuminate, sociological doctrine develop out of it." For this, reason "how the economic situation is transformed into ideology "The phenomenon of class consciousness is not accessible via man's drives." Similarly, Otto Fenichel would write to psychoanalysis." in an article for Reich's journal, "The economic conditions The bulk of the essay was a critique of a vulgar mate­ do not just influence the individual directly, but also indi­ rialism that maintained that "psychological phenomena rectly, via a change in his psychic structure." Again, do not exist: the life of the soul is simply a physical psychoanalysis intervenes at the actual 'how' of this trans­ process." Citing Marx's thesis on Feuerbach that all previ­ formation: the transformation of the ideology into a force ous materialism was defective in ignoring subjectivity or in the individual."® activity, Reich showed the incompatibility of simple jnate­ Neither the full content of Reich's work nor the stages rialism with Marxism; if the crude Marxist were "logical, of his development can be discussed here. The emphasis one should not speak of class consciousness ... but should of his work shifted from the 1929 essay; it sought to un­ wait until chemistry has supplied the necessary formula cover the concrete mediation by which ideology was mate­ for the physical processes concerned, or until the science rialized and anchored in the individual. This became urgent of reflexes has discovered the appropriate reflexes." Rather, with the political events; the question posed was why the within Marxism there was no one­to­one relation, no auto­ proletariat fell short of its revolutionary mission, or alterna­ matic, chemical, or mechanical cause and effect between tively why it was susceptible to fascism. The family and the economic reality and the consciousness of the subjects. character structure moved to the center of the analyses.®® Exactly here is where psychoanalysis intervenes: "Be­ In the context here, perhaps Reich's most importañt tween the two terminal points —the economic structure contribution, following the outlines of the theory of psy­ of society at one end, the ideological superstructure at choanalysis and Marxism, was the notion of "reproduction." the other... psychoanalysis sees a number of intermediate Production referred to the cultural and ideological neces­ stages." And exactly here it can play a role within Marx­ sities that are concretely produced by the society, but ism, "at that point where psychological questions arise as hang, so to speak, in the air; reproduction refers to the á result of the Marxist thesis that materialist existence manner and mode by which ideology is translated in the

t 92 Social Amnesia 93 Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism everyday life and behavior of the individual. As Reich "cleavage" between the economic structure and the con­ described it, the ideology and repressive morality which sciousness of the proletariat. are at first derived from the property relations ultimately The usual Communist replies to Reich were not much result in the "inner acceptance of the morality by the mass above slander and slogans.®" One of the better ones was by individual." This in turn becomes a social and reactionary 1. Sapir, in response to Reich's first essay "Psychoanalysis force: psychically reproduced ideology. and Dialectical Materialism." Sapir did indicate one diffi­ culty in Reich's position: Reich claimed that the question This social morality, anchored in all individuals and repro­ of class consciousness was inaccfessiblé to psychoanalysis; ducing itself permanently, has in this manner a reciprocal yet he was theorizing about the problem of ideology for­ effect on the economic base in a conservative direction. The mation, that is, the falsification of class consciousness. exploited person afiBrms the economic order which guaran­ How could one separate the question of class conscious­ tees his exploitation; the sexually repressed person affirms ness from that of ideology? ®° In a response to this, Reich even the sexual order which restricts his gratification and reformulated the relationship between psychoanalysis and makes him ill, and he wards off any system that might cor­ Marxism. He wrote that th& blocks to class consciousness respond to his need. In this manner morality carries out its were accessible to psychoanalysis; the more rational the socio­economic assignment."'' behavior, that is, the more in tune with class consciousness, the less the need for psychological interpretations.®* The full extent of Reich's critique of crude Marxism is A more important reply to Reich is to be found in best found in ì'he Mass Psychology of Fascism. It shows Siegfried Bernfeld's response to Reich's critique of the death in microcosm the divergence between a dialectical Marx­ instinct. According to Reich, this reply was "officially" ism and a meçhanical one that eliminated subjectivity, approved by Freud himself. At first Freud wanted Reich's admitting only automatic progress in history. His first essay to be published, with an introductory note stating words — "The German working class has suffered a serious that' it was written by a dedicated Communist. But be­ defeat" — apparently earned him the wrath of the party cause of opposition to this unprecedented editorial action regulars.®" They were a denial of the "revolutionary per­ in a psychoanalytic journal, Freud settled for a reply by spective" and recalled Trotskyist tendencies.®^ In a Nach­ Bemfeld which was published with Reich's essay. Bem­ wort (1934) to the second edition, where he noted that feld noted two things in passing that could suggest future the official Communist, position is that the world is in the differences between Reich and a critical psychology: midst of a revolutionary upsurge, Reich attacks as the Reich's 1) narrow materialism, and 2) positive notion of mçst "dangèrous fetter" to German socialism "the unshak­ health. According to Bernfeld, Reich wanted to "purge able belief in the natural necessity of socialist victory." psychoanalysis of 'metaphysical hypotheses' and restrict The social­democrats, crude Marxists, and others have it to the clinical in the narrowest sense of the word."®® been unable to conceive the mediation pf, the subjective Further, Reich pursued a "vague ideal of sexual health: and objective. The naive Marxists think «that they can ig­ full genitality, orgiastic potency, etc." nore men entirely, and, with a change in the economic If this was true in 1933, it was truer later. The at­ structure, the transformation of man will follow "almost tempt to remain loyal to a dialectical Marxism, shunning automatically." To Reich it is necessary to recognize the psychologism and sociologism, faltered; it was too great an 94 Sodai Amnesia 95 Negative Fsychoanalysis and Marxism effort. Reich began to succumb to the reification he sought form, nor the neo­Freudians another. Critical theory avoids to undo. He always stressed that psychoanalysis was a the banalization of psychoanalysis by neither distending "natural science" and tended to define sexuality and it to include all of society nor confining it to therapy and health in terms of physiology. The positive description of sexuality of the individual. Rather it has worked to pre­ the "genital character" in Character Analysis threatened serve psychoanalysis as a critique in tension — a critique to dissolve the sociâl critique; it was as if there could be that transcends the individual but does not forget the in­ healthy sexuality without a social transformation. These dividual in some suprahistorical psychological drama. Con­ tendencies surfaced clearly and openly in an essay from sciousness is not to be psychologized away as a waste 1935 on sexual economy. In this Reich claimed that his product of individual neuroses or instincts, nor sociologized "sexual economy" is not "the product of the addition of away as the prevailing social norms and values. Marxism and psychoanalysis." Rather, "The kernel of sex­ Otto Fenichel, once close to Reich and later to the economy theory, around which all further perceptions Frankfurt School, sought to preserve both individual­ group.. .is my orgasm theory. This field of facts exists instinctual and social components without reducing one to neither within the scope of Marx's economic teachings nor the other. His work illustrates critical theory's loyalty to in analytic psychology; but rather concerns biological­ the tension within psychoanalysis. (It has received little physiological phenomena which exist in alL things that attention outside psychoanalytic circles, despite its sus­ live." The social critique narrows; capitalism "destroys tained effort to resist reification and simplification.) Against orgastic potency"; and this Reich defined in purely mechani­ interpretations that conceived of capitalism as derived cal terms: "a functional relatipn to mechanical tension... from individual instincts, Fenichel stressed its social and electric charge ... electric discharge and mechanical re­ extra­individual factors; against analyses that abstracted laxation. The completion of this series and its undisturbed capitalism from the instinctual dynamic, Fenichel recalled function is the surest sign of a healthy psychic apparatus." ®® its instinctual roots. Sandor Ferenczi, in "The Ontogenesis It should be noted that it was exactly on this score, of the Interest in Money," traced the capitalist fascination that critical theory — starting.with Freud — dissociated it­ with money to the child's interest in feces. "Pleasure in the self from Reich. Freud, as early as 1928, in a letter to intestinal contents becomes enjoyment of money, which, Lou Andreas­Salomé attacked Reich's fetish of genital sexu­ however... is seen to be nothing other than odorless, de­ ality. Freud called Reich "a worthy but impetuous young hydrated filth that has been made to shine." Fenichel in man, passionately devoted to his hobby horse, who now a response to Ferenczi, as well as to Géza Róheim and salutes in the genital orgasm the antidote to every neuro­ others^ prone to psychologism, argued in "The Drive to sis."®® Fromm, some years lateir in the Frankfurt School Amass Wealth" (1938) for a "reciprocal action" between journal, criticized Reich's romanticizing of primitive sexu­ instincts and the social configuration. "The instincts repre­ ality.®^ Horkheimer would do the same, commenting on the sent the general tendency, while matters of money and "utopian meaning" which Reich ascribed to the release of the desire to become wealthy represent a specific form genital sexuality.®® Marcuse's remarks on Reich have fol­ which the general tendency can assume only in the pres­ lowed these earlier ones.®" ence of certain definite social conditions." "The existence of the erogenous pleasure in collection causes Ferenczi Reductionism of the psychological or sociological variety to overlook the fact that when the capitalist strives to in­ haunted psychoanalysis. Reich himself did not escape one crease his capital he does this on very, rational grounds: 96 Social Amnesia À 97 Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism he is forced to it by coinpetitors who jiroduce on a larger stood why an idealistic tendency to grow and develop scale.... A social system of this kind makes use of and should be regarded [as Fromm regards it] as 'biologically strengthens erogenous drives that serve the necessity for inherent in human nature' and sexual partial instincts accumulating. Of this there can be no doubt. There is should not." Fenichel wrote elsewhere, in a review of a considerable doubt, however, as to whether the existing book by another neo­Freudian, Karen Horney: "Dr. Hor­ economic conditions of production­ were created by the ney writes, 'My conviction expressed in a­nutshell is that biological instinct." He wrote in'conclusion, "Such a drive psychoanalysis should outgrow the limitations set by its to become wealthy at one time did not exist and at some being an instinctivistic and genetic psychology.' My con­ future time will exist no longer." viction, expressed in a nutshell, is that the value of psycho­ Fenichel equally resisted the errors of Adlerians, neo­ analysis as a natural scientißc psychology is rooted in its Freudians, and others who abstracted society from its being an instinctivistic and a genetic psychology," biological and instinctual substrata and thereby attained Fenichel's defense of psychoanalysis as a "genetic" a sham socialization of psychoanalysis." In a review essay science, that is, one focused on genesis and origins, can of Fromm's Escape from Freedom, Fenichel observed that be pursued, for a moment, in a philosophical and theoretical the dynamic of instincts and society is lost, and the social dimension. This dimension can illuminate the nature of moment that is advanced is idealized and spiritualized. psychological and sociological reductionism, and it can "Instead of studying the interrelations of erdgenous zones cast light on the problem, of consciousness as a psychic and object relationships, they [Fromm, Kardiner] think and/or historical phenomenon. These dimensions are inter; statically and are of the opinion that the insight into the related. "The concept of the ego is dialectical," wrote role of object relationships contradicts the importance, of Adorno, "both psychic an,d extra­psyçhic, a quantum of erogenous zones." The irony of the endeavor to escape libido and the representative of outside reality." He also from Freud's biologism is that it issues into real biologisíñ stated, "The bourgeoisie in its late phase is incapable of — an abstract and contentless idealism which is ahistori­ thinking genesis and validity in their simultaneous unity cal and invariant: biology. "Fromm gives­ examples of and difference." These two statements are of one piece; drives which came into existence at certain points of the they refer to different forins of'positivist logic that can historical development apd thinks that this is an argument Qply flit between thinking exclusively about origins — against Freud: the drive to 'enjoy nature's beauty' and psychologism — or exclusively about an abstract notion 'the drive to work.' Certainly nobody will deny the social of truth and ideas. origin of these 'drives,' but their social origin does not Both are forms of reductionism, unable to preserve the contradict the assumption that deeper biological needs dialectip of individual and society. One reduces all to the have been transformed into these 'new drives.' " Further, roots, e.g., capitalism to an instinct, and denies any truth these drives become "vèry abstract and, in comparison that claims to go beyond its origin. Such teachings are to with Freud's concrete analysis of the instinctual attitude, be found within psychoanalysis as well as elsewhere, as extremely vague." The "materialist advántage" of psycho­ in varieties of sociology of knowledge. The equally blank analysis is that it has shown that ideals such äs truth approach disregards origins and accepts at face value and justice "are not [what Fromm considers them] 'genu­ claims to truth; this tilts over into pure idealism, as it re­ ine strivings,' but are formed out of biological needs by fuses to acknowledge or study the contradiction between socially determined experiences." "It is not to be under­ the historical substratum and the extrahistorical claims. 98 Social Amnesia 99 Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism Again what is at issue is the nature of (class) conscious­ precludes individual therapeutic claims to health. The ness" and, in particular, the very relationship that most preservation of such content — the metatheory of Freud Marxists have ignored: the relationship between a psy­ — belonged to the very marrow of critical theory's reading chological and historical dimension. If one defines con­ of psychoanalysis; its preservation nourished the resistance sciousness exclusively by its subjective and psychological to subjective notions of subjectivity, conformist in their origin, then no particular form has any more claim to capitulation to the immediacy of the subject's own per­ truth than any other; one has a model of society of self­ ceptions. "Objective truth," is the "philosophical core of interest groups all with equal demands — equally right Freudianism." Freud once affirmed, "The great ethical and equally wrong. If consciousness is abstracted from its element in psychoanalytic work is truth and again truth." origin in reality, one is left with an idealistic notion of the He stated elsewhere, "Psychoanalysis demands a degree of battle of ideas uprooted from a carnal and psychic reality. honesty which is unusual and even impossible in der Adorno eschews both approaches. In his book on Hus­ bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (bourgeois society)."®® serl, he wrote, "The error of logical psychologism is that it This metatheory, psychoanalysis as an objective sci­ wished to derive immediately out of psychic facts the ence of subjectivity, passes onto Marxism; negative psycho­ validity of logical statements." Yet Husserl was equally analysis is psychoanalysis refracted through Marxism. This wrong in his critique of logical psychologism; if he is right refraction calls for an examination of the individual — in disputing the "immediate identity... of genesis and the object of psychoanalysis — in the light of developments validity, he is wrong in hypothesizing their difference." In since Freud's formulations. In brief, the transition to his lectures on the theory of knowledge Adorno noted that, monopoly capital has dealt a mortal blow to the individual in response to psychologism, recent philosophy has re­ wiiose health was always ideology. "The category of the lapsed into a form of Platonic reaUsm. The precept "that individual,"' wrote Horkheimer, "has not been able to the validity of the laws of thought is simply independent withstand giant industry."®® Psychoanalysis turns nega­ of the emergence of the ego... is as false as the reverse tive, a study of remnants; it explores a subject whose sub­ precept... that the laws of thought and laws of genesis jectivity is being administered out of existence. are simply identical." Or as he wrote elsewhere, "Genesis The intent is to abet crackii^ the continuum of his­ and validity are not to be separated without contradiction. tory. It pmsues in the psychic dimension what Western Objective truth preserves the moment of its origin; the Márxism has pursued in the nonpsychological dimension; latter works permanently within it." the objective force of capitalist domination that has para­ Consciousness and thought are neither to be reduced lyzed the subject as an active historical force. The exact to their subjective origin nor totally abstracted from it. relationship between these two spheres is difficult to define. The neo­Freudians, as some left Freudians, were imablé Negative psychoanalysis knows only a negative relation­ to maintain this dialectic. Psychoanalysis itself was diluted ship; it examines the psychic forms that have diverted, im­ — Watered down into either a psycholögical technique for peded, or dissolved a historical and class consciousness.®* individual adjustment or a superficial theory of society. It is tempting, and even partly correct, to draw exact paral­ Both forms sustain each other; for psychoanalysis to be lels between these two dimensions; to transpose an analysis billed as an individual therapy promising health and ad­ of reification as a form of consciousness to a psychic justment, the critical and social components of the theory dimension, e.g., to find in the latter a frozen, rigid, non­ must be junked, since they plumb a social universe that dynamic quality associated with the former. Marcuse him­ 100 SociahAmnesia self speaks of the "reification. of the ego," ^nd studies of the "authoritarian personality" seemed to have confirmed its existence. V Yet the nonidentity between ­these t^vo dimensions must not be forgotten, especially given recent develop­ ments. The psychic and character forms pf reification are The Politics of Subjectivity historically specific in a manner different from the non­ psychic; each has a different dynamic which is not insular but derived from the dynamic of capitalism. The concept The'political left hás not escaped the ravages of social of reification, as Adorno points out, must not be reified. It amnesia and subjective reductionism. The very effort to would be wrong to identify the sexually repressed, cold think through and back, which, in different forms belongs Puritan as the unchanging bourgçois character form of to the best of psychoanalytic and Marxist thought, is un­ reification. Since Max Weber the spirit of* capitalism, but dermined by the individual in crisis unable to think beyond not capitalism itself, has been redone. Today it is pften the itself. Evidence of this is everywhere, in revisionist and reverse: instant intimacy, smiles, liberation iji one's own conformist psychology as well as in the left. The crisis is backyard."® Marcuse's concept of "repre.ssive desublima­ no fraud; the chill of ­social relations numbs the living. tion""" or Adomo's of "desexualization of sexuality""^ The effort to keep psychically warm, to stave off the cbld are efforts to come to grips with the recent historical dy­ that seeps in, shunts aside any time for or possibility of namic of the psychic dimension. T^his psychic diineji?iojp sustained thought and theory. The permanent emergency is as fluid and historically Variable­as capital itself; as­the óf the individual blocks .the permanent and social solution. succession of capitalist forms accelerates, so do the pçychic Within the left this assumes a definite form. Because forms. In the blur, the dead shells,pf domination appear to the political left is a left it retáins a social analysis of society. come alive. Even the most resilient are turned into des­ The very problem, however, is that this social analysis de­ peradoes huntii}g for pleasures in the amusement park ,of cays more and more into slogans, thoughtless finds of the life. If critical theory as negative psychoanalysis is not to moment. The individual stripped of memory and mind succumb to the lure of the chase nor flee into old slogans, it magnetically attracts reified slogans" that serve moré to sort must plumb the psychic depths for sounds of sadness and out one's friends and enemies than to figure out the struc­ reyolt. ture'of reality. This is a dynamic that keeps society rat­ tling along; the very breathing space that could give life to critical theory is lost in the desperate search for life it­ self. The search without reflection grooves along in the ruts of society. Social amnesia takes twp forms within the left: the construction of instant and novel theories of reform and revolution, and, recently and increasingly, the ­hasty re­ furbishing of older slogans and tactics. Both proceed si­ multaneously because both live off the suppression of the past. The pop theories are fabricated out of scraps and 101 118 Social Amnesia tion. And yet, as argued here, they as others unwittingly collapsed into a subjectivity and abstract sloganeering that is part and parcel of bourgeois society itself. The Lukács of VI History and Class Consciousness suggested another meta­ phor for revolutionary theory and praxis; he wrote there of the sailor. The sailor, like the weatherman, takes exact Theory and Therapy li Freud readings from the wind — but with a decisive differenée: "without letting the wind determine his direction, on the contrary, he defies and exploits it so as to hold fast to his Not in any beyond, but here on earth original course." most men live in a hell: Schopenhauer has seen that very well. My knowl­ edge, my theories and my mèthods hâve the goal of making men con­ scious of this hell so that they can free, themselves from it. S. FREUD '

In the history of* psychoanalysis, as in the history of Marx­ ism, reformist practices threatened to supplant and. sup­ press theory. Revisionism of both schools — psychoanalytic and Marxist — crept toWard a pragmatism impatient with a noniitilitarian theory and reflection. As has been dis­ cussed, the most recent forms of revisionism are the by­ products of social amnesia and a cult of subjectivity, themselves products of an administered society. In the name of authenticity and progress, the very theory that could comprehend both is phased out as dated and obso­ lete. ^ Without a critical theory, analyses — inside and out­ side a left — degenerate into common sense and prefabri­ cated slogans. The repression of theory in the name of eflicient practice takes its revenge by returning as. mal­ practices: pseudo­therapy and phony revolution. Critical theory resists pragmatic or Marxist calls for the instant identity of theory and practice; this is to be quickly at­ tained only by the suppression of theory. Rather, critical 119 120 Social Amnesia 121 Theory and Therapy I: Freud theory seeks to preserve the contradiction of theory and "The right to such reorientations in the interest of suc­ practice by enunciating it. The relationship between theory cessful therapy and practice is not questioned here," Mar­ and practice in general cannot be compressed into a single cuse wrote of the neo­Freudians. "But the revisionists formula; it is a highly complex historical relationship. have converted the weakening of Freudian theory into a Theory is not to be reduced to practice nor cleanly severed new theory." ® This is what is crucial, that the contradiction from it. The identity of theory and practice is to be between theory and therapy is lost, not that changes are achieved in a nonantagonistic society; till then the rela­ made in the naine of therapy.^ Yet this is not to be mis­ tionship can only be one of conscious contradiction. construed to indicate there is no relationship between the general theory ànd the individual therapy, and that theory Within psychoanalysis, the same relationship of theory and ignores therapy.® Rather the­relationship is dialectical. In­ practice is preserved, though in a different form. Psycho­ dividual therapy must necessarily forget the whole so as analysis is a theory of society and civilization as a whole, to "aid its individual victim; how exactly it does this is in as well as immediate practice, therapy for the individual. part irrelevant to theory. As Brown, whose discussion Marcuse subtitled Eros and Civilization "A Philosophical parallels Marcuses, wrote, psychoanalytic therapy as a Inquiry into Freud" and wrote that the book is concerned "technique ... can be judged only pragmaticálly. Any­® with theory not therapy. "No therapeutic argument should thing goes if it works."® This is not to be criticized — or hamper the developmeni of a theoretical construction if criticized, only when that which "works" is called lib­ which aims, not at curing individual sickness, but at diag­ eration Or growth. Theoretically, what Adorno wrote re­ ­nosing the general disorder." ^ The most serious objection mains true: "In adjusting to the mad whole the cured of the Frankfurt School to the neo­Freudians turned ex­ patient becomes really sick." ^ actly on this point: they weakened the theory of psycho­ The äcuteness of Freud as bourgeois thinker is here analysis in favor of therapy. again­ glimpsed; he unflinchingly articulated contradictions Psychoanalysis as' individual therapy necessarily par­ and refrained from blurring them in the name of therapy ticipates ivithin the realm of social unfreedom, while psy­ or harmonyi From his early writings to his last no attempt choanalysis as theory is free to transcend and criticize is made to reconcile individual therapy with the "meta­ this same realm. To take up only the first moment, psycho­ iheory" of psychoanalysis; they exist in contradiction. In­ analysis as therapy, is to blunt psychoanalysis as a critiqué sofar as civilization was repression, individual therapy was of civihzation, turning it into an instrument of individual education in repression, albeit conscious repression. Freud's adjustment and resignation. The point is not to play one concluding words from his first book, with Breuer, Studies against the other; both theory and therapy exist within in Hysteria, remain a scandal to therapists who would for­ Freud in contradiction. The innovations and revisions get the theory so as to promote the therapy. Freud enunci­ necessary on therapeutic grounds are not identical with ated and distinguished these two moments. He cited the the* imperatives of the theory. Changes in the former can typical remarks of á patient who complains that proceed without changes in the latter because the locus in each case is different: one takes .the individual as ill,>the you say, yourself, that my suffering has probably much to do other civilization as ill. Measures taken to cure the in­ with my .own relations and destinies. You cannot change any dividual are not identical with those taken to "cure" the of that. In what manner, then, can you help me? To this I civilization; to a point they diverge. could always answer: "I dó not doubt at all that it would 122 Social Amnesia 123 Theory and Therapy I: Freud be easier for fate than for me to remove your sufiFerings, but haps least known of his major works is his lucid and lively you will be convinced that much will be gained if we suc­ Question of Lay Analysis. "We do not consider it at all ceed in transforming your hysterical misery into everyday desirable for psychoanalysis to be swallowed up by medi­ unhappiness." ® cine and to find its last resting place in a textbook of psychiatry under the heading of 'Methods of Treatment.' " If the goal of "everyday unhappiness" is not one that to­ Freud honed the revolutionary edge of psychoanalysiis; he day's therapists will inscribe on their banners, it is the fought its.professionalization and.domestication. He wanted unwavering appraisal of the real possibilities and limita­ to preserve psychoanalysis as a theory, not exclusively as tions of individual therapy. So too would Freud in one of a trade. "I do not know if you have detected the secret link his last papers, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," between [The Question of] Lay Analysis and The [Future emphasize the minimal change that could be expected of an] Illusion," he wrote to Oskar Pfister. "In the former from therapy: "The difference between a person who has I wish to protect analysis from the doctors and in the latter not and a person who has been analyzed is, after ­all, not from the prièsts, I should like to hand it over to a profession so radical as we endeavor to make it and expect and assert which does not yet exist, a profession of lay curers of'souls that it will be."® who need not be doctors and should not be priests." As he Freud was very much alive to the dangers of theory stated, "I only want to feel assured the therapy will not being absorbed by therapy. His terms were different, but destroy the science." " Lay analysts are essential to psycho­ the formulation was the same as Marcuse's critique of analysis, Freud told Siaifey Blanton, because "the psychia­ psychological revisionism; the immediacy of therapy or trist vvho takes up psychoanalysis is interested in the thera­ reforms rendered irrelevant a theory that promised nothing peutic needs chiefly. "This aim is not to be disparaged, but it is for the here and now but truth. The practical and im­ not the main or even the essential aim of psychoanalysis. The mediate gains of therapy convinced the pragmatists that chief aim of psychoanalysis is to contribute to the science an unworkable theory was extraneous. Yet to Freud; as of psychology and to the world of hterature and life in gen­ to those who resist revisionism within Marxism, theory is eral."" to be preserved for the very reason that the revisionists It is not without interest that Freud foresaw that the rejected it; because it is true and not because it is practical stripping of theory from psychoanalysis would be a par­ in the here and now.'® Psychoanalysis is a theory of an ticularly North American phenomenon; in this sense Freud unfree society that necessitates psychoanalysis as a ther­ anticipated and feared the neo­ and post­Freudians as his apy. To reduce the former to the latter is to gain the successors and betrayers; and he correctly adjudged a cul­ instrument at the expense of truth; psychoanalysis be­ tural climate of optimism and utilitarianism that would comes merely medicine. "I did not want to commend it repress the discovery of repression.'® Freud remarked to [psychoanalysis] to your interest as a method of treatment, Franz Alexander that under the pressure of success and but on account of the« truths it contains.... As a method pragmatism he_was afraid the Americans would turn psy­ of treatment it is one among many." choanalysis into" a "watered­down ecleclic~krnd of treat­ For exactly this reason Freud opposed the monopoli­ rhent propp/ìnr^ " And he considered that Otto Rank's zation of psychoanalysis by medical doctors as degrading shortened therapy was "designed to accelerate the tempo psychoanalysis to therapy. Almost forgotten is the vigor of analytic therapy to suit the rush of American life." '® He with which Freud defended lay analysis and, today per­ wrote not long before his death that the fate of psycho­ 124 Social Amnesia 125 Theory and Therapy I: Freud änalysis in. America was that of a "handmaid" to American The disjunction.— between the immediate therapeu­ ¡psychiatry; it did not develop into an independent auton­ tic possibilities of "happiness and health" and the repres­ omous discipline. This fate reminded him of "the .paral­ sive whole that precluded just such possibilities — is to lelism in the fate of our Vienna ladies who by exile have be found even in Freud's least "social" writing, in his essays been turned into housemaids .serving in English house­ and remarks on psychoanalytical therapeutic technique. holds." Here it is clear that Freud remained true to the meta­ If it would be wrong to state that Freud formulated theory and was continually alert to the social conditions the problem of theoryjand therapy just as critical theory that damned individual therapy to impotence. Even more; does, so too would it be wrong to argue that he did not to the point that individual neurosis was a response to articulate the contradiction. Freud resisted .the debase­ brutal social conditions, it is poiiitless for the doctor to aim ment of psychoanalysis to an instrument of medicine or to cure. The unresolved irony of psychoanalytic therapy pure therapy because he fathomed to what' degree this within an unfree society is that it is possible only when it entailed the subjugation of psychoanalysis to the given is impossible. "Psychoanalysis meets the optimum of favor­ social order that it was to comprehend; reduced in this able conditions where its practice is not needed, i.e., among way, psychoanalysis loses its truth value. "My. discoveries the healthy."®^ To cure in an unhealthy surrounding en­ are not primarily a heal­all," he wrote to Hi D. "My dis­ tailed redoing the social reality. To refuse the latter was coveries are a basis for a very grave philosophy." "I have to refuse the former. Freud stated that the doctor must become a therapist against my will," he wrote to Wilhelm "occasionally take sides with the illness which he is attack­ Fliess.'^' He told Abram Kardiner, "I am not basically inter­ ing. It is not for him to confine himself in all situations in ested in therapy." And he remarked ironically, "We do life to the part of fanatic about health; he knows that analysis for two reasons: to understand the unconscious there is other misery in the world besides neurotic misery and to make a living." — real unavoidable suffering — that necessity may even Freud continually rebuked what bp pallori thCTiipeutfr demand of a man that he sacrifice his health to it." optimism or enthusiasm.'^ This was a claim to cure, quickly Freud took to task the attitude of "fanatic hygienists and/or completely, if civilization was repressive and neu­ or therapists"; they fórget the very necessity of neuroses. rosis was deeply entangled in the unconscious, cures could Neuroses possess "social justification." "And should one only be protracted and partial. He wrote of Sandor Feren­ really require such sacrifices in order to exterminate the czi, one of the first to depart from Freud in.emphasizing neuroses while the world is all the same full of other in­ the therapeutic potential of psychoanalysis, that "the need extinguishable miseries?"®® Especially within the poor to cure and Jto help had, become paramount in him. He classes, the neuroses contained a raison dêtre — that of had probably ^et himself aims which, with our therapeutic survival — that precluded curing without changing the means, are altogether out of reach today." "Out of reach" social conditions. "It renders the sufferer too good service because the neurosis was informed by deep­seated psycho­ in the struggle for existence." logical and social determinants that severely hampered For this reason there could be no real individual solu­ any immediate cure. "The expectation that every neurotic tion, only a social one. "In matters of prophylaxis ... the phenomenon can be cured," he wrote, "may be derived individual is almost helpless. The whole community must from the laymen's belief that the neuroses are something take an interest in the matter and give its assent to the quite unnecessary which have no right whatever to exist." «construction of measures valid for all.... There is a great 126 Social Amnesia 127 Theory and Therapy I: Freud deal which musi be changed." Nor is the class nature of of the analytic situation itself, where analyst and patient existing psychoanalytic therapy veiled by Freud; we are met. The "classic" posture was that of "nonactivity" on but a "handful of people" whose work is restricted to the the part of the analyst; the analyst was not to act or react "well­to­do classes." Given the vast amount of neurotic to the patient with open love, warmth, affection, or other misery "the quantity we can do away with is almost negli­ emotions; if anything, the reverse. Freud recommended a gible." For this .reason Freud backed the idea of .state "coldness in feeling" and the model of the surgeon "who psychoanalytic clinics for the poor.®® He stated at the anni­ puts aside all his own feelings, including that­of human versary of one psychoanalytic clinic, the Berlin Institute, sympathy."®' He rejected the "expedient" of sham affec­ that it made psychoanalytic therapy availal^le to the "great tion as an aid to therapy. "Psycho­analytic treatment is multitude of people" who "suffer from neuroses no less founded on truthfulness.... It is dangerous to depart from than the rich." In a letter of Freud to Putnam the dialectic this sure foundation." To the humanist innovators these of therapy and social change is fully articulàted; therapy, directions smacked of indifference and cynicism. utterly lucid as to its limit and strength within a repressive Ferenczi was one of the first to introduce activity and society, issues into a social critique and praxis of liberation. affection into the analytic situation, which paralleled his The importance of separating the two moments of psycho­ therapeutic optimism. It is not without reason that the analysis — as therapy and as theory — is here enunciated. neo­Freudians have always been ardent defenders of Fe­ renczi, and have followed his lead in stressing the role of af­ I believe that your complaint that we are not able to com­ fection and love.®^ Clara Thompson, herself a neo­Freudian, pensate our neurotic patients for giving up their illness is lists two contributions of Ferenczi: "The analytic situation quite justified. But it seems to me that this is not the fault is a human situation in which two human beings attempt of therapy but rather of social institutions. What would you a sincere relationship" and "One must give the patient the have us do when a woman complains about her thwarted love he needs." As one enthusiastic partisan of Ferenczi life, when, with youth gone, she notices that she has been has written, "Psychoanalytic 'cure' is in direct proportion deprived of the joy of loving for merely conventional rea­ to the cherishing Jove given by the psychoanalyst to the sons? She is quite right and we stand helpless before her.... patient." Neo­ and post­Freudians have made variants of But the recognition of our therapeutic limitations reinforces this their program. Fromm, in an essay from 1935, inter­ our determination to change other social factors so that men preted the difference between activity and non­activity and women shall no longer he forced into hopeless situa­ as that between warm affection and inhuman indifference. tions.^ He wrote that the contrast between Ferenczi and Freud was one of principle. "The contradiction between a humane It was not lost to Freud that the impulse behind the inno­ philanthropic attitude that affirmed in an unrestricted vations in "classical" therapy, the tendency to absorb manner the happiness of the patient and a patriarchal theory by therapy, was a humanist one. Because Freud authoritarian attitude which was in essence misanthropic emphasized the protracted nature of therapy, the re­ 'tolerance.' " stricted range of applicability, and the minimal results — Adorno refers to this type of criticism of Freud's cold­ "everyday unhappiness" — the humanist response sought to ness and inhumanity;*' it assumes that love and happiness abridge therapy, extend its applicability, and promise are to be attained by their mere affirmation. Rather, Freud's more. The differences surfaced most clearly in the question "coldness" does mankind more honor than a false warmth 128 Social Amnesia 129 Theory and Therapy I: Freud that is to be turned on and ofiF by command — snatches purely subjective love, indifferent toward the object, was of the ideology of sensitivity. Freudian analysis is the conformist and ideological. The fetishized love reveals a steadfast penetration of the injured psyche. It takes so cold and feelingless core: indifference toward the actual seriously the damage that it offers nothing for the immedi­ world. "This dialectic of love leads to lovelessness." ate. If Freud mentions the surgeon as an analogue to the Eschewing insight into reality, love and sensitivity erode analyst, it is because neither promises that the internal to the purely subjective, a blind and blank attitude. The wounds can be smiled away. The psychic surgéry is not coldness of warm, subjective love dwells in its refusal to inhumane; rather it is a just appraisal of the damages glimpse the social mechanism that creates coldness. The wrought Ijy inhumanity. The accent on the reverse — obdiurate clinging to subjective love drives it into its op­ immediate warmth, emotions — threatens the indifference: posite, an apology for a loveless world. the different wounds are covered by a blanket warmth for Marcuse's thoughtful essay from the 1930s, "On He­ all. In a cold and cheerless world universal love and sensi­ donism," pursues the contradiction. Happiness does not drop from the sky; it is grounded in personal needs which tivity is an impossibility; if it dared to be concrete it would quickly be exhausted. It is "sustained" only by ig­ in turn are cut and shaped by extrapersonal realities and noring the individual scars of its object: brutalized hu­ forces. The subjective happiness in its immediacy, the ~y manity. In fact, it seconds the damage by degenerating happiness that satisfies the individual, is already objective 7 into a tool, an "art of loving," indifferent toward the object in that it does not arise from the deep recesses of the and applicable without distinction. Adorno likes to cite nonsocial individual, but from the entanglement of the ^ this sentence from Civilization and Its Discontents: "A individual with social structures and tensions. Happiness ­­ love that does not discriminate seems to me to forfeit a over a new car is happiness that has been drilled in, not part of its own value by doing an injustice to its objéct." spontaneously hatched. A subjective happiness that ada­ Yet a love that does discriminate is no longer purely mantly maintains' its subjectivity is one of resignation; it "subjective." To be sure, prevailing positivism renders the takes the prevailing form of happiness as natural and v notion of objective analysis of love and happiness unthink­ human. "It accepts the wants and interests of individuals / able; it decrees facts to be objective and shelves the left­ as simply given and as valuable in themselves. Yet these overs as poetry. To critical theory, however, the notions wants and interests themselves, and not merely their gratification, already contain the stunted growth, the re­ ¡ of love and happiness are fragments of a social theory. pression, and the untruth with which men grow up in J Individual love, to be sure, must be subjective; but this is precisely the point. Today it is objective but billed as the class society."" An antinomy arises that is the misery of life in bour­ reverse; it is prey, in form and ^content, .to society. Again geois society. A critique of the given and subjective needs the dialectic: the subjectivity that parades its authenticity covers for a social teality that commands. For subjectivity and gratifications — a critique imveiling the degree to to attain itself, to become ^subjective, it must achieve self­ which they are social modes, unfree and unhappy — is one which exposes the social reality that blocks and man­ consciousness: insight into the objective reality that falsi­ gles individual happiness. Yet in showing the distance fies the subject. Without this consciousness, the subject is between the prevailing subjective happy­unhappiness and ideological, a tool of a repressive society. This was exactly the drift of Adorno's critique of happiness within, and identical to, freedom, it diminishes the present pleasures. Knowledge and happiness diverge Kierkegaard's conception of love; Kierkegaard's inner and 130 Social Amnesia in an unfree society. "Knowledge destroys proffered hap­ piness Knowledge does not help him [the individual] attain happiness, yet without it he reverts to reified rela­ VII tionships. This is an inescapable dilemma. Enjoyment and truth, happiness and the essential relations of individuals are disjunctions."*® This is a historical disjunction, not a Theory and Therapy II: Laing and Cooper natural one; it is the configuration of happiness and free­ dom in an unliberated society — a society in which­ the modes of happiness are unfree and the modes of freedom, unhappy. Today, one vies with the other; every Solution No less than has the political left, the psychology of R. D. is the wrong one. Laing and David Cooper and their coworkers has not been immune to subjective reductionism — a reductionism which in particular has lost the tension between theory and therapy. Again a preliminary problem: if it is unjust to discuss the political left as kindred to the nonpolitical conformist psychologies, it is equally unjust to include Laing and Cooper. The intent of their psychology is poUti­ cal and critical; the psychology of madness seeks to indict, not absolve, a maddening society. Their work seethes with discontent. In this as well as in their serious philosophical interests they radiaally diverge from the conformist psy­ chologies. Yet they do not escape the general fate. Though their thought genuinely resoxmds with political radicalism, revo­ lutionary élan, and theoretical coherence; yet it finally dribbles into Islind therapy and positivism, pop existen­ tialism and mysticism. To the point that neither they nor their admirers appear to notice, it might not seem to matter. Yet it does matter. The critique of society is de­ graded to externals against the inner drift of their own work. Over time this inner logic, takes its toll, on Laing and Cooper and on their followers. The critique, unable to sustain itself and hollowed of meaning, is a front for estab­ lishment psychology, political passivity, spiritualism, and so on. The intention of the following is neither to sum up nor write off Laing and Cooper, but, hopefully, to be sug­ gestive. Their work is itself unfinished, and it is uncertain 131 156 Notes 157 Notes tionary crisis in Western society was not accompanied, unfor­ York, 1969], p. 20). "Freud [was] beyond question the strongest tunately,' by an understanding of its theoretical implications. individual counterrevolutionary force in the ideology of sexual 8. Theodor W. Adomo, "Scientific Experiences of a European politics during the period" (Kate Millett, Sexual Politics [Garden Scholar in America," in The Intellectual Migration, eds. Donald City, N.Y., 1970], p. 178). Such statements, if excusable because Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969), of Freud's writings on women, pass to the inexcusable. "Sexuality p. 357. was a great threat to Freud.... He demanded authoritarian so­ 9. See the attack on Marcuse's aloofness and "remoteness" by Ron­ cial control to guarantee the success of familial sexual repression ald Aronson, "Dear Herbert," in The Revival of American So­ on a widespread societal scale. In 1933 his wish came true, but cialism, ed. George Fischer (New York, 1971), pp. 257­80. the Nazis were ungrateful and Freud was disappointed" (Phil Brown, "Civilization and Its Dispossessed," in Radical Psychol­ Preface ogy, ed. P. Brown [New York, 1973], p. 246). As has been justly observed, "That Freud, personally, had a reactionary ideological 1. The small scandal that Marcuse's essay "Repressive Tolerance" attitude toward women in no way affects his science..,. That (in A Critique of Pure Tolerance [Boston, 1965]) caused is itself he partook of the social mores and ideology of his time whilst illustrative of how much has been forgotten. "Toleration is not he developed a science that could overthrow them is neither a the opposite of Intolerance, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are contradiction nor a limitation of his work" (Juliet Mitchell, despotisms. The one assumes­to itself the^ rights of withholding Woman's Estate [Middlesex, England, 1971], p. 167). Liberty of Conscience, and the other of granting it." This is not 2. Karen Hornby, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (New York, 1966), Marcuse but Thomas Paine in 1791, in the Rights of Man, ed. p. 37. Henry Collins (Middlesex, England, 1969), p. 107. 3. Clara Thompson, Psychoanalysis; Evolution and Development' 2. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures (New York, 1964), (New York, 1957), p. 132. ^ p. 160. 4. Patrick. Mullahy, Oedipus: Myth and Complex (New York, 3. See Theodor W. Adomo, "Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesell­ 1955), pp. 316, 320. schaft?" in his Aufsätze zur Gesellschaftstheorie (Frankfurt, 5. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New* York, 1964), p. 1970), pp. 149 ff. Cf. Robin Blackburn, "The New Capitalism," 97. in Ideology in.Social Science, ed. R. Blackburn (New York, 6. Sigmund Freud, "On the History of the Psychoanalytic Move­ 1973), pp. 164 ff. ment," Collected Papers (London, 1957), vol. 1, p. 325. After 4. For a survey of Frankfurt School thought and history see Martin my book was completed and readied for ' publication Juliet Jay, The' Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt MitcheiYs' Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York, 1974) ap­ School and the Institute of Social Research (Boston, 1973); and peared. A discussion of. her book, which in some ways shares for a critical discussion of Jay's book see my "Marxism and the the approach of mine, is impossible here. Only to be noted is Critical School" in Theory and Society, I, 2 (1974), pp. 231 ff. that she makes a similar — and more extensive — response to 5. Harry Guntrip, a partisan of^the object­relations theory, in his the charge that Freud was intellectually bound and stunted by a Psychoanalytic Theory, Therapy, and the Self (New York, 1973), nineteenth­century Vienna; see especially pp. 319 ff. and 419 ff. demonstrates a kinship between the two schools — a kinship 7. Joseph Wortis, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud (New which extends to sharing the weaknesses of the neo­Freudians. York, 1954), p. 142. 8. Wilhelm Lünen, "The Problem of Social Consciousness in Our I Social Amnesia and the New Ideologues Time," Contemporary Issues, 8, no. 32 (1957), p. 480. 9. Max Horkheimer and Theçdor W. Adomo, Dialektik der Auf­ 1. ^'Freud was, in short, heir to all the sexual mythology of his age" klärung ("Amsterdam, 1947); p. 274. Unfortunately this is mis­ {Masculine/Feminine, eds. Betty and Theodore Roszak [New translated in the English edition. "Alle Verdinglichung ist ein 158 Notes 159 Notes Vergessen" is rendered "All objeclification is a forgetting {Dia­ Ernest Mandel, The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl lectic of Enlightenment [New York, 1972], p. 230). To lose the Marx (New York, 1971), pp. 154 ff. distinction between objectification and reification is to lose the 20. "Not the last task that is set before thought is to tum all reac­ distinction between Hegel and Marx. Also, Ernest G. Schachtel s tionary arguments against Western culture into service of pro­ essay on amnesia remains well worth consulting ("On Memory gressive enlightenment" (Adorno, Minima Moralia [Frankfurt, and Childhood Amnesia" in A Study of Interpersonal Relations. 1964], p. 254). A fine example of this kind of work is Raymond ed. Patrick Mullahy [New York, 1957], and in Ernest Schachtel, Williams's Culture and Society (Garden City, 1960). Metamorphosis [London, 1963]). 21. Erich Fromm, "Psychoanalysis — Science or Party­Line?" in The 10. Karl Marx, Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses Dogma of Christ (New York, 1963), pp. 131 ff. (Frankfurt, 1970), pp. 17­18. Throughout this book where no 22. Cited in Carl M. and Sylvia Grossman, The Wild Analyst; The English source is given, the translation is my own. Life and Work of Georg Groddeck (New York, 1965), p. 113. 11. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York, 1962), pp. 404, 23. Rosa Luxembjirg, "Reform or Revolution," in Rosa Luxemburg 402. Speaks, ed. Mary­Alice Waters (New York, 1970), p. 87. 12. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, New 24. "The assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, York, 1958), p. 468. the recognition of the theory of resistance and repression, the 13. Ibid., p. 458. appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus 14. See George Lichtheim's essay "The Concept of Ideology," in Complex — these constitute the principal subject­matter of psy­ Studies in the Philosophy of History, ed. George H. Nadel (New choanalysis and the foundations of Its theory" (Sigmund Freud, York, 1965). "Two Encyclopedia Articles," Collected Papers [London, 1957], 15. See "Ideology" in Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, ^ vol. 5, p. 122). pects of Sociology (Boston, 1972), pp. 182 fiF. and in Institut 25. Herbert Marcuse, Eros ahd Civilization (New York, 1962), p. 11. für Sozialforschung, Soziologische Exkurse (Frankfurt, 1956), 26. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (New York, 1959), p. 3. pp. 162 ff. Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia is the crucial work 27. Fromm, "The Human Implications of Instinctivistic 'Radical­ in the domestication of the Marxist concept. Lichtheim calls it ism,' " Dissent, II, 4 (1955), p. 349. "the positivist's rejoinder" to Lukács's History and Class Con­ 28. Fromm, The Revolution of Hope (New York, 1968), p. 9. sciousness. The Frankfurt School critically appraised it soon after 29. Cited in Lelio Basso, "Rosa Luxemburg: The Dialectic Method," it appeared. See Max Horkheimer, "Ein neuer Ideologiebegriff?" International Socialist Journal, III, 16­17 (1966), p. 518, (1930) reprinted in Ideologie, ed. K. Lenk (Neuwied, 1964) 30. Fromm, The Revolution of Hope, pp. 143,157. and Herbert Marcuse, "Zur Wahrheitsproblematik der soziologis­ 31. Marcuse, "A Reply to Erich Fromm," Dissent, III, 1 (1956), chen Methode," Die Gesellschaft, VI (1929), pp. 356 ff. p.SL 16. Cited in Horkheimer and Adomo, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 32. See Loren Baritz, Servants of Power (New York, 1965), and p. 4L Georges Friedmann, Industrial Society (New York, 1964). 17. A portion of these remarks on Roszak appeared in Russell Jacoby, 33. Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (Bos­ "Marcuse and the New Academics," Telos, 5 (1970), pp. 188 ff. ton, 1913), pp. 50­51, 18. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture (Garden 34. Cited in Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry (New City, 1969), pp. 84 ff. York, 1963), pp. 287­88. 19. For a critique of Bell's and Robert Tucker's dubious iiiterpreta­ 35. Kenneth Benne, "History of the T­Group in the Laboratory Set­ tions of Marx and alienation, see István Mészáros, Marx's Theory ting," in T­Group Theory and Laboratory Method, ed. Leland of Alienation (London, 1970), pp. 227 ff., 331 ff. For a discus­ P. Bradford et al. (New York, 1964), pp. 86, 91. sion of tìie various positions on the early and late Marx, see 162 Notes 163 Notes Putnam and Sigmund Freud, ed. Nathan G. Hale [Cambridge, 50. Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York, 1946), pp. 193, 185. Massachusetts, 1971], p. 189). 51. Freud, The Ego and the Id (New York, 1962), p. 26. 31. Freud, Future of an Illusion (Garden City, 1964), pp. 15­16. 52. Ludwig Binswanger, Sigmund Freud: Reminiscences of a Friend­ For a different conceptualization of the radical content of Freud, ship (New York, 1957), pp. 96­97. For the complete citation see Philip Lichtenberg, Psychoanalysis; RadicaVand Conservative of Freud on Binswanger see the next chapter. (New York, 1969). 53. Marcuse,­Eros and Civilization, p. 236. 32. See Sperber, Alfred Adler, pp. 278 ff. 54. Adomo, "Die revidierte Psychoanalyse," p. 30. 33. Way, Adler's Place in Psychology, p. 265. 55. Institut für Sozialforschung, Soziologische Exkurse (Frankfurt, 34. Adomo, "Die revidierte Psychoanalyse," p. 41. 1956), p. 42. This and subsequent sentences — "Er ist Mit­ 35. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (Moscow, 1968), vol. 2, mensch, ehe er auch Individuum ist..." — are missing in the pp. 118­19. English translation, Fraïikfurt Institute for Social Research, As­ 36. Ibid. (Moscow, 1971), vol. 3, pp. 84­85. pects of Sociology (Boston, 1972), p. 40. 37. Marx, Grundrisse (Middlesex, England, 1973), p. 884. 56. Horkheimer, in Tensions That Cause War, ed. Hadley Cantril 38. Cited in and see H. L. Ansbacher's introduction to Adler, Su­ (Urbana, Illinois, 1950), p.'38. periority and Social Interest, pp. 9­10. 57. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 232. Marcuse's critique of 39. Walter T. James, "Karen Homey and Erich Fromm in Relation the neo­Freudian revisionism first appeared in Dissent magazine to Alfred Adler," Individual Psychology Bulletin, VI (1947), in 1955, and then as an epilogue to Eros and Civilization. Here pp. 105 ff. Cf. Nathan Freeman, "Concepts of Adler and Homey," two other critiques of the neo­Freudians should be mentioned American Journal of Psychoanalysis, X (1950), pp. 18 ff. which in some respects con Verge with Marcuse's: Paul Good­ 40. Clara Thompson, Psychoanalysis; Evolution and Development man's "The Political Meaning 'of Some Recent Revisions of (New York, 1951), pp. 159, 199. Cf. Mullahy, Oedipus; Myth Freud," Politics, II (1945), pp. 197 ff.; and John Clarkson, "The and Complex, pp. 324­25. Function of Anti­Sex: The Social Meaning of Dr. Erich Fromm's 41. Horkheimer, "Emst Simmel and Freudian Philosophy," Interna­ Ethical Desexualization of Psychoanalysis," Contemporary Issue, tional Journal of Psychoanalysis, 29 (1948), p. 111. Or Hork­ IX (1958), pp. 75 ff. The Clarkson essay could be character­ heimer wrote on Freud, 'Tsychology without libido is in no way ized as a Reichian critique of Fromm. In this context the work psychology" (cited in Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination; of Robert Lindner from the 1950s, though somewhat dated, is A History of the Frankfurt School [Boston, 1973], p. 102). worth mentioning; see his critique of Adler and the neo­Freudians 42. N. Freeman, "Concepts of Adler and Homey," p. 25; and Floyd in The Revolutionist's Handbook (New York, 1971), originally W. Matson, The Broken Image (Garden City; 1966), pp. 208 ff. published in 1952 as Prescription for Rebellion. 40. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York, 1962), p. 52. 58. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 235­36. H. C. Abraham and E. L. Freud, eds.. Psycho­analytic Dialogue: 59. Erich Fromm, "The Human Implications of Instinctivistic 'Radi­ The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, p. 12. calism,' " Dissent, II, 4 ( 1955), pp. 348,349. 45. For a discussion of second nature, see Russell Jacoby, "Towards 60. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, pp. 228,229. a Critique of Automatic Marxism: The Politics of Philosophy 61. Marcuse, "A Reply to Erich Fromm," Dissent, III, 1 (1956), from Lukács to the Frankfurt School," Telos, 10 (1971), espe­ p. 81. cially pp. 142 ff. 62. Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York, 1963), pp. 109, 111. 46. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 120. 63. Adomo, "Sociology and Psychology," New Left Review, 47 47. Freud, "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," Collected <1968), p. 95. Papers, vol. 4, p. 297. 64. Marcuse, Five Lectures, p. 44. 48. Cited in Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, p. 455. 65. Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital (Frankfurt, 1973), Band 49. Freud, "Why War?" Collected Papers, vol. 5, p. 275. II, p. 456. 165 Notes 164 Notes claiming" to be critical and humanist he is confident that in 66. Horkheimer, "Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung," in Autoritärer thought majority rules. "The romantic revival [Marcuse et al.] Staat, p. 102. is moving in a direction diametrically opposite to the main cur­ 67. Adomo, "Sociology and Psychology," p. 95. rent of psychoanalytic thought" (p. 191, Matsòn's emphasis). 68. Adomo, Kritik (Frankfürt, 1971), p. 64. In his attachment to the "mainstream" and majority thought 69. Marcuse, Five Lectures, p. 60. Matson unwittingly tells the tmth about the Freud­Adler ex­ 70. Frankfurt Institute, Aspects of Sociology, pp, 141­42. change as it has persisted till the present. "From the perspective 71. Ellenberger, Discoveiy of the Unconscious, p.. 645. of our own day, it might even be argued... that it was the 72. Robért White, "Adler and the Future of Ego Psychology," in Es­ tum first taken by Adler some fifty years ago which has come to says in Individual Psychology, eds. K. A. Adler and D. Deutsch be the 'mainstream' of the psychoanalytic movement — and (New York, 1959), p. 440. that taken by Freud which has been in fact the 'deviation'" (p. 73. Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaption 194). Exactly., (New York, 1958), p. 6. 81. Freud, The Problem of Anxiety (New York, 1963), pp. 22­23, '74. Ibid., pp. 8, 81. 25. 75. Adomo, "Sociology and Psychology," p. 91. 82. Freud, The Ego and the Id, p. 1. 76. See Klaus Horn, "Insgeheim kulturistische Tendenzen der mo­ 83. Cited in Max Schur, The Id and the Regulatory Principles of dernen psychoanalytischen Orthodoxie," in Psychoanalyse als Mental Functioning (London, 1957), pp. 17­18. Sozialwissenschaft (Frankfurt, 1971). More than most, Hartmann 84. See Otto Fenichel's model djscussion of ego and depth moments, seemed aware of the problem; see H. Hartmann, "The Appli­ Such as in his "Ego Disturbances and Their Treatment," Col­ cation of Psychoanalytic Concepts to Social Science," Psycho­ lected Papers of Otto Fenichel: Second Serieé (New York, 1954). .analytic Quarterly, XIX, 3 (1950), pp. 385 ff. 85. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 30. 77. 'Daniel Yankelovich and William Barrett, Ego and Instinct (New 86. Adomo, "Sociology and Psychology," p. 88. York, 1971), p. 97. 87. Adomo, Kritik, p. 37 . 78. PaulJRoazen, Freud: Political and Social Thought (New York, 88. Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New 1970), p.234. York, 1960), p. 3» 79. Henry M. Ruitenbeek, Freud and America (New York, 1966), 89. Adomo, Kritik, pp. 90­91, p. 163. 90. Adomo, "Sociology and Psychology," p. 88. 80. Matson, The Broken Image, pp. 210­13. Matson's book illus­ trates the insuflSciency of neo­Adlerian theory which finally tums ideological. While the book is openly and cogently critical of in Conformist Psychology behaviorism, it enthusiastically returns to the establishment fold 1. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (Greenwich, Connecticut, when it comes, to the Freud^Adler­neo­Freudian divergence. 1955), p. 174 (Fromm's emphasis). Matson denigrates the interpretation of Freud by Marcuse, 2. Sigmund Freud, "Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy," Brown, et al., by calling the latter "literary figures" — the first Collected Papers (London, 1957), vol. 2, p. 290. and final insult' of the positivist protecting his scientific turf 3. Cited in Roman Rosdolsky, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Marx­ from the unaccredited outsiders; he tells us that their thought schén 'Kapital' (Frankfurt and ViennU, 1968), Band I, p. 358. "betrays the vast difference separating this essentially literary 4. Carl Rogers, On Encounter Groups (New York, 1970), p. 162. perspective from the clinical professional center of psychoanal­ 5. Gordon W. Allport, Becoming (New Haven, 1955), pp. 68, 72. ysis" (pp. 190­91). Matson thinks that he is scoring a decisive 6. See Michel Foucault, Madness and .Civilization (New York, point against Freudians such as Marcuse when he notes séveral 1963), especially pp. 42­77. times that they are in the minority as compared With thè com­ 7. Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York, 1963), pp. 4, 90 ff. pact majority of the neo­Freudians and Adlerians: in a bOok 168 "Notes 169 Notes 43. See the discussion in J. Matzner, "Der BegrifiF der Chafakter­ maske bei Karl Marx," Sozial Welt. XV (1964). pp. 130 £ 4. Helmut Dahmer, "Psychoanalyse und historischer Materialis­ 44. B. F. Skinner, "Beyond Freedom and Dignity," in Psychology mus, in Psychoanalyse als Sozialwissenschaft (Fiankiuit 1971) p. 64. ' '' Today, V, 3 (August 1971), p. 39. 45. A graphic example of the antinomies of behaviorism is Harold 5. Horkheimer, Autoritärer Staat, p. 59. An English translation is L. Cohn, James Filipczak, A Nèw Learning Environment, fore­ now in Telos, 15 (1973), pp. 11 ff. words by R. Buckminster Fuller and B. F. Skinner (San Fran­ 6. Cited in "Introduction" by Fred Halliday'in Karl Korsch, Marx­ cisco and Washington, 1971). Again, there is the same confi­ ism. andPhilosophy (London, 1970), pp. 9­10, dent materialism. "The youngster is not mentally bankrupt, but 7. Wilhelm Reich, People in Trouble (Rangeley, Maine, 1953), p. 59." the public school and the systems that sustain it are" (p. 5). And again th'ere is the same undisguised enthusiasm for the capitalist 8. For a brief survey of the Russian reception to psychoanalysis, ethos of success and calculation which is billed as a recent scien­ 1950)°^^^\2^°'^^"' Psychiatry (Middlesex, England, tific innovation. "Using money as a generalized reinforcer wôrked ih our educational research environment, just as it does in our 9. W. Jurinetz, "Psychoanalyse und Marxismus," in Psychoanalyse society. We all perform because there' is something iri it for us" una Marxismus, hrsg. H. J. Sandkühler (Frankfurt, 1970), pp. 85—86. (p. 8). The goal is to move the delinquent youth toward the "middle­class adolescent life" (p. 141). 10. Karl Korsch, Schriften ^ur Sozialisierung (Frankfurt 1969) pp. 74­75. , ' " 46. Spiro T. Agnew, "Blast at Behaviorism," Psychology Today, V, 8 (Januaiy 1972), pp. 4 ff. 11. Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein (Amsterdam, 47. Wilson, New Pathways in Psychology, p. 181. Wilson also notes 1967), pp. 86­88, and History and Class Consciousness (Lon­ that while Marcuse was apparently uninterested in Maslow's don, 1971), pp. 73­75. See Lukács's comments on mass psy­ ideas, they "were having influence where it mattered =—in cor­ chology in his review of Michels's Zur Soziologie des Partei­ poration board rooms" (p. 183). wesens, reprinted in Lukács, Organisation und Partei (n.p., 48. Maslow, Eupsychian Management (Homewood, Illinois, 1965), n^.). He says there mass psychology is "nothing but the scien­ tific wish­dream of the bourgeoisie." Illustrative of the fissure p. 206. 1­ between the psychological and historical dimensions in Lukács are his astounding personal remarks in an interview shortly be­ fore his death; these, perhaps, illuminate his defective analysis IV Negative Psychoanalysis and Marxism of much of modem literature, to say nothing of his anti­psycho­ 1. Heinrich Regius (Max Horkheimer), Dämmerung (Zürich, logical political thought. "I must say that I am perhaps not a 1934), p. 135. very contemporary man. I can say that I have never felt fms­ 2. Horkheimer, "Vernunft und Selbsterhaltung," in Autoritärer Staat tration or any kind of complex in my life. I know what these (Amsterdam, 1968), p. 91. mean, of course, from the literáture of the twentieth century, 3. An unfortunately excellent example of this is Shulamith Fire­ and from having read Freud. But I have not experienced them stone's The Dialectic of Sex (New York, 1970). Her synthesis of myself (Georg Lukacs, 'An Unoificial Interview," New Left Freud and Marx as crystallized in the concept "sex class" is Review, 68 [1971], p. 58). Compare these remarks with those geometrically perfect and theoretically vacuous. Her book suffers recorded by Gyula Illyés: "What preserves me is that I have from a host of lethal simplifications about both Marxism and no inner life. I am interested in everything except my' soul" psychoanalysis; see the critical review in Telos, 8 (1971), pp. (Gyula Illyes, On Charon s FeiTy," New Hungarian Quarterlu XIII [1972], p. 154). 149 ff. 12. See Klaus Horn, "Psychoanalyse—Anpassungslehre oder kri­ 170 Notes 171 Notes tische Theorie des Subjekts?" in Marxismus. Psychoanalyse. Sex­ of suffering from the optimistic hope for a changed future. Freud pol 2, hrsg. H.­P. Gente (Frankfurt, 1972), pp. 116 ff. responded by saying that he did not consider Reik's "pessimistic 13. Theodor W. Adomo, "Postscriptum," in Adorno, Aufsätze zur dismissal of a better future" justified (Theodor Reik, Freud als GeseUschaftstheorie (Frankfurt, 1970), p. 55. Kulturkritiker [Vienna, 1930], pp. 26, 64). 14. Adomo, Stichworte (Frankfurt, 1969), pp. 182­83. 26. S. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York, 1962), 15. It should be recalled that Emst Bloch's 1923 review of History pp. 59 ff. and Class Consciousness took it to* task exactly for its sociolo­ 27. S. Freud, New Introductory Lectures, p. 67. gism, though this was not argued from within a psychoanalytic 28. Emphasis added. Cited by Emest Jones, Life and Work of Sig­ context. Lukács, according to Bloch, in his drive toward totality, mund Freud (New York, 1957), vol. 3, p. 345. For a recent loses the "depth­relations of being"; this was due to a "reduc­ discussion that collects most of the relevant Freud passages, see tion or homogenization to a pure social matter" or to a "certain W. Lepenies and H. Nolte, Kritik der Anthropologie. Marx und simplistic tendency to ... an almost exclusive sociological homog­ Freud (Munich, 1971). enization of the [historical] process" (Emst Bloch, "Aktualität 29. According to his son, Federn was a member of the Austiian und Utopie. Zu Lukács' 'Geschichte und Klassenbewusstein'" Social Democracy till its dissolution in 1934 (see Emst Fedem, reprinted in Lukacsdebatte [Marxismus­Kollektiv, 1969], pp. "Funfunddressig Jahf mit Freud," Psyche, XXV (1971), p. 723. 136­38). See the discussion and relevant citations in Paul 30. Paul Fedem, "Zur Psychologie der Revolution," reprinted in Breines, "Bloch Magic," Continuum, VII, 4 (1970), pps 622­24. Psychoanalyse Marxismus und Sozialwissenschaft (W. Grauen­ 16. Adorno, Negativ Dialektik (Frankfurt, 1970), p. 343. hage, 1971), pp. 412,418. 17. Adomo, Stichworte, p. 159. 31. íiíd.,p.416. 18. Karl Marx, "Communist Manifesto," in Marx and Engels's Basic 32. Ibid.. pp. 417,429. " Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewis S. Feuer (Garden 33. Erich Fromm, "Psychoanalytic Characterology...," reprinted in City, 1959), p. 22. "It is not individuals who are set free by Crisis in Psychoanalysis (Greenwich, Connecticut, 1971), p. 177, free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free' (Marx, 34. Horkheimer et al., Studien übet Autorität und Familie (Paris, Grundrisse [Middlesex, England, 1973], p. 650). 1936), p. 87, 19. Adorno, Negativ Dialektik, p. 171. 35. Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, 3d ed. (New York, 1949), 20. Marx, "Contributions to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of pp. xxii, XXV (empliasis deleted from original). Right," in Marx and Engels on Religion (New York, 1964), p. 36. Reich, Geschlechtsreife, Enthaltsamkeit, Ehemoral (Berlin, 42. 1968), p. 6L 21. For a lengthier discussion of the political and philosophical mean­ 37. Horkheimer, "Geschichte u. Psychologie," reprinted in Kritische ing of automatic Marxism, see my "Towards a Critique of Auto­ Theorie der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1968), I, pp. 19­20. matic Marxism: The Politics of Philosophy from Lukács to the 38. Horkheimer, "Autorität und Familie," in Kritische Theorie der Frankfurt School," Telos. 10 (1971). Cf. Paul Breines, "Praxis Gesellschaft, I, pp. 288, 330. and Its Theorists," Telos. 11 (1972), pp. 82 ff. 39. Adomo, Stichworte, p. 132. 22. Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures (Boston, 1970), pp. 38­39. 40. Adomo et al., The Authorifarian Personality (New York, 1969), 23. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York, 1962), p. 83. p. 749. 24., Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 41. Adomo, "Die revidierte Psychoanalyse," in Adomo, Horkheimer, (New York, 1965), p. 181. and Marcuse, Kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft (n.p., n.d.), 25. Emst L. Freud, ed.. Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold IV, pp. 27­28. Zweig (London, 1970), p. 21. If Freud was pessimistic about 42. Marcuse, Five Lectures, pp. . 13­14. One of the most interesting the possibility for change, this should be measured against Theo­ attempts to work out the relationship between a Marxist notion dor Reik's pessimism. Reik accused Freud's Future of an Illusion of reification and a psychological or clinical one, perhaps to be 172 Notes 173 Notes found in some forms of schizophrenia, 'is Joseph Gabel's La One example: in a book solely concemed with Reich, Róheim, fausse conscience (Paris, 1962). A discussion of this book can­ ahd Marcuse, Robinson does not seem to be aware that Reich not take plaqe here; only to be noted is that any such discussion wrote extensively on Róheim. A better treatment, though with a would have to pursue the difference between Lukács's and Mann­ different focus, is Richard King's The Party of Eros (New York, heim's notions of ideology, as Gabel sees his work­ as validating 1973). For some other details on Reich, see Ilse O. Reich, Wil­ the "total" or "universal" notion, that is, Mannheim's. Some of helm Reich (New York, 1970), and Ola Raknes, Wilhelm Reich his formulations that derive from this seem questionable. and Orgonomy (Middlesex, Englan'd, 1971). 43. Aurel Kolnai, Psychoanalysis and Society (London, 1921), pp. 48. W. Reiçh, "Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis," in Stud­ 116,173. ies on.the Left, VI, 4 (1966), pp. 6­7. 44. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Fedem, eds.. Minutes of the Vienna 49. Ibid., pp. 11, 36­37, Psychoanalytic Society (New York, 1962), vol. 1, p. 162. 50. E. Fromm, "Politik und Psychoanalyse," Psychoanìdytische Be­ 45. Ibid., p. 164. wegung, III, 5 (1931), p. 444. 46. The following is concemed with the German debate; there were 51. Fromm, "Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychol­ others of less interest, such as the insular English examination ogy," reprinted in Crisis.of Psychoanalysis (Greenwich, Connec­ of Marx and Freud. See Reuben Osbom, Freud and Màrx: A ticut, 1971), p. 155 (emphasis deleted). Dialectical Study (Londbn, 1937), arguing for the use of psy­ 52. Otto Fenichel, "Über die Psychoanalyse als Keim einer zukünfti­ choanalysis within Marxism; and a rejoinder, Francis Bartlett, gen dialektische­ijiaterialistischen Psychologie," Zeitschrift für Sigmund Freud: A Marxian Study (London, 1938). A,presenta­ politische Psychologie und Sexualökonomie, I, 1 (1934), pp. 49­ tion of this exchange, which is as insular as the original, is to be 50 (emphasis deleted). found in Thomas Johnston, Freud and Political Thought (New 53. As has lieen often noted, the changes in editions of Reich's book York, 1965), pp. 81 ff. Later English contributions are of in­ are a major obstacle in pursuing his thought; even aside from terest because they explicitly take up the question of whether often cmcial revisions in translation, there are frequent major the neo­Freudian revisions render psychoanalysis moré or less alterations to earlier editions. The new edition (1970) of The acceptable to Marxism; some of the main essays in this are F. Mass Psychology of Fascism not only eliminates thei important Bartlett, "Recent Trends in Psychoanalysis," Science and So­ preface to the first edition and the afterword to the second, but ciety, IX, 3 ­(Summer 1945), pp. 214 ff.; Marie Carroll, "On adds some 200 pages. Recently some translations based on the Bartlett's Psychoanalytic Views," Science and Society, IX, 4 original editions appeared: see Wilhelm Reich, Sex­Pol Essays (Fall 1945), pp. 362 ff.; Joseph Wortis, "Freud, Homey, Fromm^ 1929­1934, ed. Lee Baxandall (New York, 1972). and Others," Science and Society, X, 2 (Spring 1946), pp. 176 54. Reich, "The Imposition of Sexual Morality," in Sex­Pol, p. 245. ff.; Judson T. Stone, "The Theory and Practice of Psychoanal­ 55. Reich, Massenpsychologie des Faschümus, II. Auflage (n.p., ysis," Science and Society, X, 1 (Winter 1946), pp. 54 ff. Finally n.d.), p. 5. to be mentioned here is the inteUigent essay by Paul Baran, 56. Reich, People in Trouble, p. 153, Marxism and Psychoanalysis (New York, 1960). 57. See "Zur Geschichte des Sex­Pol­Bewegung," Zeitschrift für 47. Works on Reich are appêaring thick and fast. A decent exposi­ politische Psychologie ... I, 3­4 (1934), pp. 260 ff. tion is to be found in Constantin Sinelnikoff, L'oeuvre de Wil­ 58. Reich, "Nachwort zur II Auflage," Massenpsychologie des Fas­ helm Reich, 2 vols. (Paris, 1970). Others, in order of descending chismus, pp. 277 ff. quality, are Jean­Michel Palmier, Wilhelm Reich (Paris, 1969); 59. Cf. C. Sinelnikov, "Early 'Marxist' Critiques of Reich," Telos, 13 Michel Cattier, La vie et Voeuvre du Docteur Wilhelm Reich (1972), pp. 131 ff, (Lausanne, n.d.); Paul Robinson, The Freudian Left (New 60. I. Sapir, "Freudismus, Soziologie, Psychologie," in Psychoanalyse York, 1969). The last is superficial, uninformed, and defective. und Marxismus, hrsg. Hans Jörg Sandkühler, p. 223. 174 Notes 175 Notes 61. Reich, "Zur Anwendung der Psychoanalyse in der Geschichts­ 70. Sandor Ferenczi, "The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money," forschung," Zeitschrift für politische Psychologie... I, 1 (1934), in Ferenczi, Sex in Psychoanalysis and The Development of Psy­ pp. 8,15. choanalysis (with Otto Rank), (New York, 1956), p. 276. 62. Siegfried Hemfeld, "Die kommunistische Diskussion um die Psy­ 71. Fetiichel, "The Drive to Amass Wealth," Psychoanalytic Quar­ choanalyse und Reich's 'Widerlegung" der Todestriebhypothese," terly, VII (1938), pp. 83, 85, 95. Cf. Fenichel's critique of La­ in Psychoanalyse und Marxismus, p. 279. Reich considered the forque's psychological reductionism (Fenichel, "Psychoanalyse introduction of the death instinct and repetition compulsion as der Politik. Eine Kritik," Psychoanalytische Bewegung, IV, 3 "undoubtedly metaphysic element, a hypothesis which was not [1932], pp. 255 ff.). Laforque seeks "to understand the fate and only unproven but incapable of proof (Reich, Character Analy­ present düBculties of capitalism without entering into the rela­ sis, 3d ed. [New York, 1949], p. 215). tions of production and their problematic" (p. 266). 63. Bemfeld, "Die kommunistische Diskussion...," p. 283. 72. Others, such as Franz Alexander, criticized both psychologism 64. Reich, Character Analysis, pp. 159 £E. and sociologism within psychoanalysis. It may have been Alex­ 65. Reich, "Überblich über das Forschungsgebiet der Sexualökono­ ander who initiated the use of the term "revisionists" to refer to mie," Zeitschrift für politische Psychologie ... II (1935), pp. 5, the neo­Freudians (see Franz Alexander, "Psychoanalysis Re­ 6. Cf. Howard Press, "The Marxism and Anti­Marxism of Reich," vised," Psychoanalytic Quarterly, IX [1940], pp. 1 ff). Telos, 9 (1971), pp. 65 ff. For a critique of Reich's positivism 73. Fenichel, "Psychoanalytic Remarks on Fromm's 'Escape from and fetish of genital sexuality,' see H. Dahmer, "Wilhelm Reich. Freedom,'" The Psychoanalytic Review, XXXI (1944), p. 150. Seine Stellung zu Freud und Marx," in Marxismus. Psychoana­ 74. Ibid., pp. 140 ff. lyse. Sexpol 2, hrsg. H.­P. Gente, pp. 80 ff. Also see H. Dahmer, 75. Fenichel's review of Homey, New Ways in Psychoanalysis, in "Psychoanalyse und historischer Materialismus," in Psychoanalyse Psychoanalytic Quarterly, IX (1940), p. 121. als Sozialwissenschaft: this last essay is a cogent and intelligent 76. Adomo, "Sociology and Psychology," Neio Left Review, 47 articulation of the Frankfurt School position. For a sympathetic (1968), pp. 86,93. discussion of Reich, see Berteli Ollmann, "The Marxism of Wil­ 77. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Stuttgart, 1956), helm Reich," in The Unknown Dimension: European Marxism pp. 87­88. Since Lenin, eds. Dick Howard and Karl L. Klare (New York, 78. Adomo, Vorlesung zur Einleiting in die Erkenntnistheorie 1972), pp. 197 ff. The full flavor of where a reactionary Reichian (Frankfurt, n.d.), p. 102. position can lead can be sampled in Elsworth Baker, Mßn in the 79. Adorno, Aufsätze zur Gesellschaftstheorie, p. 191. Trap (New York, 1967), a book dedicated to Rieich. "Only the 80. Horkheimer, "Emst Simmel and Freudian Philosophy," Interna­ most 'hideous distortions' of ergonomie truth — as Reich put it tional Journal of Psychoanalysis, 29 (1948), p. 112. — could possibly equate his work, thinking, and hopes for man­ 81. Nathan G. Hale, ed., James Jackson Putnam and Psychoanalysis: kind with those of present­day liberals, leftists, and beatnik­ Letters Between Putnam and Sigmund Freud... (Cambridge, bohemians" (p. xiii). Massachusetts, 1971), p. 171. 66. Eric Pfeiffer, ed., Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas­Salomé: 82. Quoted by Wortis, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud, p. 22. Letters (New York, 1972), p. 174. 83. Horkheimer, "Vernunft und Sjelbsterhaltung," pp. 100­01. 67. Fromm in a review of Reich, Der Einbruch der Sexualmoral in 84. This is true with the important exception of Marcuse, who has Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, II (1933), pp. 119 ff; attempted to work out a positive relation between a psychic and 68. Horkheimer, "Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung" (1936), re­ historical dimension. printed in Traditionelle und Kritische Theorie. Vier Aufsätze 85. Cf. F. Böckelmann, Die schlechte Aufhebung der autoritären (Frankfurt, 1970), p. 154. Persönlichkeit  ( Frankfurt, 1971 ), 69. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 218, and Counterrevolution 86. Marcuse, One­Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964), pp. 56 ff. and Revolt (Boston, 1972), p. 130. 87. Adorno, "Sexualtabus und Recht heute," Eingriffe (Frankfurt, 1963), p. 101. 177 Notes 176 Notes relation which is neither "simple fidelity" nor indifferent and brutal interchangeability. And see Freud's comments to Wortis: V The Politics of Subjectivity "We don't know what the future of monogamy will be, and can­ not prophesy.... If socialism comes, we shall see what happens" 1. René Descartes, "Discourse on Method," part III, in Philosoph­ (Joseph Wortis, Fragments of an Analysis with Freud [New ical Writings, Norman K. Smith (New York, 1958), p. 113. York, 1954], p. 42). 2. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Middlesex, England, 1973), p. 158. 18. Sigmimd Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 3. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. (New York, 1960), p. 93. Dirk J. Struik (New York, 1984), pp. 137­38. 19. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York, 1971), p. 55, 4. Theodor W. Adomo, "Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis," Stich­ 20. Horkheimer, "Vernunft und SelbsterhaltungI" in Autoritärer worte (Frankfurt, 1969), p. 177. Staat (Amsterdam, 1968), pp. Ill, 113. Cf. the beautfful aphor­ 5. Max Horkheimer, "Authorität und Familie," Kritische Theorie ism of Adomo, "Constanz," Minima Moralia (Frankfurt, 1964), der Gesellschaft, Band I (Frankfurt, 1969), p. 346. p. 226. It is translated in Reimut Reiche, Sexuality and Class 6. Adomo, Negativ Dialektik (Frankfurt, 1970), p. 148. Struggle (London, 1970), p. 163. 7. See Marx's comments on Bakunin's program in Marx and Engels, 21. Adomo, Negativ Dialektik, p. 278. Werke (Berlin, 1969), vol. 18, pp. 14 if. 22. Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewus^ein (Amsterdam, 8. Herbert Marcuse, "Neue Quellen zur Grandlegung des Historis­ 1967), p. 267; History and Class Consciousness (London, 1971), chen Materialismus," Ideen zu Einer Kritischen Theorie (Frank­ p. 262. furt, 1967), pp. 35 ff. English translation in Marcuse, Studies in Critical Philosophy (Boston, 1973). 9. Marx, Civil War in France (New York, 1940), p. 61. 10. Cf. Marx, Capital (Moscow, 1961), vol. 1, p. 763. VI Theory and Therapy I: Freud 11. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 1. Sigmund Freud, cited by Helmut Dahmer in a review of B. 132­33. Goetz, in XXIV 12. Marx and Engels, The Holy Family (Moscow, 1956), pp. 156­ Erinnerungen an Sigmund Freud, Psyche, (1970), p. 132. 57. 13. Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy of the Bedroom (New 2. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York, 1962), p. 7. 3. Ibid., p. 226. Cf. Stanley E. Hyman, "Psychoanalysis and the York, 1966), pp. 318­19,321. 14. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York, 1966), Climate of Tragedy," in Freud and the Twentieth Century, ed. Benjamin Nelson (New York, 1957). p. 10. ^ , 15. For a good discussion of Marxism and montfgamy, see the work 4. Dieter Wyss, Depth Psychology; A Critical History (New York, from the 1920s by the Russian scholar David Riazanov, avaüable 1966), pp. 317­18. This book is worth consulting, as it is ency­ in French translation: "Communisme et marriage," ^Partisans, clopedic in its scope. 5. For Fromm's latest misunderstanding of this point — and attack 32­33 (1966), pp.69 ff. 16. See the letter of Marx to Jenny Marx cited in Alfred Schmidt, on Marcuse — see The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (Greenwich, Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx (Frankfurt, 1967), Connecticut, 1971), pp. 25 ff. '6. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death (New York, 1959), p. p. 113. 155. 17. Yet ff Utopian thought is in order there is nowhere better to turn than to the most determined foe of bourgeois sexuality and civi­ 7. Theodor W. Adomo, "Sociòlogy and Psychology," New Left Re­ lization, Charles Fourier, and especially to his long­suppressed view, 46 (1967), p. 78. work, Le nouveau monde amoureux ­{PaTis, 1967). Of particu­ 8. Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies ih Hysteria (Boston, lar interest is his notion of "pivotal love" (pp. 290 ff.) — a love 1964), p. 232. 178 Notes 179 Notes 9. Freud, "Analysis Tenninable and Interminable," Collected Pa­ 17. Franz Alexander, The Western Mind in Transition (New York, pers (London, 1957), vol. 5, p. 329. 1960), p. 99. Freud repeated this in his "autobiography"; in 10. "Freudian theory cannot in any way be reduced to that neo­ America psychoanalysis "has suffered a great deal from being positivist schema. The theory is not the simple systematization of watered down" (An Autobiographical Study [New York, 1963], observations. It remains the theory of interpretations" (Octave p. 100). For some other remarks of Freud on America, see Paul Mannoni, Freud [New Vork, 1971], pp. 143­44). "Psychoanaly­ Roazen, Freud; Political and Social Thought (New York, 1970), tic theory cannot... be reduced to a mere array of individual pp. 97 ff. < observations, nor does psychoanalytic theory represent a struc­ 18. Cited in Emest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (New ture of thought superimposed upon the 'empirical material' that York, 1957), vol. 3, p. 77. would have precedence" (Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris, and Ru­ 19. Cited in Franz Alexander, ed.. Psychoanalytic Pioneers (New dolph M. Loewenstein, "The Function of Theory in Psychoanaly­ York, 1966),'p. 228.. sis," in Drives, Affects, Behavior, ed. R. M. Loewenstein [New 20. H. D., Tribute to Freud (New York, 1956), p. 25. York, 1953], p. 14). 21. Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters of Wilhelm Fleiss 11. Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York, (New York, 1954), p. 162. 1965), pp. 156­57. "I did not like the idea that psychoanalysis 22. Abram Kardiner, "Freud — The Man I Knew," in Benjamin should suddenly become fashionable because of purely practical Nelson, ed., Freud and the Twentieth Century (New York, considerations" (Freud to Abraham, in A Psycho­analytic Dia­ 1957), p. 52. logue; The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, ed. 23. Cited in Alexander, Psychoanalytic Pioneers, p. 255. H. C. Abraham and E. L. Freud [London, 1965], pp. 279­80). 24. See the discussion in Psychoanalysis and Faith: Letters of Freud 12. S. Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis (Garden City, 1964), and Pfister, pp. llQ­20. p. 96. 25. Freud, "Sandor Ferenczi (1933)," Standard Edition (London, 13. Freud and Oskar Pfister, Psychoanalysis and Faith; Letters of 1964), vol. 12, p. 229. See Freud's remarks on Ferenczi's — and Freud and Pfister (New York, 1963), p. 126. Here, too, it could Rank's — innovations in A Psycho­analytic Dialogue: The Letters be noted, Reich's positivist bent set him in opposition to Freud; of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, pp, 344 ff. These remarks he considered lay analysis a deviation from the natural scientific also put into question charges about Freud's alleged despotism rigor of analysis (Cf. Reich Speaks of Freud, eds. Mary Higgins in theoretical matters. and Chester Raphael [New York, 1967], pp. 86­87). 26. Freud, New Introductory Lectures, p. 153, 14. Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis, p. 106. 27. Freud cited in P. Roazen, Brother Animal: The Story of Freud 15. Smiley Blanton, Diary of My Analysis with Sigmund Freud and Tausk (New York, 1969), p. 184. No one should look at (New York, 1971), p. 116. Roazen's book without consulting its full­scale critique and re­ 16. For a discussion of American reception and dilution of psycho­ buttal, Kurt R. Eissler, Talent and Genius: The Fictitious Case analysis see Nathan G. Hale, Freud and the Americans: The Be­ of Tausk Contra Freud (New York, 1971). ginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States (New York, 28. Freud, General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York, 1971), pp. 322 ff.; and John Bumham, Psychoanalysis and Amer­ 1963), pp. 390­91. ican Medicine, Monograph No. 20, Psychological Issues, V 29. Freud, "Future Prospects of Psychoanalytic Therapy," Collected (1967), pp. 180 ff. Cf. Clarence P. Obemdorf, A History of Papers, vol. 2, pp. 294­95. Psychoanalysis in America (New York, 1964), p. 231, For a 30. Freud, "Further Recommendations in the Techniques of Psycho­ study that is not concemed with psychoanalysis, but illuminates analysis," Collected Papers, vol. 2, p. 353. the American interpretation of psychoanalysis, see Donald Meyer, 31. Freud, "Sexuality and Aetiology," Collected Papers, vol. 1, p. The Positive Thinkers (Garden City, 1965). 239. 180 Notes 181 Notes 32. Freud, "Turnings in the Ways of Psycho­analytic "Therapy," Col­ Therapie," Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, IV (1935), p. 391. lected Papers, vol. 2, pp. 400­01. Cf. The Question of Lay Anal­ 41. Cf. Adomo, "Die revidierte Psychoanalyse," in Adorno, Hork­ ysis, p. 99. heimer, and Marcuse, Kritische Theorie der Gesellschaft (n.p., 33. Cited in H.­J. Bannach, "Die Avissenschaftliche Bedeuting des n.d.),IV;p. 39. alten Berliner Psychoanalytischen Instituts," Psyche, XXV 42. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York, 1962), p. 49. (1971), p. 243. 43. Adomo, "Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe," in Kierkegaard 34. James Jackson Putnam and Psychoanalysis: Letters Between Put­ (Frankfort,'1966), p. 272. nam and Freud, ed. Nathan G. Hale (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 44. Marcuse, "On Hedonism/' in Negations (Boston, 1968), p. 168. 1971), pp. 90­91 (emphasis added). ^ 45. Ibid., p. 166. 35. Freud, "Recommendations for Physicians on the Psycho­analytic Method of Treatment," Collected Papers, vol. 2, p. 327. 30. Freud, "Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psycho­ analysis," Collected Papers, vol. 2, p. 383. Vii Theory and Therapy II: Laing and Cooper 37. That much of contemporary psychoanalysis itself has retreated 1. I am in partial agreement with Ja» B. Gordon, "The Meta­Jour­ from Freud's position is shown in Paul Haimos, The Faith of the ney of R. D. Laing," in R. D. Laing and Anti­Psychiatry, ed. Counsellors (New York, 1970), pp. 94 ff. Haimos cited from re­ Robert Boyers (New York, 1971); and Peter Sedgewick, "Mental cent psychoanalytical literature and comments, "Psychoanalysis Illness Is Illness," Salmagundi, 20 (1972), pp. 196 ff. has not committed its followers to some of the most fundamental 2. R. D. Laing, Politics of Experience (Middlesex, England, 1969), tenets of the theory, namely those which insist that therapy p. 95. should be reductive so that the patient should be able to resolve 3. David Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti­Psychiatry (New York, the present in terms of the objective insight'he gains from the 1971), p. 35. past, and not in terms of either a mystical and spiritual com­ 4.. Cooper, Death of the Family (New York, 1971), p. 60. munion with the analyst, or in terms of directions and value­ 5. Ibid., p. 16. judgments coming from him" (p. 97). 6. "The investigation of the relation betweén individuals and so­ 38. Clara Thompson, Interpersonal Psychoanalysis: The Selected Pa­ ciety ... is reduced tò the study lof the interdependence of indi­ pers of Clara M. Thompson, ed. Maurice R. Green, foreword by viduals and groups" (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Erich Fromm (New York, 1964), p. 79. "Since analysis was be­ Aspects of Sociology [Boston, 1972], p. 60, and Institut für So­ coming too intellectualized," Thompson wrote, "Ferenczi sought zialforschung, Soziologische Exkurse [Frankfurt, 1956], p. 60). ways to encourage more emotional reliving" (p. 78). Aside from The diversity of the group dynamic tradition can be glimpsed whether this is a valid interpretation of Ferenczi's contribution, in one of its advocates, Kurt Lewin. First, evident in his writings would it be fair to append to this statement on the overintellec­ is an existential moment, protesting against a narrow behaviorism tualization of psychoanalysis an exchange between Wortis and which abstracts the individual from a human context: "One of Freud? Wortis remarked, " 'The Jews are over­intellectualized; it the basic characteristics of field theory in psychology... is the was Jung who said, for example, that psychoanalysis bears the demand that the field that influences an individual should be de­ mark of this Jewish over­intellectualization.' 'So much better for scribed not in 'objective physicalistic' terms, but in the way in psychoanalysis then!' said Freud'' (J. Wortis, Fragments of an which it exists for that person at that time." But, as with Laing Analysts with Freud, p. 146). and Cooper, this in no way precludes the mathematization or .39. Izette de Forest, The Leaven of Love: A Development of the formalization of this context: "It is possible to determine and to Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique of Sandor Ferenczi (Ham­ measure psychological atmospheres quite accurately" (Kurt den, Connecticut, 1965), p. 15. Lewin, Field Theory in Social Science, ed. Dórwin Cartwright 40. Fromm, "Die gesellschaftliche Bedingheit der psychoanalytischen [New York, 1951, 1964], pp. 62­63). Secondly, Lewin was an