The possibility of marrying, fusing, or synthesizing Marxist and Freudian problematics was certainly not unheard of before the Frankfurt School pursued it (and, soon after, became associated with that pursuit). In 1923, young Bolshevik philosopher Bernard Bykhovskii pushed Russian psychoanalysts to justify the compatibility of Freud and Marx, a task quickly taken up by M.A. Reisner, Alexander Luria, and A.B. Zalkind.1 The work of these ‘Soviet Freudians’, allowed by Lenin and encouraged by Trotsky, unfortunately met heated opposition, and by 1930 ‘the concept of the unconscious was attacked as though it were an enemy of the state’.2 Surrealists in France were also finding ways of bringing Marx and Freud together, albeit through a criticism rather than an affirmation of both. André Breton, for instance, having overcome his doting admiration for Freud, attempted to give psychoanalysis a more materialist grounding in Les Vases Communicants (1932).3 Working both to reform and to apply Freud’s ideas after joining the Communist Party in 1928, Wilhelm Reich opened psychoanalysis to social theory through the notion of ‘character structure’ and employed the theory of sexual repression to explain the unconscious appeal of fascism. Though intolerant of Reich, even attacking him publicly in an editorial of the Zeitschrift in 1932, Freud was much more supportive of other analysts who saw the radical political implications of psychoanalysis, including Siegfried Bernfeld and Otto Fenichel. Bernfeld published a number of essays in the 1920s on socialism, Marxism, education, and psychoanalysis,4 and Fenichel offered up ‘psychoanalysis as the nucleus of a future dialectical-materialist psychology’.5
That being said, the thinkers associated with the Institut für Sozialforschung – and here we are thinking in particular of Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno – rightly deserve their status as natural referent of the term Freudo-Marxism. Save for Reich, whose important contributions will be covered below, they did – and to the present day, have done – more than anyone to think social and psychic alienation together, to supplement Marxism with penetrating insight into the psychic depths of ideological subjectification, and to critique and historicize Freudianism with an eye toward its ultimate preservation. In what follows, we will first review the different uses to which psychoanalysis has been put in the works of Reich, Fromm, Löwenthal, Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Adorno. Our aim in this section is to provide a concise but comprehensive summary of the contributions of these authors. In the second section, we will look at the reception of this work by two prominent commentators, Jessica Benjamin and Joel Whitebook. In the third and final section, we will then turn to a general assessment of the flaws and deficiencies in the Frankfurt School’s use of psychoanalysis and of the promise that this project still holds for the present.
We offer two points of departure for a reinvestigation of the psychoanalytic component of critical theory: first, we affirm Amy Allen’s claim that ‘psychoanalysis, as the most sophisticated and systematic study of human irrationality developed to date, offers critical theorists the best chance of making sense of the … forces that attach subordinated subjects to the modes of identity … that subordinate and wound them’.6 Marxist social theory depicts an alienating, exploitative, and immiserating society that is all the more horrifying given what it could be. At a certain point, appeals to the ‘interests’ of certain parties do not help make sense of the continued viability of capitalist society, and this is where a sophisticated study of human irrationality seems to us indispensable. Second, psychoanalysis, at its best, is a critical sociology of the family.7 In a very literal sense, the psyche is, for Freud, nothing but the internalization of early developmental relationships as they are mediated by the kinds of bodies that human beings have. The great accomplishment of psychoanalysis was to have uncovered the ways in which what we call ‘I’ is formed and deformed within the family. Once this family is seen as historically specific and a center of ideological reproduction, psychoanalysis becomes an invaluable tool for understanding subject–object mediation in capitalist society.
Although Martin Jay’s introduction to the Frankfurt School in The Dialectical Imagination makes it seem as if the mixing of Marx and Freud was something of a great surprise in twentieth-century social theory,8 the disarmingly self-evident nature of the relation of psychoanalysis and Marxist sociology to the early Frankfurt School is clear in several important early texts and statements. Horkheimer’s ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, as well as his ‘Inaugural Address’, show critical theory conceived as, far from an autonomous form of philosophizing, a mode of mediating different forms of knowledge in both the philosophical and empirical sciences around the questions of the social totality and the possibility of the good society. Marcuse similarly argues that the dissolution of Hegelian philosophy had left reflexive social and human sciences as the legitimate inheritors of German Idealism’s project of self-consciousness and emancipation.9 For both, psychoanalysis was one among several sciences of obvious relevance for contributing to an understanding of capitalist society.
Before the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis was operationalized in the methods and modes of inquiry of the Frankfurt School, ideological accounts had to be settled between the materialist bases of Marxist epistemology and science and the bourgeois, idealistic character of most psychology. Wilhelm Reich’s 1929 article ‘Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis’ provided a comprehensive précis of the debate as it had developed up to that point, as well as perhaps the strongest statement in favor of psychoanalysis’ materialist credentials.10 Marxists were rightly suspicious that lending too much importance to subjective factors would obscure hard-won insights into the class character of society, and these suspicions were only confirmed by texts like Civilization and Its Discontents, which appeared to offer a neo-Hobbesian account of society that presupposed the isolated individual that Marx and other social theorists had unmasked as a product of larger social forces.
That much of the debate throughout the 1920s hinged on the natural-scientific definition of materialism appears in hindsight as an unfortunate consequence of the ideological configuration of the time. While the later formulation of hybrids such as Fromm’s ‘analytical social psychology’ and Reich’s ‘critical political psychology’ and ‘sex-pol’ depended upon, or were at least cushioned by the legitimation and acceptance engineered by, the earlier natural-scientific argument for compatibility, it is also true that the terms of the earlier debate hampered more productive engagements between psychoanalysis and sociology. The homologies that became central to later syntheses – for instance, the parallel between the postulates that humans are fundamentally governed by unconscious processes (Freud) and social conditions (Marx) –were buried in the early debates. When this debate was finally left behind, a different theoretical as well as methodological apparatus linking psychoanalysis and social theory matured.
For Erich Fromm, the earliest ‘official representative’ of psychoanalysis in the Frankfurt School, the study of religion was the training ground for a development of a theory of ideology in which the crucial mediation was provided by psychoanalysis. The opening sentences of his first book, The Dogma of Christ, read:
It is one of the essential accomplishments of psychoanalysis that it has done away with the false distinction between social psychology and individual psychology. On the one hand, Freud emphasized that there is no individual psychology of man isolated from his social environment, because an isolated man does not exist. Freud knew no homo psychologicus, no Robinson Crusoe, like the economic man of classical economic theory. On the contrary, one of Freud’s most important discoveries was the understanding of the psychological development of the individual’s earliest social relations.11
Fromm had thus found a counter to bourgeois psychology in Freud, who could explain how social forces were experienced and internalized. The Dogma of Christ ultimately concludes that all domination involves the propagation of infantilizing substitute satisfactions, and that with increasing freedom, equality, and maturity, the power of these satisfactions would decrease. Fromm’s interpretation of authority relations as holding the masses in a state of dependency subject to libidinal manipulation signaled a clear opposition to the reactionary assumptions of much group psychology and sociology of mass society.
‘The Method and Function of an Analytical Social Psychology’ (1932) turned the psychoanalytic approach to authority and ideology in Weimar Germany. Perhaps the most consequential aspect of Fromm’s approach for later social-psychological research in critical theory was the decisive position accorded to the family as the mediating institution between society and individual:
the family is the essential medium through which the economic situation exerts its formative influence on the individual’s psyche. The task of social psychology is to explain the shared, socially relevant, psychic attitudes and ideologies – and their unconscious roots in particular – in terms of the influence of economic conditions on libido strivings.12
‘Analytical Social Psychology’ was in part a lesson drawn from a lengthy empirical study, begun in 1929 but only published decades later in fragmentary form, on the working and salaried classes in Germany, that paid particular attention to familial experience and attitudes.
While Fromm was preparing the grounds for a productive collaboration of psychoanalysis and social theory, Reich was no less busy developing theories that tightened the relation between society and psyche. His depth-account of character, first elaborated in Character Analysis and later deployed in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, remained a key concept and descriptive object for Frankfurt School research. Since character was what made sense of repeated patterns of submission and conformity in the individuals produced by capitalist societies, Reich conceived of it as a kind of ‘armor’ that won for the subject the ability to tolerate harsh conditions of social existence, but only at the price of a loss of the sensitivity and openness to the world and to others that would make change and transformation possible.13 The specific modes of defensiveness encountered in the psychoanalytic consulting room were thus, for Reich, connected to the psychic substratum of ideological subjectification (i.e. character).14
The research of Fromm and Reich in the early 1930s, and their respective insights into the social mediation of family and character, would converge on the concept of authoritarianism. The study of authoritarianism was the site of emergence for another key concept of Frankfurt School psycho-social research: the mechanism. Some of the mechanisms typical of the authoritarian character include identification with the dominating figure, which provides a distorted narcissistic compensation for objective powerlessness; reversal and projection, which allow for the paranoid structure of right-wing politics and its violent scapegoating; and the sado-masochistic oscillation between violent assertions of the will to power and sacrificial gestures of dissolution. Fromm would later interpret all such mechanisms under the rubric of a more general ‘fear of freedom’, i.e. as regressive responses to a situation in which the individual is untethered from the traditional containment functions of pre-capitalist social community, and not yet, due to capitalist exploitation, provided the material bases or psychic resources for genuine individuation and autonomy.15
After the 1930s, Reich and Fromm both underwent marked transformations. Reich developed his own particular brand of ‘orgone’ therapeutics, characterized by increasingly grandiose claims and peculiar therapeutic practices. By the end of World War II, Fromm’s ideas had also considerably altered: in an epilogue to Eros and Civilization, Marcuse placed Fromm at the center of a revisionist turn in psychoanalysis that had abandoned the earlier critical perspective. In turning to a more interpersonal theory that made psychoanalysis a promissory note of increased individual autonomy and freedom despite the accelerating irrationality of capitalism, Fromm had, in Marcuse’s words, ‘resurrected’ the creative potentialities of the personality ‘in the face of a reality which has all but eliminated the conditions for the personality and its fulfillment’, thereby turning psychoanalytic theory into ideology.16 Fromm’s early views, which were built upon the schematism of substitute satisfaction that bound the economic structure of domination to the instinctual drives, was gradually eroded to the position that wrong life can in fact, with the right kind of therapy and ethical exhortation, be lived rightly. It seems, in the end, that Fromm’s religious and ethical commitments won out against his critical social theory.
Of the thinkers reviewed in this section, Löwenthal is perhaps least associated in the popular imaginary with the Freudo-Marxist moment, yet he is responsible, along with Norbert Guterman, for the most even-handed and cogent application of psychoanalytic concepts that one will find in the collective oeuvre of the Frankfurt School. Their 1949 work, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator, aims to illuminate the sources of the unconscious appeal of the ‘great little man’ demagogue whose rhetoric is defined by themes all too familiar to the American public, including the positing of conspiracies; a ‘charade of doom’; a hostility toward corrupt government officials, foreigners, and minorities, specifically Jews; and the idealization of an ‘endogamic community’ of ‘simple Americans’.17 Psychoanalytic concepts appear in discussion of all of these themes, but they are particularly well-used in explaining the unconscious satisfaction involved in the vitriol directed at already marginalized groups, particularly immigrants and refugees. For one, the very instability of the refugee’s and the outcast’s situation, their lack of a home, makes them
symbols of vague unconscious urges, of the repressed contents of the psyche, which, mankind has learned in the course of its history, must be censured and condemned as the price for social and cultural survival. The outcast serves to exorcise the fears as well as the temptations of self-righteous individuals. The hatred for the refugee seems thus a rejection of one’s inner potential of freedom.18
In other words, at the unconscious level, refugees deserve their situation of precarity because their lack of a stable place in society is indicative of their unwillingness to submit to instinctual repression. Labeling them ‘parasites’ further reinforces their connection to repressed urges: rejecting the parasite, which represents ‘that phase in infancy in which the child … clings to and desires the mother’, allows the follower of the fascist agitator to express ‘his subsequent revulsion from this attachment by means of his sadism into which his longing receded after being subjected to serious genital shocks and disappointments’.19 The natural association of the parasite with filth and disease also elicits a repressed anality: a ‘strong believer in the exogenic theory of disease’, the agitator relies upon his audience’s ‘feelings of repulsion to the more obvious manifestations of uncleanliness’ that they have developed as a result of being coerced as children with ‘threats that they will become sick and be punished for their sickness if they violate the rigid hygienic codes’.20 The ‘unclean foreigner’ is thus a natural repository for the projection of repressed preoedipal urges and attachments.
In addition to formulating a precise psychoanalytic explanation of xenophobia, Prophets of Deceit also addresses the problem of the curious mystique of the agitator, which is attributed to a reactivation of early forms of identification. On the one hand, ‘instead of emphasizing the identity of his interests with those of his followers, [the agitator] depicts himself as one of the plain folk, who thinks, lives, and feels like them. In agitation this suggestion of proximity and intimacy takes the place of identification of interests’.21 In other words, rather than a mature identification with others based upon rational interest, the agitator welcomes an immature identification based upon emotional resonance. On the other hand, the agitator also resorts ‘to such traditional American symbols of leadership as the indefatigable businessman and rugged frontiersman’ and constructs an image of himself ‘as a suffering martyr who, as a reward for his sacrifices, deserves special privileges and unlimited ascendancy over his followers…. One of the plain folk, he is yet far above them; reassuringly close, he is yet infinitely aloof’.22 What the agitator creates, in other words, is the aura of parental authority and intimacy: close and unassuming, the leader is also powerful and idealized, bearing all the ambivalence of the relationship to a preoedipal parent.23
Löwenthal and Guterman do a great deal more to situate the problem of the appeal of the fascist agitator on psychoanalytic ground –by relating it to ‘the heritage of infantile anxieties’, the projection of ‘disaster on the imaginary enemy’, the ‘gratifying play [of] fantasies arising from repressed destructive impulses’24 – but their most important lesson is not a psychoanalytic one. For them, the agitator is only able to exploit the unconscious because capitalist subjects suffer from a malaise that appears to originate from the depths of the psyche, but is actually a product of modern social developments. The agitator is the worst kind of opportunist in ‘play[ing] upon those disturbing sicknesses of modern life’ that give rise to this malaise, but he is also merely a symptom of a ‘world where the individual’s sphere of action is increasingly restricted by anonymous social forces’.25 In their view, the struggle to attenuate the alienation and immiseration of capitalist society is thus about not merely ‘economic’ justice but also the amelioration of the conditions that make possible fascist agitation.
Whereas Löwenthal and Guterman employed psychoanalysis to make sense of a very particular problem of social theory, Marcuse found radical implications for social theory already at work in psychoanalysis. Two neologisms form the point of departure for his infamous work of 1955, Eros and Civilization: the performance principle and surplus-repression. While there are undoubtedly features of physical and human reality that are trans-historical components of any reality principle, the ‘reality’ to which late capitalist subjects accord themselves in the process of ‘maturing’ is an historically specific one defined by competition and alienated labor. To capture this specificity, Marcuse coins the phrase ‘performance principle in order to emphasize that under its rule society is stratified according to the competitive economic performances of its members’.26 The repressive controls over the instincts ‘over and above those indispensable for civilized human association’ demanded by this performance principle are what Marcuse denotes as surplus-repression.27 Dated as both terms have become in certain circles, Marcuse is here only giving specific names to ideas that any responsible social theorist would affirm: that both the ‘reality’ and also the frustrations and anxieties of capitalist subjects are historically specific ones.
Having cut straight to the core of psychoanalytic theory, Marcuse then turns to the central contradiction of capitalist production: that technological advance ‘enhances the scope of material culture, facilitates the procurement of the necessities of life, makes comfort and luxury cheaper, [and] draws ever-larger areas into the orbit of industry – while at the same time sustaining toil and destruction’.28 Capitalism has always simultaneously made possible and defended itself against a ‘world which could be free’, but for Marcuse, his age was the one in which ‘the discrepancy between potential liberation and actual repression [had] come to maturity’.29 It was time, he speculated, to start thinking through the possibility of a truly non-repressive civilization, one in which our drives do not need to be ‘subordinated to the discipline of work as full-time occupation, to the discipline of monogamic reproduction, [and] to the established system of law and order’.30 Dealing with the objection that sexuality is fundamentally anti-social for Freud, and thus that freedom from repression would erode ‘lasting interpersonal relations’, Marcuse makes the unfortunate argument that sexuality is ‘self-sublimating’, that it would become socially beneficial all on its own were it not for the excessive repression involved in abiding by the performance principle.31 All he means to claim here, however, is that a non-repressive society would offer a plethora of sublimated forms for sexuality beyond reproduction and pseudo-culture. Indeed, in his later work, he would change his terminology and speak instead of a ‘lasting desublimation’ ‘manifest in the progressive alleviation and pacification of the struggle for existence, in the growth of refined erotic needs and satisfaction’.32 This non-repressive desublimation following from an overcoming of the performance principle would allow for a ‘free play of human faculties’ in which not only the ‘receptivity of sensuality’ but also the ‘spontaneity of reason’ would be a ‘source of happiness’.33 In short, we live in a unique moment where happiness and civilization, the drives and reason, pleasure and reality can and must be reconciled to an historically unprecedented degree.
Or else! The flip side of Marcuse’s supposed ‘utopianism’ is a dire assessment of what happens if we fail to realize the dialectical possibility inherent in late capitalist society. For one, the revolutionary ‘refusal’ of repressive sublimation is being channeled into an equally repressive desublimation, in which the individual’s drives undergo a ‘commercial release for business and fun…, replacing mediated by immediate gratification’.34 Popular culture is, in other words, offering late capitalist subjects the possibility of a domesticated release of instinctual gratification, one that could be directed toward political struggle. This ‘controlled desublimation’, in which ‘sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression’, ‘facilitates the acceptance of the misdeeds of this society’, and thus works to eliminate the possibility of a non-repressive civilization.35
The even more urgent problem inherent in a failure to realize non-repressive civilization lies in a destructiveness that proportions itself to the irrationality of repression. In Marcuse’s re-reading of Freudian drive theory (itself derived from the work of Fenichel), Eros and Thanatos spring from ‘an originally common root’.36 The death drive and aggressiveness are only differentiated from Eros and sexuality ‘as the result of the trauma of primary frustration’.37 Marcuse takes this to mean that the frustration involved in the repressive desublimation and constrained eroticism of late capitalism, one that is enhanced in comparison to how erotic life could be, redirects psychic energy toward a powerful destructiveness. This destructiveness is then put to use by instrumental reason toward a compulsive mastery over nature that is demanded by civilization; for this reason, ‘destructiveness, in extent and intent, seems to be more directly satisfied in civilization than the libido’.38 The creation of a non-repressive civilization, so the argument goes, would alleviate the libidinal frustration that is the very source of destructiveness; thus, with ‘the gradual elimination of surplus repression’, ‘an expanding area of destructiveness could be absorbed or neutralized by a strengthened libido’.39 The urgency of realizing a non-repressive society is thus a question not only of expanding the scope of pleasure but also of snuffing out a planet-threatening destructiveness at its instinctual source.
At the heart of Eros and Civilization is a bold historical claim, one that Marcuse shares with his colleagues Horkheimer and Adorno. The claim, often called simply the ‘culture industry thesis’, is that the forms of media invented and propagated in the first part of the twentieth century (film, radio, television) have annihilated the bourgeois dream of culture and altered the dynamics of the family and of the psyche so as to make the capitalist subject more docile and unthinking.40 How precisely the culture industry has changed the family structure, and in turn the individual psyche, is the central organizing problem of the shared project of Horkheimer and Adorno, the uncomfortable spur in their sides driving them in different theoretical and methodological directions.
The force of the culture industry thesis can only be appreciated in the historical narrative in which it is couched; thus, to understand the damaging effects of the culture industry, we must first look at the nature of subject formation before the twentieth century. In the classical bourgeois era, when the aim was to ‘tirelessly realize … the ideal type of homo oeconomicus’, the ‘predominant productive community’ of the patricentric family was the norm.41 In this type of family,
the father’s control of his household was doubtless an indispensable condition of progress. The self-control of the individual, the disposition for work and discipline, the ability to hold firmly to certain ideas, consistency in practical life, application of reason, perseverance and pleasure in constructive activity could all be developed, in the circumstances, only under the dictation and guidance of the father whose own education had been won in the school of life.42
This is the kind of family that produced the subject of Freud’s theories: for this ‘old anthropological type’,
the ego, the agency of social control within the individual, keeps the drives within the limits set by self-preservation. The areas of friction are large and neuroses, the incidental expenses of such a drive economy, inevitable. Nevertheless, this complex psychical apparatus made possible the relatively free interplay of subjects which constituted the market economy.43
In other words, the bourgeois subject was burdened by an excessive guilt and explosively unstable, but at least it was something like an individual.44
In the age of mass production and the culture industry, by contrast, individuals – in the sense of agents that make decisions based upon ‘a painful inner dialogue between conscience, self-preservation, and drives’ –no longer exist.45 In his contribution to Studies on Authority and the Family (1936), Horkheimer was content to say that the ‘limited family’ was increasingly failing to carry out its educational function of producing authority-oriented subjects as a result of bearing a shrunken economic importance, but that the modern family’s authority structure can nonetheless ‘be strong enough for the father to maintain his position even after its material basis has disappeared’.46 By the 40s, however, both he and Adorno were willing to admit that the shell of the bourgeois family had finally caved in, having been penetrated definitively by the culture industry. The new kind of father, socially conditioned for weakness,47 and mother, icy and brutal instead of warm and comforting,48 both retain their nominal functions, but they are no longer tasked with producing anything resembling autonomy. With televisions and radios in every home, and movie stars and advertisements bearing the latest sage advice, children are now taught to think within ‘the schema of mass culture’. The resulting ‘pseudo-individuals’ – at different times dubbed new anthropological types, new types of human beings, and authoritarian personalities – think only in stereotypes, want entertainment rather than edification, accept that ‘everything is business’, and are resigned to agreeing to the world as it is.49
The new anthropological type is described psychoanalytically in a variety of ways but regressed is probably the best general characterization available: having failed to sublimate primary process energy and to accept the reality principle, the new anthropological type readily pursues unsublimated sexual satisfaction as it is delivered in managed form by the culture industry and thinks in a narrow and paranoid manner reminiscent of the mode of experiencing of preoedipal children. Many interpreters take Horkheimer and Adorno to mean that individuals raised on mass media are lost in fantasied projections like overgrown children,50 but Adorno in particular emphasizes that the most salient feature of this regression is a rigidity with which new anthropological types engage the world, a rigidity represented in a commitment to instrumental rationality and the reality of the status quo. As opposed to old anthropological types, who are rent by the demands of the superego, the id, and reality, and thus able to perceive hesitantly51 and from different perspectives, new anthropological types are oriented ‘straight ahead’ and untroubled by a difficult inner dialogue between competing psychic agencies.52 Horkheimer and Adorno sometimes describe this rigid unidirectionality as ‘ego weakness’, and sometimes as ‘superego weakness’, but the important idea is that a psyche that was previously defined by tension and conflict has been streamlined and flattened.53 Another way of expressing this same idea in terms closer to Adorno’s heart is to say that the psyche is insulated against its own mimetic tendencies: oriented straight ahead toward professional tasks and life goals, the new type of human being does not consciously experience contradiction and dialectical possibility, and thus cannot engage the capitalist world as it is.
The late capitalist subject does, however, seem to unconsciously experience this contradiction, and the result is a blind and manipulable rage. This rage is then processed in ‘false projection’, which Horkheimer and Adorno describe as the ‘reverse of genuine mimesis’.54 False projection ‘displaces the volatile inward into the outer world, branding the intimate friend as foe. Impulses which are not acknowledged by the subject and yet are his, are attributed to the object: the prospective victim’.55 This rather conventional explanation of anti-Semitism in the fifth chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment is immediately followed by a more troubling claim: that ‘there are no longer any anti-Semites…. The anti-Semite’s conviction, however mendacious it may be, has been absorbed into the preconditioned reflexes of the subjectless exponents of a particular standpoint’.56 In other words, contemporary anti-Semitism is less a true xenophobia than it is a natural product of mass culture.57 It is for this reason that Horkheimer and Adorno were prepared readily to equate American consumerism and German fascism: ‘The citizens whose lives are split between business and private life, their private life between ostentation and intimacy, their intimacy between the sullen community of marriage and the bitter solace of being entirely alone, at odds with themselves and with everyone, are virtually already Nazis’.58
It is this equation that served as the founding conceit of the most well-known of the Frankfurt School’s empirical work, The Authoritarian Personality, one among many empirical studies carried out in both Germany and the United States that engaged with the composition of the public sphere. Adorno’s The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses, for instance, applied the social-psychological account of authoritarianism developed by Fromm and others to identify and describe the devices of seduction of fascist politics. This study often descends from the usual theoretical heights to the level of practical intervention, a gesture present in much of the Frankfurt School’s empirical work. At the end of ‘How to Look at Television’, written in the 1950s for a mainstream American communications journal, Adorno writes:
The effort here required is of a moral nature itself: knowingly to face psychological mechanisms operating on various levels in order not to become blind and passive victims. We can change this medium of far-reaching potentialities only if we look at it in the same spirit which we hope will one day be expressed by its imagery.59
Thus, the empirical studies not only drew their inspiration from the original Frankfurt Institute design of a transdisciplinary dialectical mediation of particular forms of knowledge but were also interventions in the public sphere, combining the most prosaic form of inoculatory enlightenment with the esoteric hopes of ‘saving critique’.60 Perhaps the best examples of this public-sphere oriented ‘education to maturity’ are the so-called ‘Group Experiments’, carried out collaboratively after the Institute returned to Germany following the War.61 These studies, which examine the defensive strategies around confronting the Nazi past through protocol-led group conversations, culminated in Adorno’s ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’.62 This essay exemplifies the multiple communicational tendencies at work in the best research and productions of the Frankfurt School: it is a work of applied psychoanalysis that extends Freud’s idea of Durcharbeiten to an entire society, a work of reflective social theory, and a practical, ideological-critical intervention in the public sphere of the Federal Republic.
The most shocking thing about the reception of the Frankfurt School’s use of psychoanalysis is just how paltry it has been. Martin Jay highlighted the ‘integration of psychoanalysis’ into critical theory in the third chapter of The Dialectical Imagination, but the significance he accords it there did not spawn a great deal of interest in this theoretical nexus.63 Justifying what was in any event already the case, in Late Marxism Fredric Jameson questioned the impact of psychoanalysis on the Frankfurt School in claiming that Freud’s categories were never ‘centrally organizing’ as Weber’s, Lukács’, or Nietzsche’s were (a direct contradiction of Horkheimer’s assertion that psychoanalysis was ‘one of the foundation stones without which our philosophy would not be what it is’).64 Our only guess as to why there has been so little secondary literature here, and thus why Jameson’s claim of exaggerated importance would go unchallenged, is that there is a general trepidation or dismissiveness among social theorists about transdisciplinarily engaging the language of psychoanalysis. In this section, we will review the work of Jessica Benjamin and Joel Whitebook (both psychoanalysts with backgrounds in the humanities), who are, almost by default, responsible for the more influential readings of the Frankfurt School’s use of psychoanalysis.
In the late seventies, Benjamin formulated a powerful critique of what she dubs the Frankfurt School’s ‘end of internalization’ thesis.
In the present epoch the critical theorists find that authority is directly exercised over individuals rather than internalized – thereby eliminating the potential for critique or revolt. As a result, the possibility for the formation of a revolutionary subject is foreclosed. In the face of this situation the critical theorists look backward to the form of instinctual control which was the basis for ego development and reason in the past – individual internalization –and argue that only it contained a potential for the formation of a critique of domination. This is the impasse which I refer to as the ‘end of internalization’.65
Benjamin takes issue with this narrative for many reasons, but for our present purposes, we will highlight two: first, since it is the father who is seen as the ‘indispensable condition’ of instinctual control (as we saw above), the end of internalization thesis represents a ‘nostalgic romanticization of paternal authority’.66 In her view, while Horkheimer had rightly characterized ‘obedience as a formal response demanded by a structural role rather than a substantive behavior’ in his contribution to Studies on Authority and the Family, by the 40s, when he had accepted the demise of the classical bourgeois family, he had idealized old versions of paternal authority and maternal nurturance in order to provide stark relief for the brokenness of the new kinds of fathers and mothers. In so doing, he not only retreated from his more cogent assertion that the authority of the classical bourgeois father lay with economic function rather than moral rectitude, but also callously disregarded the possibility that maternal care encourages autonomy, and thus that ‘mutual recognition and nurturant activity … may guide us in our struggle against instrumental rationality toward a society without the father’.67
Second, she takes issue with the idea that the ‘impasse is complete’; that, in other words, ‘the impact of the mass media, state institutions, professional guidance is so overwhelming that people are now directly manipulated into unthinking conformity’.68
This view rests upon an important but questionable methodology and ontological assumption. The assumption is that the active nature of subjectivity is only brought into being by external pressure, and therefore that it can be extinguished. This assumption breaks with the concept of alienation, which contains the notion that a fundamental need or capacity takes on an objective form which is opposed to, yet depends on, the original need or capacity.69
On both counts, Benjamin is neither right nor wrong. In the case of the charge of patricentrism, it is true that Horkheimer in particular had an unfortunate tendency to make the simple equation ‘father = truth’.70 That being said, much of ‘Authoritarianism and the Family Today’, the place where Benjamin notes Horkheimer’s theoretical regression, is devoted to a disjunction not between a past familial wholesomeness and a present familial fragmentation but rather between the reality of fragmentation and the fantasy of wholesomeness. ‘The more the family as an essential economic unit loses ground in Western civilization’, Horkheimer contends, ‘the more society emphasizes its conventional forms’.71 Thus, the growing child, who receives in reality only ‘the abstract idea of arbitrary power’ as a father, still ‘looks for a stronger, more powerful father’ in fantasy (a kind of father which, on Horkheimerian grounds, we have good reason to believe never existed).72
In any event, so much of what Horkheimer and Adorno say about the crisis of internalization – the resultant stereotyping, the lack of thinking, the assent to the status quo – has little to do with the father, and to dismiss the whole enterprise as patricentric throws the baby out with the bathwater. To argue, in other words, that the historical problem of the damage done to late capitalist subjects by the imposition of the culture industry on the family is itself a patricentric articulation, is also to say that it is not really a problem; to say, in other words, that the real problem is the problematizers’ theoretical lens, which Benjamin recommends should be replaced by one that privileges mutual recognition between subjects. A historical conundrum is tidily avoided with a simple change of theories, and critical theory thereby returns to traditional theory.
As for the point about direct domination, Benjamin is certainly right that claims about ‘ends’ and ‘completeness’ litter the works of Horkheimer and Adorno, but there are two problems with her further contention that this represents a reversal of Marx’s problematic of alienation. First, it is not that subjects are delivered ‘passively into the grip of external social forces’, but rather that the ‘active nature’ of their subjectivity is manipulated with such psychological sophistication that the possibility of being ‘active’ in such a way as to undermine the status quo is foreclosed. People act, but they act ‘spontaneously according to a “level” determined by indices’; they think, but they think within the ‘schema of mass culture’.73 Horkheimer and Adorno would likely respond to Benjamin’s criticisms by saying that the very recognition and nurturance of early life that she so prizes is deftly channeled by a culture industry that ‘recognizes’ and commends its reliable consumers for their pseudoindividual traits.74
Second, it is not clear that either Horkheimer or Adorno ever abandoned the framework of indirect domination. Even in ‘Authoritarianism and the Family Today’, Horkheimer still asserts the family to be the key site for the production of authoritarianism.75 Adorno is a more suitable target here, prone as he was toward bold statements, but as Gillian Rose has persuasively argued, the statement that ‘consciousness of society is completely reified implies that no critical consciousness or theory is possible’.76 The thesis of complete reification, like that of an end of internalization, is thus ‘unstatable, because if it were true it could not be known’. Adorno presents this impossible thesis ‘in order to induce in his reader the development of the latent capacity for non-identity thought – the perspective that the concept is not identical with its object. This is an attempt to prevent the complete reification which is imminent’.77 In this view, the end of internalization, so long as we understand it, can only ever be a dangerous diminution of internalization.
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For many years, Joel Whitebook has carried the flag of Freudo-Marxism through various companions and handbooks, and produced what is still the most important work of secondary literature at this intersection, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (1996). Whitebook’s aim there is to ‘reinvigorate the psychoanalytic dimension of Critical Theory’, but one is immediately struck by just how negatively he portrays the initial encounters of these two domains. In a move that sweepingly dismisses the contradictions of capitalism that the Frankfurt School was trying to take seriously, he describes Marcuse’s belief that ‘the forces of production have developed to the point where surplus repression constitutes by far the commanding share of renunciation exacted in modern society’ as ‘utterly naïve’.78 In fact, Whitebook finds almost nothing salutary in Marcuse’s project, criticizing ‘its search for an uncontaminated first nature, economism, sloppy argumentation and impracticality’.79 Marcuse is for him more of a cautionary tale than a base from which to ‘reinvigorate the psychoanalytic component of critical theory’, given ‘not just the banal unworkability of utopia but the profound philosophical flaws in Marcuse’s position’.80
The real danger here lay in a false equation of material scarcity (Lebensnot) and necessity as such (Ananke) in Freud: even if we were free of surplus repression, Whitebook argues, we would still be lacking, still be finite, still be subject to a constraining and uncomfortable reality.81 In arguing for ‘a struggle against time’ and an historically unprecedented reconciliation of the drives and reason, Marcuse encourages an ‘omnipotent denial of reality’, a ‘pursuit of “integral satisfaction” that disavows the incomplete and conflictual nature of human existence[, which] brings us into the register of omnipotence and therewith raises the specter of totalitarianism’.82 Whitebook is thus quite satisfied that ‘the political experiences of the last three decades have chastened the utopian sensibility and produced a new appreciation of human finitude – of difference, particularity, and plurality – as well as a suspicion of grandiose projects and the metanarratives that have traditionally been associated with them’.83
Whitebook might be correct that Marcuse’s utopianism gets grandiose, especially in the discussions of Orpheus, Narcissus, and temporality as such, but he fails to properly register the fact that any political project that questions the legitimacy of present reality can be (and typically is) accused of infantile regression. The possibility of a world without necessary and dissatisfying labor has been and should be a live one for any advanced capitalist society with developed technological capacities: to dismiss the act of thinking through what this means for human potentialities as ‘infantile’ is the gesture of a conservative too lazy to refute arguments for socialism rationally. Whitebook’s near axiomatic ‘respect for liberalism, that sober philosophy that harbors no illusions about human perfectability’ makes a real engagement with Marcuse’s work almost impossible.84
Though not as ideologically charged, Whitebook’s assessment of Adorno is similarly bleak: conceiving of ego formation narrowly as a process of ‘violent unification or forced synthesis’, Adorno believes the ‘principium individuationis is violent as such’, and that the autocratic self formed through this violence in turn ‘imposes its rigid unification outwardly onto the diversity of external nature’.85 Overly reliant on drive theory and id psychology, Whitebook’s Adorno ‘takes the ego only in its defensive aspect, as the opponent of the drives, and does not sufficiently appreciate its synthetic function’.86 Furthermore, since he ‘can only think unity as compulsion’, he has nowhere to hang his ideals of autonomy and maturity, and is thus forced endlessly to circle the aporia of subjectivity.87
Whitebook believes the ego psychologists, who offer a vision of the ego as mastering without dominating, present a way out of Adorno’s theoretical morass.88 He makes a telling comparison in justifying this move: ‘the ego psychologists were compelled to introduce a second dimension, as it were, to correct the instinctual monism of drive theory. Habermas, for similar reasons, introduced the dualistic framework of communicative and instrumental reason to overcome the implicit monism of the early Frankfurt School’.89 Whitebook’s turn to ego psychology could, like Habermas’ turn to communicative reason, be seen as a ‘solution’ to a previous impasse, but it could also be seen as taking the sting out of purposely difficult formulations. To follow Whitebook here, one would have to be convinced, as these authors are not, that Adorno’s schizoid alternation between arguing for the preservation and for the ruthless criticism of western subjectivity is a theoretical fault rather than a mimetic presentation of a schizoid reality and a spur to non-identity thinking.
As should be obvious by now, we find ourselves perplexed as to why precisely the intersection of psychoanalysis and social theory mined by the Frankfurt School should generally be considered obsolete, as it produced a much-needed historicization of psychoanalytic theory; a cogent analysis of fascist agitation; an illumination of the dialectical possibilities, both positive and negative, of late capitalist society; and an historical narrative of capitalist subjectivity that employs psychoanalytic categories to make sense of the demise of the Freudian conception of the psyche. In this final section, we would now like to lay out the general shortcomings of the Frankfurt School’s employment of psychoanalysis, as well as hold up what we find most relevant and in need of further development.
As for general deficiencies to be remedied, we will mention four: first, though Jessica Benjamin goes too far in hanging the Frankfurt School with the rope of patricentrism, we agree that far too much is garnered in their work from stereotyped versions of paternal and maternal tendencies. Without misguidedly attempting to undo in theory the reality of the patricentric family, we must be very careful about not reifying gender roles. Recent attempts in psychoanalytic theory to salvage the oedipus theory without the figures of the father and mother, including Benjamin’s own theory of the intersubjective ‘third’, are salutary expressions of very necessary theoretical work.90 We also agree with Benjamin that there is a lingering nostalgia at work in the formulations of the Frankfurt School. As Robert Hullot-Kentor has recently argued, we ought to think today not about returning to the individual of the liberal era but rather about working through the damaged and regressed subjectivity of the new anthropological type.91
Second, the Frankfurt School goes too far, as do psychoanalytic theorists in general, when they unjustifiably transcend the historically specific; when, in other words, they extrapolate from the conditions of the late capitalist subject trans-historical lessons. The ‘struggle against time’ depicted at the end of Eros and Civilization could have been very productively contextualized with something like E.P. Thompson’s ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, but Marcuse instead dives headfirst into the kind of philosophical abstraction for which Whitebook takes him to task.92
Third, the Frankfurt School was much too reliant on Freud as the beginning and end of psychoanalytic theory: the contributions of Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Jacques Lacan, and other important psychoanalytic theorists have not been adequately mined for their relevance to social theory. Klein and Lacan are particularly ripe for ‘integration’: Isaac Balbus and more recently Amy Allen have both started the project of thinking through the implications of Klein’s work for critical theory,93 and Lacan practically invited comparison in theorizing a ‘decline of paternal imagoes’ that resulted in a new form of subjectivity, what he called the ‘subject of science’.94
Finally, the gap between the Frankfurt School’s theoretical and empirical work was much too wide: though they admirably attempted to translate their philosophy into social scientific terms, much was lost in translation. In The Authoritarian Personality, the new anthropological type is opposed to the democratic and autonomous personality, whereas in Horkheimer and Adorno’s earlier work on the family, it is opposed to the bourgeois individual. The former thus injects a normative preference into historical analysis in a way that is thoroughly misleading, and that reinforces the incorrect view that the Frankfurt School associated bourgeois individuality with true autonomy.
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The promise we associate with the psychoanalytic project of the Frankfurt School pertains essentially to the hypothesis of the new anthropological type, which is an indispensable starting point for making sense of subjection in late capitalism. What is new and interesting here is not just the idea that subjective experience is objectively determined, the important payoff of Fromm’s reconceptualization of the drives and in any event a very old idea; it is rather that late capitalism, the regime of capitalism whose start coincides with the emergence of the culture industry, can be distinguished from capitalism per se by the reformulation of subjectivity in ways that both reduce and enhance alienation. Our alienation from the products we produce, the ways in which we produce them, our species-capacities, and our fellow human beings, produces a basic subjective tension that Marx believes will only be resolved with the overcoming of the contradictions of capitalism. The culture industry partially dispels this tension in providing outlets for domesticated pleasure, in giving the subject forms of quick relief from an existence otherwise dominated by alienated labor. It also rigidifies the subject’s thinking, and thereby veils objective contradictions. In both ways, the subject is relieved of consciously experiencing an objective alienation, but since alienating conditions are not themselves overcome, the experience of alienation becomes unconscious. The new anthropological type fronts fun-loving happiness and adaptable practicality, but underneath this thin veneer the drives seethe, just barely contained. The study of the ways in which these drives find expression – in latching on to fascist agitators, for instance – is the second feature of this project that still holds great promise today. In truth, these two features – the hypothesis of the new anthropological type and the analysis of the social and political fallout of the existence of this type – are of a piece, as the type is formed by conditions that are reinforced by its existence. We only separate them here to mark off two paths of inquiry: one into the conditions that produce subjectivity, the other into the ways in which that subjectivity is then exploited.
Both require some attention after years of disuse. In the case of the former, the invention of the internet and the forms of social media and devices that go along with it undoubtedly require an updating of the culture industry thesis: how, for instance, does using a smartphone differ from watching television? Does it actually provide occasion for more activity, as opposed to the passivity involved in consuming shows, or is that activity a pseudo-activity? Does it reinforce or break down the division between work and play? In ways that generate new dialectical possibilities or not? The replacement of the old forms of news consumption by viral videos and clips from late-night comedy shows spawns a similar line of questions, as do many other developments since the beginning of the culture industry. The changing conditions of the family are particularly important: how do the stresses of work in the neoliberal world translate in developing psyches? If not care and authority, what do parents today represent? These questions are in the social ether today but if the answers are going to continue the historical narrative centered on the new anthropological type, then they must be tackled in reference to the objective contradictions of capitalism as they are experienced by a damaged subject.
As for the second component, fascist rhetoric has, to say the least, entered a new era, and one could imagine a study of Trump’s new media assault that pays homage to Adorno’s analysis of the speeches of Martin Luther Thomas. The self-reproachful yet thoroughly engrossed way in which The New York Times covers his Twitter activity, for instance, speaks to a form of pleasure that we have not begun to understand. Furthermore, the channeling of historically specific rage by fascist rhetoric is only one way in which the drives are manipulated today. The psycho-pharmaceutical industry was born in response to a need to deal with the unintelligible misery and fragility of late capitalist subjects. Understanding the ways in which drugs organize life today is an urgent problem for a psychoanalytically inflected social theory. More generally, the minefield of irrationality that attends the existence of the new anthropological type can be preyed on in any number of ways: being ever vigilant to its uses and abuses is the best way to stay faithful to the original project of the Frankfurt School.
In all of these lines of inquiry, the Frankfurt School worked toward a truly transdisciplinary social science, one that goes beyond the ‘interdisciplinarity’ of the academic knowledge industry. Their ingenuity was made possible by an unwillingness to ‘discipline’ their inquiries into fields that speak to the conventions of particular audiences. It is this unwillingness that allowed their work to function as a counterpropaganda in the public sphere, as a kind of Nacherziehung [after-education] that undoes the insidious effects of the culture industry in much the same way that psychoanalysis works on the effect of our personal histories. Like Adorno,
We propose to concentrate on issues of which we are vaguely but uncomfortably aware, even at the expense of our discomfort’s mounting, the further and the more systematically our studies proceed. The effort here required is of a moral nature itself: knowingly to face psychological mechanisms operating on various levels in order not to become blind and passive victims. We can change this medium of far-reaching possibilities only if we look at it in the same spirit which we hope will one day be expressed by its imagery.95
Finally, the Frankfurt School, as opposed to many psychoanalytic traditions with a political bent, was emphatic about the necessity of social revolution in order to secure the possibility of Erfahrung. While psychoanalysis can bring to light the varied ways in which late capitalism forms and exploits psychic subjectivity, it cannot thereby remedy the damage because what is unearthed in analyzing, for instance, a susceptibility to fascist agitation is not a buried and obscure past but rather the unconscious registration of an all-too-apparent present.96 The essential choice for capitalist society has always been socialism or barbarism; until we achieve the former, psychoanalysis will be consigned to critiquing the latest unpalatable version of the latter.
Late in life, Marcuse made an unfortunately quotable statement: ‘Not every problem someone has with his girlfriend is necessarily due to the capitalist mode of production’.97 He was speaking against the trivialization of the concept of alienation, and his concern seems to have been justified, given the continued expanded use of the term today. But there is a way in which this statement represents a retreat from the radical implications of his and his colleagues’ work. The Frankfurt School recognized that capitalism entered a new epoch when an industry devoted to ‘pseudo-educating’ the general populace through film, radio, and television was born, and that this historical shift had not only profound social, political, and economic implications but also familial and psychic ones as well. In a very fundamental way, capitalism is responsible for the problems in our personal lives: an unreflective narrow-mindedness and a resigned acceptance of fleeting pleasures might be general human tendencies, but they are tendencies that are so encouraged by the culture industry that they have become defining features of subjectivity. The Frankfurt School formulated the uncomfortable thought that thanks to the culture industry, social structure appears at the deepest levels of our psyches, in our pleasures, frustrations, unthinking blunders, and neurotic behaviors. In the tradition of Freud, we hope that the disagreeable is not mistaken for the untrue.
1. Alexander Etkind, Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997).
2. Martin A. Miller, ‘The Reception of Psychoanalysis and the Problem of the Unconscious in Russia’, Social Research 57:4 (Winter 1990): 875–88, here 885.
3. André Breton, Les vases communicants (Paris: Gallimard, 1955).
4. Siegfried Bernfeld, Antiautoritäre Erziehung und Psychoanalyse: Ausgewählte Schriften, 3 vols. (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1969–70).
5. Otto Fenichel, ‘Psychoanalysis as the Nucleus of a Future Dialectical-Materialistic Psychology’, American Imago 24:4 (Winter 1967): 290–311.
6. Amy Allen, ‘Are We Driven? Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis Reconsidered’, Critical Horizons 16:4 (November 2015): 312–13.
7. This phrasing is borrowed from our colleague, Jeremy Cohan.
8. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (London: Heinemann, 1973), 86.
9. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955).
10. Wilhelm Reich, ‘Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis’, in Sex-Pol Essays, 1929–1934 (London: Verso, 2012), 1–74.
11. Erich Fromm, The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology, and Culture (London: Routledge, 2004), 1.
12. Erich Fromm, ‘The Method and Function of an Analytic Social Psychology: Notes on Psychoanalysis and Historical Materialism’, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 2005), 477–96, here 486.
13. Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, trans. Vincent Carfagno (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984), 52.
14. Ibid., xxii–xxiii.
15. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Henry Holt, 1969).
16. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 240.
17. Prophets of Deceit extends Löwenthal’s earlier work on authoritarian rhetoric in ‘Knut Hamsun’, in Literature and the Image of Man: Sociological Studies of the European Drama and Novel, 1600–1900 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 190–220.
18. Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), 51. For Löwenthal and Guterman, anti-semitism is to be located here, in this hatred of a rejected freedom (ibid., 87).
19. Ibid., 57.
20. Ibid., 95, 103.
21. Ibid., 118.
22. Ibid., 118.
23. Adorno riffs on this line of thought in Theodor Adorno, ‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 132–57, here 140–2.
24. Löwenthal and Guterman, Prophets of Deceit, 36, 37.
25. Ibid., 139, 24.
26. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 44.
27. Ibid., 37.
28. Ibid., 100.
29. Ibid., 100, 101.
30. Ibid., 3.
31. Ibid., 200, 204.
32. Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Utopia, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro and Shierry M. Weber (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 56.
33. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 214; Herbert Marcuse, ‘On Hedonism’, in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: MayFly Books, 2009), 128.
34. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2002), 75.
35. Ibid., 81, 79.
36. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 29.
37. Ibid., 138.
38. Ibid., 86.
39. Ibid., 131.
40. Though the culture industry thesis has been heavily criticized, it is difficult for these authors to see how the idea that the commodification of culture changes the nature of experience in late capitalist society is impertinent or dated.
41. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 168; Max Horkheimer, ‘Authority and the Family’, in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell and Others (New York: Continuum, 1999), 47–128, here 101.
42. Ibid., 101.
43. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 168.
44. Horkheimer, ‘Authority and the Family’, 114, 128.
45. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 168; Theodor Adorno, ‘Notizen zur neuen Anthropologie’, in Briefe und Briefwechsel, 8 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994), 4.2: 453–71, here 453.
46. Horkheimer, ‘Authority and the Family’, 102, 123.
47. Max Horkheimer, ‘Authoritarianism and the Family Today’, in The Family: Its Function and Destiny, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York: Harper, 1949), 359–74, here 365.
48. Ibid., 366.
49. See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, chapter 4.
50. Theodor W. Adorno and Hellmut Becker, ‘Education for Autonomy’, Telos 56 (Summer 1983): 103–10; Shane Gunster, Capitalizing on Culture: Critical Theory for Cultural Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).
51. See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 170.
52. Adorno, ‘Notizen zur neuen Anthropologie’, 468.
53. Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1950), 234; Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 386.
54. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154.
55. Ibid., 154.
56. Ibid., 165–6.
57. Ibid., 172.
58. Ibid., 125–6.
59. Adorno, ‘How to Look at Television’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 158–77, here 176.
60. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin’, New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979): 30–59.
61. Friedrich Pollock and Theodor W. Adorno, Group Experiment and Other Writing: The Frankfurt School on Public Opinion in Postwar Germany, ed. and trans. Andrew J. Perrin and Jeffrey K. Olick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
62. Theodor W. Adorno, Guilt and Defense: On the Legacies of National Socialism in Postwar Germany, trans. Andrew J. Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 213–27.
63. Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, chapter 3.
64. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 26; quoted in Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 102.
65. Jessica Benjamin, ‘The End of Internalization: Adorno’s Social Psychology’, Telos 32 (Summer 1977): 42–64, here 44.
66. Jessica Benjamin, ‘Authority and the Family Revisited: Or, a World Without Fathers?’, New German Critique 13 (Winter 1978): 35–57, here 48.
67. Ibid., 57.
68. Benjamin, ‘The End of Internalization’, 51; Benjamin, ‘Authority and Family Revisited’, 43.
69. Ibid., 43.
70. See Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 112–113.
71. Horkheimer, ‘Authoritarianism and the Family Today’, 362–3.
72. Ibid., 365.
73. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 97.
74. Ibid., 124–5.
75. Horkheimer, ‘Authoritarianism and the Family Today’, 362.
76. Gillian Rose, ‘How is Critical Theory Possible? Theodor W. Adorno and Concept Formation in Sociology’, Political Studies 24.1 (March 1976): 69–85, here 74.
77. Ibid., 74.
78. Joel Whitebook, ‘Fantasy and Critique: Some Thoughts on Freud and the Frankfurt School’, in Handbook of Critical Theory, ed. David M. Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 287–304, here 292.
79. Ibid., 298.
80. Ibid., 294.
81. Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 29.
82. Joel Whitebook, ‘The Marriage of Marx and Freud: Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis’, in The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred Rush (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 74–102, here 89.
83. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 75.
84. Ibid., 76.
85. Joel Whitebook, ‘From Schoenberg to Odysseus: Aesthetic, Psychic, and Social Synthesis in Adorno and Wellmer’. New German Critique 58 (Winter 1993): 45–64, here 46, 48.
86. Joel Whitebook, ‘Reason and Happiness: Some Psychoanalytic Themes in Critical Theory’, in The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessments, 6 vols., ed. Jay Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1994), vol, 6: 316–33, here 320.
87. Ibid., vol. 6, 320.
88. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, 253.
89. Whitebook, ‘Reason and Happiness’, 327.
90. Jessica Benjamin, ‘Two-Way Streets: Recognition of Difference and the Intersubjective Third’, differences 17.1 (2006): 116–46.
91. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ‘A New Type of Human Being and Who We Really Are’, The Brooklyn Rail, November 10, 2008, http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/11/art/a-new-type-of-human-being-and-who-we-really-are
92. E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present 38 (December 1967): 56–97.
93. Isaac D. Balbus, Mourning and Modernity: Essays in the Psychoanalysis of Contemporary Society (New York: Other Press, 2005); Allen, ‘Are We Driven?’
94. Elizabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925–1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 485.
95. Adorno, ‘How to Look at Television’, 175–6.
96. See Adorno, Critical Models, 103.
97. flame 0430, ‘Herbert Marcuse on the Frankfurt School: Section 3 of 5’, December 2009, Youtube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REP7HLI4Rpk