This chapter analyzes the relationship between Critical Theory and psychoanalysis. Critical Theory has two fundamental principles: the orientation toward emancipation and the critique of ‘traditional theory’. Both of them provide not only for a diagnosis of society’s historical circumstances [Zeitdiagnose], but also allow us to distinguish between identifiable emancipation potentials in capitalist societies and the obstacles which block these potentials.
Since its inception in 1923, the goal of the Institute for Social Research [Institut für Sozialforschung] was to broaden discussion among Marxist thinkers beyond both established disciplinary divisions and dogmatic postures of official Marxist doctrines at that time.1 The attempt at interdisciplinarity included the integration of psychoanalysis into critical social theory and the development of a critical theory of psychoanalysis, wherein the contributions of Max Horkheimer and Erich Fromm are central. The version of psychoanalysis elaborated by Fromm marks a transformation of this discipline into social psychology.2 Fromm’s social psychology placed psychoanalytical categories firmly into a historical context, expounding them as categories of definite social relations. Indeed, the Frommian version of psychoanalysis led to the progressive abandonment of Freud’s libido theory. It was on this point that Horkheimer and Fromm started to part company, leading to Fromm’s break with the Institute in 1939.
In the Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno retrieved and reformulated key themes of Freud’s drive theory. Indeed, Freudian notions of fear, anxiety, horror, and terror became central to a psychoanalytically enhanced critical theory of society. The psychoanalytical framework was of decisive importance for the understanding of why the ‘impulse’ for and reality of emancipation appeared to be blocked.
In the 1940s, psychoanalysis takes a central place in Critical Theory, which it retained for the next 30 years. The historical context for the integration of psychoanalysis into Critical Theory is Nazism.3
Although psychoanalysis continued to have a central presence in Jürgen Habermas’ Knowledge and Human Interests (1968), it soon vanished, to all intents and purposes, from Habermas’ work from then on. The focus of social diagnosis shifted away from Nazism toward the Welfare State and questions of legitimation. As a consequence of this shift, theories of language and communication became central to Habermasian critical theory, especially in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), which would be substituted again later on by a theory of law in Between Facts and Norms (1992). After Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s analysis of the blockage of emancipation, Habermas relocates its possibility to the field of intersubjective relations of communicative action.
After Habermas, these intersubjective relations have been reformulated as relations of recognition. In his Struggle for Recognition (1996) Alex Honneth reintegrates psychoanalysis into critical theory and sees it as an explanatory device for the contemporary diagnosis of intersubjectivity. Nevertheless, in Honneth’s work psychoanalysis ceases as a distinguishable account of the social relations. In fact, despite the fact that his theory of recognition deals with intersubjective relations, his usage of psychoanalyses reaffirms ontogenesis as a normative model of social critique.
The chapter starts with an account of the central role of psychoanalysis in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which amplified the regressive character of society in distinction to its –blocked – emancipatory potential. Then the chapter explores the manner in which Critical Theory presents a deep psychology, another name for Freudian psychoanalysis. It includes interpretation of texts by Freud in order to shed light on what I consider to be psychoanalysis’ critical potential. Finally, the argument turns to Social Sickness and Ego, which explores Axel Honneth’s conceptions, such as the difference between normality and normativity, intersubjectivity and emancipation in order to consider the problem of social pathologies from a viewpoint other than that of biologism. I hold that regardless of my critique of Honneth’s approach, it articulates a number of questions and challenges that must be addressed by those who remain committed to the interdisciplinary character of Critical Theory.
We will take the highly celebrated Dialectic of Enlightenment as the reference for the theme of society and regression. In Germany, in the early twentieth century, Marxist theory was not suspect of the concept of rational action and considered that workers would act according to what were supposedly their own interests, insofar as the development of the productive forces would establish the objective conditions for overcoming capitalist society. Instead of socialism, however, it was National Socialism that came to the fore in 1933, destroying the labor movement that collapsed almost without a fight. As Wilhelm Reich states, ‘at the crossroads between “socialism and barbarism”, it was in the direction of barbarism that society first proceeded’.5 How can this regression be explained? This is the question that Critical Theory confronted and tried to answer with recourse to psychoanalysis, which seemed to offer explanatory insights into the omnipotence of bourgeois ideology, including what Reich saw as the irrational political behavior of the German working class at that time.6
Until the writing of Dialectic of Enlightenment Horkheimer and Adorno followed a philosophy of history inspired by Hegel, Marx, and Lukács, according to which they considered the unfolding of an emancipatory rationality along the development of productive forces. Even though an increasingly instrumental form of science, culture, and morality prevailed, modern capitalism and bourgeois culture still had an emancipatory potential. The critique of ideology would demystify the established relations of unreason in support of emancipatory praxis. With Nazi domination and the exhaustion of revolutionary possibilities, this type of ideology critique had become historically obsolete because it lacked an empirical referent which theory could summon in support of praxis.
Furthermore, this referent – that is, reason and the objective rationality of the productive forces of human labor – was now considered to be the heart of domination itself. Reason, which had appeared as a project of human emancipation, had not just vanished. It had in fact turned against itself as a means of domination. Thus, reason no longer held the promise of liberation from prejudices and mythologies. Rather, it had become a mode of control over nature and Man, and over itself, too. The philosophy of history which had inspired notions of reasons as the means and ends of progress toward a future liberated humanity had run its course. Progress appeared in the form of an acute regression of ever-increasing domination.
In the context of Nazi barbarism, the critique of political economy as a philosophy of history fell into disrepute and ceased as the organizing center of Critical Theory. In its stead, psychoanalysis came to the fore as a central category of interdisciplinary research and it remained there for the next two decades. The central text is Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this work, psychoanalysis provides the main categories for the analysis and comprehension of domination.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer attributed a central place to reflection on the relation between myth and enlightenment, stressing that tradition opposed reason to myth: ‘Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge’.7 Against this opposition the authors suggest another interpretation that insists on a complicity between myth and enlightenment: ‘Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology’.8 In order to develop this proposition they go back to the adventures of Ulysses in Homer’s Odyssey. Here, we find myth in Homer, although its narration is already a sign of escape from myth. For Adorno and Horkheimer, Ulysses’ story is that of the appearance of subjectivity, a birth which is fundamentally ambivalent: on the one hand we have the relief of escape; on the other, the fear of uprooting. This reflection on origins, always returning to myth, inaugurates for subjectivity a founding history, which the Enlightenment exemplifies. Liberation as a distancing from its origins is ambivalent at best, that is, the promise of reason remains tied to the conditions of unreason from which it derives its claim for liberation. Indeed, myth is the condition of reason and reason’s promise of liberation carries within itself the force of its own delusion. Myth is the premise of reason to which it is bound. Myth thus blocks the desire for emancipation, and reasserts itself as premise of desire. Reason reverts to myth as the foundation of its origins. The derivation of liberation from existing conditions of unreason does not emancipate reason from unreason. It rather makes unreason appear as reason, leading to a relapse into mythical powers and submission to them: this is how in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s argument Enlightenment returns to mythology, from which it could never escape.
Why does this occur in such a way? In the course of his adventures, Ulysses reinforces and consolidates his ego. He cannot simply enjoy this new freedom, because it is comprised of many dangers: he must set limits to himself in order to overcome danger. In this renouncement, he acquires his identity, bidding farewell to the joyful archaic unity of external and internal nature, as it is only at the cost of a repression of their internal nature that humans learn to dominate external nature. This figure of thought provides the model for both faces of enlightenment progress: renouncement – the split between ego and its own nature, which becomes anonymous in the Id – is the consequence of the introversion of sacrifice. In this gesture of self-preservation against external danger lays the origin of this movement of freedom qua domination.
This general argument is anchored in three fundamental elements of Critical Theory: first, a new diagnosis of the present (developed to a great extent by Friedrich Pollock in his State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations);9 second, a new interdisciplinary arrangement, reflecting political economy’s loss of centrality; and third, the articulation of the general problem concerning the foundation of this perspective, in which psychoanalysis has a decisive role.
In the introduction to Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer thus argue as follows:
While we had noted for many years that, in the operations of modern science, the major discoveries are paid for with an increasing decline of theoretical education, we nevertheless believed that we could follow those operations to the extent of limiting our work primarily to a critique or a continuation of specialist theories. Our work was to adhere, at least thematically, to the traditional disciplines: sociology, psychology, and epistemology. The fragments we have collected here show, however, that we had to abandon that trust.10
This passage makes clear, political economy is not to be replaced by another discipline as the principle of enquiry. Instead interdisciplinarity itself becomes the principle of enquiry. Thus, it is possible to hypothesize that Adorno and Horkheimer replaced the previous model of critical thought with what we could call a new ‘space of interdisciplinary dialogue’. At its center is a ‘critique of instrumental reason’, the basis of which, I argue, can be found in Freudian drive theory. This hypothesis allows us to put forward a more general problem of the foundation of this critique without entangling us in a paradox. In the introduction of their book, Horkheimer and Adorno affirm that:
The aporia which faced us in our work thus proved to be the first matter we had to investigate: the self-destruction of enlightenment. We have no doubt – and herein lies our petitio principia – that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today.11
According to our interpretation, this aporia should be understood as the expression of an objective repression of society. The most familiar theses of Dialectic of Enlightenment are those in the introduction, such as: ‘The critical part of the first essay can be broadly summed up in two theses: Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology’.12 We have already highlighted the second thesis, the return to mythology: ‘the cause of enlightenment’s relapse into mythology is to be sought not so much in the nationalist, pagan, or other modern mythologies concocted specifically to cause such a relapse as in the fear [Furcht] of truth which petrifies enlightenment itself’.13 The first thesis, in turn, which stated that myth is already reason, is explained in the opening of the first essay of the book: ‘Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity’.14
This theoretical insight takes us directly to Freud, particularly to the text ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. The dialectic that is posed here is one that operates between mimetic behavior and self-preservation, resulting in the expulsion of mimesis from the rational field and its repression in such a way that the exclusive claim of self-preservation to determine the rational is fulfilled.15 In the purely natural scope of its existence the species finds itself in ‘absolute danger’ [absolute Gefahr]. Even though already mediated by anxiety [Angst], the moment of danger is not avoided: it shows itself as ‘terror’ [Schrecken]. According to Horkheimer and Adorno:
The oldest fear [Angst], that of losing one’s own name, is being fulfilled. For civilization, purely natural existence, both animal and vegetative, was the absolute danger [absolute Gefahr]. Mimetic, mythical, and metaphysical forms of behavior were successively regarded as stages of world history which had been left behind, and the idea of reverting to them held the terror [Schrecken] that the self would be changed back into the mere nature from which it had extricated itself with unspeakable exertions and which for that reason filled it with unspeakable dread [Grauen].16
The dialectic that takes place here – resulting from the domination of internal and external nature – starts with anxiety about a threatening and essentially unintelligible nature. This anxiety requires an internalization of the threat, a determination of the dangerous object in order to neutralize it. This neutralization appears as fear [Furcht]. Fear indicates that the successive attempts of internalizing the anxiety-inducing threat could never remove it completely. It is no longer possible to internalize external nature and its threats without any traces. This is the impossibility, along with its scars, marks and wounds that never disappear, that Horkheimer and Adorno name ‘fear’ [Furcht].
This schema is clearly borrowed from Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, even though it is modified to suit Horkheimer and Adorno’s arguments. As we can read in Beyond the Pleasure Principle:
‘Fright’ [Schreck], ‘fear’ [Furcht] and ‘anxiety’ [Angst] are improperly used as synonymous expressions; they are in fact capable of clear distinction in their relation to danger [Gefahr]. ‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one. ‘Fear’ requires a definite object of which to be afraid. ‘Fright’, however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it; it emphasizes the factor of surprise.17
Comparing both theoretical schemes, one can see that Horkheimer and Adorno rely on Freud to establish the general framework that moves from primitive ‘danger’ to the ‘fear’ of an entirely ‘enlightened’ world. But the differences are as important as the similarities: if Adorno and Horkheimer use Freud to build this ‘negative’ philosophy of history, they do not share Freud’s analysis of a distinction between ‘real anxiety’ and ‘neurotic anxiety’.18 Contrary to Freud, Horkheimer and Adorno consider it an impossibility ‘to bring danger to conscience’, as it is objectively blocked by a social organization (the ‘administered world’) in which repression is a second nature elevated to the condition of a functioning mechanism of a flawless domination: ‘Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized’.19
If we do not sustain an interpretation of the Freudian statement ‘Wo Es war Soll Ich werden’ [Where the Id was, the Ego shall be] in a classical sense, Horkheimer and Adorno’s objections go even deeper, especially when they refer to the social order. As Adorno wrote in a Notebook in 1941:
Freud represents drive processes as a kind of equivalents exchange. But the drive exchange schemata, which Freud presents, are no longer valid as soon as the I has no longer the power of disposition over the many drives that are subordinated to it. When collective subjects form, the whole drive economy together with the pleasure principle is overridden. In his most advanced works, especially Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud saw something of this, but did not draw the consequences.20
Even while rejecting the Freudian drive scheme and against the background of their ‘negative’ philosophy of history, Horkheimer and Adorno reach a conclusion fundamental to Critical Theory. In opposition to the second Freudian drive theory, they return to the forefront what Freud had set aside. Reason, insofar as it is the objective process of the individual as presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, ends up reduced to self-preservation, which, at least for now, takes the place of the Ego and confuses the narcissistic mechanism, preventing it from becoming aware of instrumental reason.
This is precisely what we find in a decisive passage of Dialectic of Enlightenment, where Horkheimer and Adorno discuss the internalization of domination in the form of the individual’s relation to her or his own body:
In the relationship of individuals to the body, their own and that of others, is reenacted the irrationality and injustice of power as cruelty; and that irrationality is as far removed from judicious insight and serene reflection as power is from freedom. In Nietzsche’s theory of cruelty, and still more in the work of Sade, the extent of this connection is recognized, while in Freud’s doctrines of narcissism and the death impulse it is interpreted psychologically.21
According to our reading, this is a better way to interpret the idea that, ‘Not only is domination paid for with the estrangement of human beings from the dominated objects, but the relationships of human beings, including the relationship of individuals to themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the objectification of mind’.22
Even if both authors go far with psychoanalysis, one can ask if it is far enough, a question that arises from the following statement: ‘Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology. Receiving all its subject matter from myths, in order to destroy them, it falls as judge under the spell of myth’.23 Psychoanalysis allows us to diagnose as insurmountable24 the element represented by the constellation of anxiety, but it should also show how this element shifts. From the point of view of psychoanalysis it is not possible to affirm how the repetitive cycle between myth and enlightenment can be broken, nor how or when it is going to shift. However, even if we cannot predict its direction, we can at least say that it is going to shift.
Psychology as critical theory is the psychology of the depths, that is, psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is the attempt to grasp the unconscious in order to understand passions and human psyche. In other words, psychoanalysis’ critical role takes the form of Freudian diagnosis.
Civilization and Its Discontents is a late text (1929) wherein Freud sketches a theme that runs through all his work: a sometimes silent, sometimes explicit tension between the individual’s realizations and the demands of the group. This section explores the tension in explicit terms in order to establish a clear conceptual frame for psychoanalytical doctrine, bringing psychoanalysis’ critical potential to the fore. Even if this tension has been reformulated several times with respect to Freud’s writings – either in biological or metapsychological terms, or even according to different viewpoints (economic, dynamical, and topographical) – our reading does not focus on the epistemological clarification of Freudian developments, which is not to say that such a clarification is not important. For the purposes of this text, the critical potential of Freud is the key question: what are the ethical and political dimensions of psychoanalytic discourse as unveiled by Freud?
In Civilization and its Discontents Freud (1989) argues that with the birth of civilization (or culture) humans turn from animals into rational beings. The more repression perpetuates itself, the more civilization advances and progresses; civilization seems to follow this single dynamic forever, one that involves both exploiters and exploited. As Freud understands it, the opposition between individual and society is immutable, and in light of this irreconcilable character Freud denies and defends civilization at the same time. He denies it by claiming that overcoming the state of nature is impossible; he defends it insofar as civilization is responsible for producing cultural goods, and insofar as it is impossible for humans to live under the dominance of the pleasure principle. Since sublimated drives originate culture, Freud considers the struggle for existence to be eternal and relentless, as it is with the conflict between the pleasure and the reality principles.25 In other words, psychoanalysis posits the actualization of discontent in the construction of the social and the individual. This is, in general terms, the so-called Freudian cultural pessimism.
Let us now turn to the drive problematic in Freud. It has become a convention to divide Freud’s work in two different moments according to the variation of drive theory which underlies them. The first moment posits the idea of a conflict between two drive types: sexual and self-preservational (the latter would later be called Ego drives). In the second moment the conflict shifts to a tension between life drive (Eros) and death drive (Thanatos). This shift aims toward evincing the unbinding character which constitutes the death drive. This unbinding character assumes the clinical form of the repetitive compulsion; a compulsion that displaces the pleasure principle as the only principle of intelligibility of psychoanalytic theory, that is, as the sole organizer and regulator of psychic causality.
With the death drive, Freud proposes a ‘beyond’26 the pleasure principle, in contrast to the first model of high and low excitements, lived as pleasure or displeasure. This first model is maintained by Freud until 1895, having at its core the quantitative hypothesis presented in his Project for a Scientific Psychology. This model is also pervasive in all of Freud’s metapsychology, supplying the qualitative terms for capturing the economic and dynamic accounts of the libido. The shift undertaken by Freud – from the pleasure principle to the death drive – adds topographical consideration to the quantitative and qualitative problematic. The first Freudian topographic model of the psyche has three instances: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. This model is reformulated after the introduction of the death drive and is subsequently expressed as a division between the Ego, the Id, and Superego. This shift has the Freudian maxim Wo Es war soll Ich werden as a corollary.
This is an important and revealing maxim in that it solicits different interpretations among the critical theorists of the first generation. For Fromm, the Ego takes the place of the Id and the emancipation of the Ego from the unknown forces of Id is possible. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the total displacement of the Id by the Ego is not possible and the emancipation of the Ego from the Id will always remain incomplete. For Marcuse,27 the relation between the Ego and the Id is dialectical, and emancipation, even if as a utopia, is necessary.
The specificity of the critical aspect of psychoanalysis resides precisely in envisioning more than the proposition of a worldview or an entrenchment of the discipline in the clinic. Above all, the critical aspect intends to put in evidence how the Freudian doctrine is rooted in history. That is, Freud is concerned with the construction of a clinical-theoretical corpus rooted in the relation of the human subject to the world. The choice of the term ‘diagnosis’ reflects precisely this intention of revealing this interest for the human subject conceived under the prism of its insertion into a world of definite social relations. Thus, ‘diagnose’ should be understood in its etymological sense, as able to recognize, as the search for that which is not transparent in the relation of the subject with her or himself and with the representations of the world surrounding this subject. From a Freudian perspective, diagnosing is to aim for the return of what is repressed in the form of the symptom that replaces it. In present-day terms, it consists in searching for what is dysfunctional in intersubjective and intrapsychic relations. The critical account does not intend in any case to create a worldview. Rather, Freud’s timeframe of diagnosis, far from being a closed one, takes into account the historical dimension and, therefore, has an unfinished character. The very idea of a diagnosis implies, fundamentally, an opening.
In order to avoid any misconceptions that might be formed from the idea of an opening – such as the possibility of having no clear aim – we should consider as open the statement according to which a diagnosis forcefully presupposes a normative reference: to criticize compels us to mobilize a shared reference and, therefore, a norm. The normative reference does not come from Freudian developments; it comes from philosophy where reason incarnated in the form of an autonomous subject is seen as transparent to itself and as posing its own rules from the scientific-medical ratio, which considers the normal to be the norm. Freud’s greatest discovery is precisely this ‘beyond reason’ we call unconscious, in which an opacity always subsists, the very opposite of philosophic ratio. The search for a normative reference in psychoanalysis would be, strictly speaking, strange or even hostile to it.28
My approach to the theme of social sickness and Ego will be indirect. The purpose is to briefly examine how Axel Honneth uses psychoanalysis in his work up until the 2000s. I hold that his ontogenetic use of psychoanalysis undercuts the critical potential of this discipline in the field of critical theory. In addition I also show a new tendency in Honneth’s more recent work, a ‘biologizing’ one, so to speak, which shows up especially in his 2014 text ‘The Diseases of Society: Approaching a Nearly Impossible Concept’. In this paper Honneth reconstructs Alexander Mitscherlich’s attempt – and also Freud’s, in a certain sense – to justify the use of the term ‘pathological’ in reference to the subject of society. For Honneth, Mitscherlich’s justifications are insufficient. According to Honneth the comprehension of society requires that one thinks of society as though it were a living organism. I will discuss the groundings of Honneth’s theory and its relationship to psychoanalysis, but my approach will be more oriented toward a presentation of Freud’s interpretation of the passage from nature to society (or from the biological to the social) instead of a deep reconstruction of Honneth’s arguments. Thus, we intend to show how the Freudian articulation goes beyond that offered by Honneth.
Although psychoanalysis (as well as psychology, generally) is not fully elaborated in Honneth’s works, his approach to Critical Theory, especially from 1992 onward, contains a number of formulations which, however tentative, provide sufficient ground for critical engagement. Further, in Struggle for Recognition, in which he develops his now famous recognition paradigm, Honneth affords psychoanalysis a central position in Critical Theory’s interdisciplinary constellation. The objective of Honneth’s approach is to provide social psychology with a critical foundation. For this purpose the work of Georg Herbert Mead29 and Donald Winnicott30 is of special importance to him.
Honneth’s approach to psychoanalysis does not put into question the narcissistic ego, and its overcoming is no longer a goal for a critical theory of society. This abandonment results from a partial reading of Winnicott’s notion of the transitional object, which Honneth views as a break with Freudian drive theory, and not as an extension of it. This is related to a large extent to the fact that, as shown above, Honneth views psychoanalysis as an account of intersubjectivity. It demonstrates the primacy of recognition. For Honneth, therefore, the psychoanalytic account provides a foundation for social critique as thinking in normative orders. For this purpose, Honneth sets Freud and the Freudian orthodoxy against the relational model of object relations theory.31 In Honneth’s view, Freud neglected the relation with the other, intersubjectivity, and thus disregarded the communicative model of interaction. As a consequence, Freud’s contribution remained restricted to the drive model.
Two things must be taken into account as an answer to this statement. First, contrary to Honneth, it is possible to articulate object relations theory and the drive model in a dialectical fashion without opposing one to the other. Both models can be complementary, especially because they were built according to the clinical developments of Freud and Winnicott.32 Second, it seems that a statement such as Honneth’s contributes mainly to further misunderstandings rather than to a clarification of the problem. It would be useful to remember that at the time of Freud’s writing psychology far from ignored the relational issue of the orientation toward the other – this was, in fact, a predominant issue. Freud’s contribution was precisely to put in evidence other instances such as the Id and drives as the materialization of the unconscious. The unconscious was seen as a constitutive factor of Ego formation, of personality, that which is in conflict with everything that sets a limit to its search for satisfaction. Thus, Honneth’s view that Freudian psychoanalysis does not take into account the relations with the external world and the role of reference people seems strange, to say the least. We know that Freud begins Beyond the Pleasure Principle with the war neurosis, an issue which is nothing other than that of trauma, and which refers precisely to an experience originating in the external real world that remains unfathomable to the subject – this experience drives Freud, so to speak, to a reformulation of his drive theory. Therefore, Honneth’s view that Freud’s works fail to take into account the relations which constitute the subject in its relationship to the external world seems entirely misconceived.
Moreover, Honneth’s emphasis on the relational model does not prevent him from falling into the trap of a narcissistic conception of the subject (Ego), which, in a certain sense, is opposed to the intersubjective assumptions of recognition theory. The radicalization of the intersubjectivity principle applied to socialization concepts silences the traumatic dimension of intersubjective relations. This turn is not only problematic with regards to the formation processes of the Ego, which Honneth conceives of in terms of child development psychology, but also with respect to the role psychoanalysis should play in a critical theory of society. In Honneth’s non-Freudian model, overcoming the narcissistic ego is no longer an objective because narcissism no longer appears as a problem of, nor as an obstacle to, the practical movement of emancipation. In recognition theory the non-Freudian appropriation of psychoanalysis leads to a monist theory of the subject, according to which, as paradoxical as it may seem, emancipation can be thought as a realization of the narcissistic Ego.
Such a conception is quite removed from the approach of the first generation of critical theorists and their appropriation of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis cannot serve as an ontogenesis articulated to a normative model of social critique; it is, rather, a means of understanding the obstacles that block the reasonable organization of society, of emancipation. The dialectical method in psychoanalysis proceeds from the pathology toward the universal, from neuroticization to normality, from pathology to reason’s project of emancipation. From this conception, psychoanalysis helps to identify the obstacles without removing them and without guaranteeing normativity’s moral progress or its practical anchorage. It demonstrates that the model of a ‘normal’ subject inhabiting a world permeated by neurosis is an impossible ideal. Psychoanalysis allows Critical Theory to reconstruct a possible explanation for modern capitalist societies’ blockages and pathologies. Thus, Critical Theory’s diagnosis is mirrored in Freudian drive theory, revealing the latter’s critical potential. These are the grounds for Adorno’s, and also Marcuse’s, strong criticism of Eric Fromm, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, and many other theorists from the ‘revisionist’ school, which is rejected because it leads to the abandonment of Freud’s drive theory.33 Adorno and Marcuse stress the impoverishment that such an abandonment would bring to a critical theory that is associated with a ‘monist’-reduced psychoanalysis. This ‘revisionist’ perspective rejects the death drive principle or, in other words, the specific element along with the life drive that founds all of Freud’s late elaborations. Honneth, despite his efforts to the contrary, does not offer a worthwhile alternative to his predecessors’ insights.
But one could still ask whether Honneth’s ontogenetic use of psychoanalysis is necessarily condemned to an idealist perspective that refuses to see the role of the narcissistic ego. The perspective developed by Jacques Lacan is helpful in dealing with this question. Lacan’s conception of recognition is strictly linked to the concept of misrecognition. In contrast to Honneth, Lacan’s notion is therefore not premised on reconciliation and universal civility. It is premised on conflict. Nevertheless, it is also the case, that the concepts of identification, misrecognition, and recognition display in fact affinities; that is, recognition entails the pathology of misrecognition, and misrecognition entails recognition as its civilized resolution. Even though these terms are not posited explicitly as such by Honneth himself, his ontogenetic application of psychoanalysis recognizes the narcissistic ego and in this manner it summons the individuated individual as self-seeking. That is to say, by implication recognition is premised on misrecognition. Despite itself, his theory promises reconciliation and recognition as either mutually beneficial at best, or under duress at worst. Indeed, once the question of normativity is translated into the field of psychoanalysis, we are tempted to reduce it to a question of normality. There are no guarantees that psychoanalysis can contribute to Honneth’s normative order of universalized standards of recognitive reason without undermining the very basis of his project.
Many critical interpretations of Freud insist on his reference to biologism.34 When Freud first alluded to a biological reason with respect to the drive duality – which led him to distinguish between Ego drive and sexual drive – he established a corresponding difference between hunger and love – that is, he introduced the idea that the same erogenous zone can be invested in different ways. By doing so, he established that the relationship of the subject with its culture and with nature cannot be of the same order. The former requires mediation whereas the latter is immediate. By following Freud’s clues one can reconstruct this mediation. My analysis of the role of biologism in Freud insists on the idea of anaclisis [Anlehnung]: biologism intervenes insofar as it is attached to the sexual functions, an idea that appears only in the second part of Introduction to Narcissism:
The first auto-erotic sexual satisfactions are experienced in connection with vital functions which serve the purpose of self-preservation. The sexual instincts are at the outset attached to the satisfaction of the ego-instincts; only later do they become independent of these, and even then we have an indication of that original attachment [Anlehnung] in the fact that the persons who are concerned with a child’s feeding, care, and protection become his earliest sexual objects: that is to say, in the first instance his mother or a substitute for her.35
Here we can observe how Freud conceives the passage from the biological to the psychical: the latter is attached to the biological. We have then an idea that goes back to the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and that is represented by the concept of support [stützen] or anaclisis [Anlehnung]: if something must be supported by something else in order to be itself, this implies that both of them are distinct. One can only come into being making use of the other. If human sexuality requires support for its development it is because it is poorly sustained. The notion of anaclisis allows us to move from the biological to the psychical, and this ‘new psychic action’ takes the form of narcissism; it also organizes all the partiality of the drives in one image. Anaclisis allows Freud to consider a genesis of sexuality, opening the way to an organization of the body from helplessness [Hilflosigkeit], that is, the biological dependency of the child in relation to its mother or person of reference. In other words, the experience of pleasure is also supported by the experience of a maternal other. If we follow Freud strictly we can see how the subject organizes the parts of its body that have a biological function such as feeding and care. Thus, the determination of the erogenous zones also depends on anaclisis.
Consequently, Freud cannot be accused of neglecting the other and of having a monadic conception of the subjectivation process. Anaclisis does not presuppose a state of symbiosis between mother and child; the central idea of anaclisis is that human sexuality is poorly sustained. Thus, we come to the idea of helplessness, the idea of a first traumatic experience of the subject that sees itself ‘thrown into the world’. This is the first trauma that characterizes human sexuality: the characteristic of human sexuality is that the biological cannot do this work alone if the other is not there beforehand. With these explanations it should now be possible to understand why the continuous passage from the biological to the social, or from nature to society, does not occur. They also allow us to understand why this passage is always a mismatch, a continuity that always imprints itself in a discontinuity.
When we compare Honneth’s solution to that of Freud, we notice that his attempt does not go as far as Freud’s because it falls in a biologism without considering the notion of anaclisis, which poses a dialectic between the realm of biology and that of the human, allowing passages between them. Honneth becomes stuck in one of the poles of this conflict, namely, that of biology; we cannot infer anything else from his 2014 text ‘The Diseases of Society: Approaching a Nearly Impossible Concept’, which he concludes quite laconically: ‘Without rehabilitating this organic conception that has long since been declared dead, I fear the thesis that societies also can be stricken by diseases cannot be justified’.36
With all its paradoxes and theoretical reformulations, Freudian psychoanalysis still has much to offer a critical theory of contemporary society. This is why Axel Honneth’s attempt at reformulation is of interest, as well as deserving of critique. In order to further develop an effective collaboration between psychoanalysis and Critical Theory we should interrogate the appropriateness of the ontogenetic perspective for a critical theory of society, and one should not endorse biological perspectives that debunk Critical Theory method par excellence, that is, the dialectic.
1. These groups were increasingly dogmatic. It seems easy to judge the ideological dogmatism of the Third International, but this was not so evident in the 1920s. A clear example of this is Georg Lukács’ book History and Class Consciousness (1923), which initiated Western Marxism and which would later be condemned by its own author after the massive rejection it received from the communist movement.
2. The fact that Fromm was a psychoanalyst and also a Marxist oriented sociologist played an important role in his integration into the very select group of researchers of the IFS. See Jay (1973, especially chapter 3). Also Funk (2000: 72).
3. This holds not only for the already mentioned Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) but, also for Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) and the research project on Authoritarian Personality.
4. The analysis presented here of Dialectic of Enlightenment was developed with Marcos Nobre. See Nobre and Marin (2012). A French language version was published as ‘Une novelle anthropologie. Vers une lecture psychanalytique de l’unité critique de La Dialectique de la Raison’. Illusio, no. 14/15: 259–76, January 2016.
5. Reich (1970: 9).
6. ‘Rationally considered, one would expect economically wretched masses of workers to develop a keen consciousness of their social situation; one would further expect this consciousness to harden into a determination to rid themselves of their social misery. […] the thinking (“consciousness”) of the worker would be in keeping with his social situation. The Marxists called it “class consciousness”. We want to call it “consciousness of one’s skills”, or “consciousness of one’s own responsibility”. The cleavage between the social situation of the working masses and their consciousness of this situation implies that, instead of improving their social position, the working masses worsen it. It was precisely the wretched masses who helped to put fascism, extreme political reaction, into power’ (ibid.: 10).
7. Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 1).
8. Ibid.: xviii.
9. In the early 1940s, Friedrich Pollock proposed an analysis of capitalism that questioned some central aspects of Marx’s diagnosis. With his idea of ‘State Capitalism’, Pollock states that the primacy of the economic has been replaced by the primacy of the state. In State Capitalism, the market is a political event. Pollock distinguishes between an ‘authoritarian form’, presented by Nazi Germany, and a ‘democratic form’, which exists only as a possibility. Accepting Pollock’s central thesis, Adorno and Horkheimer introduced the formula of an ‘administered world’ [verwaltete Welt] to highlight instrumental reason’s domination over nature.
10. Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: xiv).
11. Ibid.: xvi
12. Ibid.: xviii.
13. Ibid.: xvi.
14. Ibid.:1.
15. ‘The reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite. It is itself mimesis: of death’ (ibid.: 45).
16. Ibid.: 24.
17. Freud (1961: 6). In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Freud (1925–6: 165) states this more precisely as ‘anxiety [Angst] has an unmistakable relation to expectation: it is anxiety about something. It has a quality of indefiniteness and lack of object. In precise speech we use the word ‘fear’ [Furcht] rather than ‘anxiety’ [Angst] if it has found an object’. In the original it reads: ‘Die Angst hat eine unverkennbare Beziehung zur Erwartung; sie ist Angst vor etwas. Es haftet ihr ein Charakter von Unbestimmtheit und Objektlosigkeit an; der korrekte Sprachgebrauch ändert selbst ihren Namen, wenn sie ein Objekt gefunden hat, und ersetzt ihn dann durch Furcht’ (Freud, 1999: 197–8).
18. ‘Real danger is a danger that is known, and realistic anxiety is anxiety about a known danger of this sort. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an unknown danger. Neurotic danger is thus a danger that has still to be discovered. Analysis has shown that it is an instinctual danger. By bringing this danger which is not known to the ego into consciousness, the analyst makes neurotic anxiety no different from realistic anxiety, so that it can be dealt with in the same way’ (Freud, 1925–6: 165).
19. Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 11).
20. The German original reads: ‘Freud stellt sich die Triebprozesse als eine Art von Äquivalententausch vor. Die Tauschschemata des Triebs, die Freud aufstellt, gelten aber nicht mehr, sobald das Ich nicht mehr die Verfügungsgewalt über die ihm unterstehende Triebmenge hat. Wenn sich Kollektivsubjekte bilden, dann ist die ganze Triebökonomie mitsamt dem Lustmechanisnus ausser Kraft gesetzt. Freud hat in seinen avanciertesten Arbeiten, vor allem in Jenseits des Lustprinzips etwas davon geahnt, aber nicht die Konsequenz daraus gezogen’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2004: 454).
21. Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 193).
22. Ibid.: 21.
23. Ibid.: 8.
24. ‘In myths, everything that happens must atone for the fact of having happened. It is no different in enlightenment: no sooner has a fact been established than it is rendered insignificant’. Further, ‘The “unshakable confidence in the possibility of controlling the world” which Freud anachronistically attributes to magic applies only to the more realistic form of world domination achieved by the greater astuteness of science. The autonomy of thought in relation to objects, as manifested in the reality-adequacy of the Ego, was a prerequisite for the replacement of the localized practices of the medicine man by all-embracing industrial technology’ (ibid.: 7–8).
25. As a clarification of Freud’s vocabulary, it is possible to think of a mirroring between psychoanalysis and philosophy. In general terms, the pleasure principle would correspond to something like the Hobbesian state of nature, in which men are guided by their passions. The reality principle would correspond to the establishment of civil society.
26. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud’s text from 1920 where he first presents the new drive duality.
27. Marcuse is not discussed in this chapter. See however Marin (2016).
28. For our reading of Freud the question of normativity is hostile to psychoanalysis, but in the history of Critical Theory we have works that deal with normative referents in the figure of Erich Fromm. See Jacoby (1997).
29. George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher of decisive importance for sociology and social psychology. Along with James, Pierce, and Dewey, Mead was part of a theoretical current of American philosophy known as pragmatism. Mead’s works are read and interpreted by Honneth under the influence of Hegel and his intersubjective innovation. Honneth revisits this Hegelian insight, with the help of Mead, in his formulation of the social foundations of intersubjective communication. Mead shares with the earlier Hegel the intuition that the socialization process should be understood through the individuation process. Mead introduces a distinction between the entities that constitute the driving forces of human action: the I and the Me. The formation of individuality is then considered as the product of a tension between these forces. See Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Mead, 1962).
30. Donald Winnicott was a British child psychoanalyst who was neither affiliated with the tradition associated with Melanie Klein, nor with the tradition associated with Anna Freud. Winnicott’s importance for Honneth lies in the way Winnicott emphasizes the environmental factors of the subjectivation process, differing from Freud, who mainly stressed the internal motivations that form the psyche. Winnicott’s approach is informed by the logic of the interwar period when psychoanalysis was losing interest in notions of the father, Oedipus and patriarchy, in favor of motherhood and the feminine. According to Honneth, Winnicott’s psychoanalytical formulations are a translation of Hegelian concepts and Winnicott’s work influences Honneth’s conception of the first sphere of recognition, that of love and affective relations. For Honneth, Winnicottian psychoanalysis serves as the empirical proof of Mead’s reading of Hegel, according to which the stages of recognition follow a determinate direction. See Playing and Reality (Winnicott, 2005).
31. The so-called object relations theory actually comprises a variety of positions. In general terms, ‘object relations’ signals an opposition to Freud and Melanie Klein who posit the intrapsychical character of the relation between subject and object. The common ground for psychoanalysts associated with the object relations school is the idea that the object exists as something real apart from the relation, and not merely as an internal object. Winnicott shares this position, according to which the object relation is a relation to a real object, an object that is characterized by its environment.
32. As in Winnicott’s (2005) Playing and Reality.
33. See Adorno (1955, 1963). See also Marcuse (1969).
34. See Junior (1991) for a brilliant account of the Lacanian approach to the problematic relationship between biologism and narcissism.
35. Freud (1914–16: 87).
36. Honneth (2014: 702).
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