In Search of a Career 105Why was Adorno interested in psychoanalysis, a discipline that was
so very controversial at the time? He concentrated on Freud’s own
theory because its epistemological status was still completely unclarified,
even though it operated with a concept of the constitution of mental
objects – quite unlike associative psychology, experimental psychology
and gestalt theory. What made psychoanalysis attractive for a transcen-
dentalist analysis of the unconscious was its assumption that ‘all psychic
phenomena have a meaning, all psychic existence is determined by laws
through the agency of personal consciousness or. .. alternatively, allour
phenomena. ..are the phenomena of unconscious objects, knowledge
of which depends on understanding their conscious context and its laws.’^37
To demonstrate the truth of this thesis, Adorno referred to theso-called
parapraxes or Freudian slips: dreams and neurotic symptoms.
To reproach psychoanalysis with failing to distinguish betweennormal
consciousness and events determined by the unconscious is to succumb
to the naturalist fallacy that has its roots in an untenable ontological
distinction between consciousness and reality. ‘Doubtless, the facts of
our waking life are determined in many instances by changes in the
material world, but is not the material world itself built on the laws
governing our consciousness?’^38 Perceptively, Adorno warned expressly
against a naturalistic misinterpretation of the unconscious and of in-
stinct. In Freud, he maintained, neither concept is ultimately primary;
they are rather no more than conceptual tools with which to describe
laws governing the psyche.
Adorno was not at all interested in the therapeutic aspects of Freud-
ian theory. He treated it purely as an epistemology entirely concerned
with the nature of the knowledge arising from analysis. This led him to
regard Freud’s theory as a turning point inaugurating the definitive
‘demystification’ of the unconscious. It followed that psychoanalysis was
‘a sharp weapon ... against every attempt to create a metaphysics of
the instincts and to deify dull, organic nature.’^39
With this conclusion the 24-year-old Adorno adopted a radically en-
lightened position that he was to retain throughout his life. Towards the
end of the thesis a further important point emerged. He attempted to
link psychoanalytical insight to sociological knowledge. He argued that
the causes of the psychic symptoms uncovered by psychoanalysis could
be eliminated only if there were a ‘change in our current social condi-
tions’. The analysis of the psyche was a necessary but not a sufficient
condition for any fundamental transformation of the ‘material world’ so
as to make it less oppressive for human beings. This finding sounds
materialist, but Adorno did not go beyond mere assertion. However,
he did move to a critique of those organicist and vitalist currents in
contemporary philosophy that appealed to the ominous effects of pro-
cesses operating unconsciously in history and society.
Adorno evidently wished to pillory attempts to transfigure social facts
into natural, fated necessities. The social impact of such ideological