388 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
society. He understood individuality, on the one hand, in the sense of
self-determining active subjects. On the other hand, he used the con-
cept descriptively, in order to describe changes in social character. The
lectures took place over a period of two months in Frankfurt and
Heidelberg, but even though the topic was close to his heart, he was not
one of the speakers. He will not have been too disappointed, however,
since he was still on his travels. A month before the ceremony he spent
a week in Vienna where, among others, he met Helene Berg. He had
wanted also to go to Oldenburg to see the much praised production of
Berg’s Wozzeck, but this too proved impossible.
As for the lecture series on Freud, Adorno made way on this occa-
sion for Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse gave two lectures, on ‘The Theory
of the Instincts and Freedom’ and ‘The Idea of Freedom in the Light of
Psychoanalysis’, and it was through these lectures that he first made
a name for himself in postwar Germany. Adorno took a back seat
on this occasion in part because he had already published his essay ‘On
the Relationship between Sociology and Psychology’ in Sociologica, the
Horkheimer Festschrift. So he confined his efforts to working on the
volume in which the lectures were published, Freud in der Gegenwart,
which appeared in the Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie. Never-
theless, he remained one of the initiators of the lecture series and also
of the centennial ceremony in the main lecture theatre of Frankfurt
University, which was attended by the federal president, Theodor
Heuss, and also the prime minister of Hessen, Georg-August Zinn. In
addition to Horkheimer, the participants in the lecture series included
Alexander Mitscherlich and Erik Erikson, who talked about psycho-
analysis as a form of therapy and the theory of the unconscious. Adorno
described the event to Friedrich Hacker, who had tormented him in
Beverly Hills, but with whom he still kept in touch. He reported that
the lecture series organized by the institute had been a huge success.
‘The impact was very great and, without boasting too much, I believe
that we have finally succeeded in breaking through the mechanism of
repression that has surrounded Freud in Germany and Austria and has
lasted well beyond the demise of Hitler.’^90 Adorno had no need to fear
that his assessment of psychoanalysis as a critical theory of the subject
or his legitimately claimed competence in these matters would fail him.
The preface to the collected lectures, Freud in der Gegenwart, clearly
bore his imprint, insisting on the need to bring socio-psychological
research up to date. ‘If, twenty-five years ago, the aim of research was
to investigate the manner in which social coercion extended into the
most subtle ramifications of the individual human psyche which had
hitherto imagined that it existed for itself alone and belonged to itself
alone, then, today, reflections on psycho-social mechanisms are frequently
used to deflect attention from the power of society. Difficulties and
conflicts of the present are played down once they are reduced directly
to individual human beings, to merely internal processes. This explains