5 :: SOCIAL THEORY SINCE FREUD
TRAVERSING SOCIAL IMAGINARIES
incorporates psychoanalysis into a theory of intersubjectivity.) Injecting Freudian
psychoanalysis into Webarian social theory, Adorno is said by Whitebook to have
effectively pitted unconscious rage against the non-identical —registered in the
administered world’s blind ‘compulsion for unity’, the manic articulations of which
arise precisely at that historical moment in which the psychological possibilities for
reflexivity are rendered superfluous. But there are considerable difficulties with the
interpretation that the ‘psychological’ dimensions of liberal individualism have been
replaced by the ‘post- psychological’ individual of the administered world of late
capitalism. These difficulties include, among others, Adorno’s reductionistic reading
of psychoanalysis as a ‘psychological theory’ (but see Žižek, 1994).
What has been of incomparable value, however, is the School’s analysis of why
human subjects, apparently without resistance, submit to the dominant ideologies of
late capitalism. The general explanatory model developed by the Frankfurt School to
study the socio-psychological dimension of the relation between the individual and
culture has received considerable attention in social theory (Jay, 1973; Benjamin,
1977; Held, 1980; Elliott, 1999). In what follows, I shall concentrate principally on the
social-theoretical reconstructions of psychoanalysis offered by Fromm and Marcuse.
ERICH FROMM
Fromm, who had been practising as an analyst since 1926 and was a member of the
Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute, sought in his early studies to integrate Freud’s
theory of the unconscious with Marxist sociology. Influenced by Wilhelm Reich’s
book Character Analysis, which connects society to the repressed unconscious,
Fromm became preoccupied with the cultural consequences of sexual repression,
as well as the mediating influence of the family between the economy and the
individual. According to Fromm, Freudian psychoanalysis must supplement Marxism
in order to grasp how social structures influence, indeed shape, the inner dimensions
of human subjectivity. Fromm’s concern with the effects of repression, however,
differed substantially from the analysis worked out by Reich. In Fromm’s view, Reich
had been unable to develop an adequate theory of social reproduction because he
had reduced Freud’s theory of sexuality to a monadic focus on genital sexuality. Yet
Freudian psychoanalysis, Fromm maintained, was fundamentally a ‘social psychology’.
For Fromm, the individual must be understood in his or her relation to others.
The bourgeois nuclear family, Fromm says, is pivotal to understanding the links
between individual repression, cultural reproduction and ideological domination.
An agency of social reproduction, the family is described as ‘the essential medium