Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda

by Theodor W. Adorno

Written in 1951, this essay systematizes Theodor Adorno's extensive work in the 1940s, informed by psychoanalysis, on the mass psychological base of fascism. It is important for us because it asks for the socio-psychological conditions of the possibility (and also the limits) of modern authoritarian states. The essay further demonstrates the interrelationship of the Frankfurt critique of mass culture and the Institute's fascism theory. Adorno was to call both the culture industry and fascist propaganda "psychoanalysis in reverse."

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Psychoanalysis, Essays

21 pages, Unknown Binding

About the author

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.

Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.

Reviews

[Ethan]

Very predictable formulation of the crowd enraptured by fascism in a Freudian formula. There are parts that I think are quite obviously correct, i.e. the explanatory power of the pleasure principle is very apparent here and rings rather true. Further the sort of fictional nature of fascism as an ideology is somewhat penetrated, most people don't genuinely believe that Jews are evil and control the world etc but it fulfils a certain irrational end that vents frustration; frankly a more elaborate explanation of the scapegoat. There is also an interesting bit of the configuration of the Fuhrer figure as the projection of the individuals in the crowd's would-be personality of sorts, the figure need not be a genuine leader with rational aims and methods, just a manifestation of the crowd.

There are bits that suffer and are outdated. I simply don't buy the hypnosis stuff, and the proclaimed libidinal, or latent homosexual urges, that are apparently in Nazism or fascism, might be true but isn't convincing as a genuine theory or truth of the crowd. It would seem that we would have to generalise that most (perhaps all) crowds have a fanatic homosexuality about them based on Adorno's reasoning here and that just strikes me prima facie as just obviously wrong and a relic from odd (very odd) psychoanalytic quirks.

[d]

(...) Moreover, the primitively narcissistic aspect of identification as an act of devouring, of making the beloved object part of oneself, may provide us with a clue to the fact that the modern leader image sometimes seems to be the enlargement of the subject’s own personality, a collective projection of himself, rather than the image of the father whose role during the later phases of the subject’s infancy may well have decreased in present day society. All these facets call for further clarification The essential role of narcissism in regard to the identifications which are at play in the formation of fascist groups, is recognised in Freud’s theory of idealization. We see that the object is being treated in the same way as our own ego, so that when we are in love a considerable amount of narcissistic libido overflows on the object. It is even obvious, in many forms of love choice, that the object serves as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal of our own. We love it on account of the perfections which we have striven to reach for our own ego, and which we should now like to procure in this roundabout way as a means of satisfying our narcissism. It is precisely this idealization of himself which the fascist leader tries to promote in his followers, and which is helped by the Führer ideology. The people he has to reckon with generally undergo the characteristic modern conflict between a strongly developed rational, self-preserving ego agency and the continuous failure to satisfy their own ego demands. This conflict results in strong narcissistic impulses which can be absorbed and satisfied only through idealization as the partial transfer of the narcissistic libido to the object. This, again, falls in line with the semblance of the leader image to an enlargement of the subject: by making the leader his ideal he loves himself, as it were, but gets rid of the stains of frustration and discontent which mar his picture of his own empirical self. This pattern of identification through idealization, the caricature of true conscious solidarity, is, however, a collective one (...)

[Taya Cornett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remember this paper you wrote : Psychotherapy or Psychosubjection?
Dominated Subjects, Damaged Subjectivities, and
the Conception of Power in Adorno and Foucault

HAHAHAH... you put Foucault on this text review. Note search emails to C.D 02.23.2020 on editing Adorno.


I. Exposition and discussion of Foucault’s genealogical approach to exposing the socio-
historical implication of psychotherapeutic discipline and practice as a discursive power of
subjection and subject-formation.

II. Explication and discussion of Adorno’s critical-theoretic interventions against psychoanalytic
theory and practice under the conditions of late capitalism. That is, in this section I will explain
what I consider to be some crucial moments in Adorno’s immanent critique, or negatively-
dialectical inhabiting of psychoanalysis as beset with ideological distortions that ultimately
hand it over to the service of a status quo increasingly characterized by domination and
barbaric violence, bewildered stupefaction and horror.

III. Discussion of the commonalities in Foucault and Adorno’s conceptions of power: they each
attempt to trace and depict how relations of domination have changed form after the
Industrial Revolution to become more pervasive, dispersed, and entrenched in the individuals
that such relations simultaneously (mis)shape. That is, power relations, constued as
domination relations, have come to characterize even the minutest details of “daily
experience,” or of whatever still passes as a “normal” and “decently” standardized way of
living our lives or experiencing ourselves as selves. Finding common ground in these two
critics remains an urgent theoretical matter in the present time, “After Auschwitz,” as Adorno
puts it, given that psychoanalysis, however helpful it may be to some of the patients who can
afford its services, seems utterly incapable of preventing sociopolitical regressions into
needless barbarism and atrocity towards people who are often unarmed and always prefer
not to be caged, tortured, separated from their loved ones, or murdered. And this, despite
levels of industrial-technological and scientific attainment more than capable of providing
more than enough to satisfy the basic needs of everyone. How does psychoanalysis fit into
this historical situation? Could it be playing an instrumental role as an ideological weapon,
having reached its climax as a repressive discourse of post-traumatic false enlightenment in
the age of postwar integration of individual subjects into their own---our own---culture-
industrial mutilation?

IV. Critical comparison of the two thinkers’ respective interpretations of psychotherapy in light of
their conceptions of power. Adorno and Foucault, each in their peculiar ways, seek
continually and methodically to undermine Enlightenment-era conceptions of power as
inextricably bound up with scientific knowledge, where the latter gets construed as a project
of mastering or dominating an “unruly,” “savage,” hitherto fearsomely dark, unknown, and life-
threatening Nature. These thinkers also share a radical suspicion of the ways in which this
rigidly “top-down,” domination-based figuring of the knowledge-power of human beings as an
emancipatory force for progressively “rationalizing” those societies where it emerges or takes
hold. Psychoanalytical (along with psychiatric) discursive practices, which are at the centre of
the paper, are a relatively recent emergence in the blighted history of the Western-European
effort to spread its “rational civilization” across the lands and peoples of the earth---largely
regarded by many, in accordance with the same ideological programme, as “uncivilized,”
“savage,” insufficiently disciplined, and so on, even to the point of genocidal “schools” such as the Indian Residential Schools in Canada and the Indian Boarding Schools in US-America
that inspired the Canadian federal government’s institutionalization of such child-prisons as a
repressive wing of the State. Could psychoanalysis, the practitioners and theorizers of
purport to take the methods of empirical science as their model, be implicated (as a “support
beam” or psychological “gluing-back-together” of sorts) in a more or less subtle deception of
its subjects (therapist and client-patient alike) into the various forms of self-(de)formation that
some individuals are diagnosed as needing, particularly those who have been
interpreted/treated as “suffering too much,” too visibly, pathologically, or too abnormally for
the predominant discourse of a multiply oppressive society to fully assimilate into its
miserable, homicidally hypocritical “normalcy,” disciplined to the point of a near-total
reification of the subject.

V. Discussion of some important divergences in Adorno and Foucault’s critiques of
psychoanalysis as implicated in repressive subject-formation and subject-treatment.

VI. Conclusions