Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 389why a synthesis of sociology and psychology seems less appropriate
to us at the moment than sustained, independent work in both dis-
ciplines.’^91 Adorno had already advanced this argument in his essay
‘On the Relationship between Sociology and Psychology’, although this
was one of the texts he was not entirely happy with after publication.
In October, he confessed to Alfred Andersch, to whom he nevertheless
sent a copy, that he was not satisfied with the piece; it was one of his
‘failed efforts’.^92
The theme of this failed effort was his assertion of the end of indi-
viduality in modern society.^93 This assertion was linked to an older
essay on ‘Psychoanalysis Revised’ that he had given as a paper to the
Psychoanalytical Society in San Francisco.^94 His – admittedly fitful –
preoccupation with the topic of the transformations of the self under
the growing social pressure to conform in fact dates from that early
period.
At around this time, Adorno collected a number of reflections
under the heading ‘Notes on the New Anthropology’.^95 Some of these
were now incorporated into the aphorisms in Minima Moralia.^96
He returned to these in the early 1950s when he was framing his
objections to revisionist tendencies in psychoanalysis and was himself
proposing changes in socio-psychological research: ‘Our descriptions of
early childhood behaviour must inevitably become much more precise
and discriminating than hitherto if we are to gain access from the
inside to the substratum at which psychoanalytical anamnesis is aimed.’^97
Adorno’s general diagnosis of the subject without a self went far
beyond his disagreement with the ego-psychology of Erich Fromm and
Karen Horney. His observations dated from the last years of his stay
in America. At that time, he had doubts about the reduction of psy-
choanalysis to a therapeutic procedure. But he also went far beyond
this. From the vantage point of sociology, he noted the elimination
of the internal imagos of the father and mother and their replace-
ment by direct social power. There no longer was an unconscious, and
repression too had become superfluous. The Freudian censor was
now replaced by defiance and universal hostility. The Oedipus complex
had become redundant in the new anthropology and, in the absence
of an ego, the category of egoism lost all meaning as well. The image
of the body had become desexualized, ‘either because of the cult of
functioning... as such or because of the way in which sexuality had
been liberated, which meant that the withdrawal of resistance had led
to the loss of pleasure.’^98
Adorno’s critical reflections on the subject are to be found in many
places in his cultural criticism and his sociological writings. They must
be regarded as a central feature of his analysis of the age. For he
proceeded from the assumption that you can read off the state of
society as a whole from what you can discover about individual living
beings. From this vantage point, Adorno reconstructed the individual