5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
Frankfurt Institute of Social Research. The Frankfurt School, as it came to be called,
was formed in the decade prior to the Nazi reign of terror in Germany, and not
surprisingly many of its leading theorists conducted numerous studies seeking to grasp
the wave of political irrationalism and totalitarianism sweeping Western Europe. In a
daring theoretical move, the School brought Freudian categories to bear upon the
sociological analysis of everyday life, in order to fathom the myriad ways that political
power imprints itself upon the internal world of human subjects and, more specifically,
to critically examine the obscene, meaningless kind of evil that Hitler had actually
unleashed. Of the School’s attempts to fathom the psychopathologies of fascism, the
writings of Adorno, Marcuse and Fromm particularly stand out; each of these authors,
in quite different ways, drew upon Freudian categories to figure out the core dynamics
and pathologies of post-liberal rationality, culture and politics, and also to trace the
sociological deadlocks of modernity itself. The result was a dramatic underscoring of
both the political dimensions of psychoanalysis and also the psychodynamic elements
of public political life.
The philosophical backdrop to the Frankfurt School’s engagement with Freud and
psychoanalysis was spelt out in particular detail by Adorno, who sketched along with
co-author Max Horkheimer—in Dialectic of Enlightenment—a bleak portrait of the
personal and political pathologies of instrumental rationality. Humanization of drives
and passions, resulting in the transformation from blind instinct to consciousness of
self, was for Adorno necessary to release the subject from its enslavement to Nature.
But, in a tragic irony, the unconscious forces facilitating the achievement of autonomy
undergo a mind-shattering repression that leaves the subject marked by inner
division, isolation and compulsion. The Janus-face of this forging of the self is clearly
discerned in Adorno’s historicization of Freud’s Oedipus complex. According to
Adorno, the bourgeois liberal subject repressed unconscious desire in and through
oedipal prohibitions and, as a consequence, achieved a level of self-control in order
to reproduce capitalist social relations. But not so in the administered world of late
modernity. In post-liberal societies, changes in family life means that the father no
longer functions as an agency of social repression. Instead, individuals are
increasingly brought under the sway of the logic of techno-rationality itself, as
registered in and through the rise of the culture industries. The concept of ‘repressive
desublimation’ is crucial here. The shift from simple to advanced modernity comes
about through the destruction of the psychological dimensions of human experience:
the socialization of the unconscious in the administered world directly loops the id
and the superego at the expense of the mediating agency of the ego itself. As Adorno
summarized these historical developments in identity-constitution: ‘The prebourgeois