Filosofía

Psychoanalysis and materialistic social psychology
Contents: 1. Introduction: the «need of psyhology» in the Frankfurt Institute 2. The early works of Erich Fromm and the project of the Studies on Authority and the Family 3. Against the complicity between liberal history and traditional psychology 4. New psychology as auxiliary science 5. From individual psychology to a psychology of socialcharacters 6. From consciousness psychology to a psychology of unconscious 7. Beyond Mass Psychology 8. The power of immaterial/symbolic satisfaction 9. Social reality and psychical reality 10. The rhythm of economy and that of social character: the role of the family

1. Introduction: the «need of psyhology» in the Frankfurt Institute In a note from the middle 40es, referring to the reception ofpsychoanalysis characterizing the intellectual activity of Frankfurt Institute from the beginning, Herbert Marcuse speaks of a «need for psychology». In his opinion, it was the theoretical instrument to comprehend why men in the face of the decline of old capitalistic world (crisis, wars, poverty), instead of tending to establish a free society, had integrated into fascist order, confirmingcapitalistic domination. Mere social categories were no more sufficient to explain the phenomenon of mass consent of the authoritarian society. In fact, for longer than twenty years the Frankfurt theorists were intensively confronting Freudian concepts. As result, four theoretical constellations emerged: a) the reformulation of psychoanalysis into a materialistic social psychology, i.e., into a theory ofbasic character structures, corresponding to the different social groups in capitalistic society: it is what finds expression in the Studies on Authority and the Family (1936); b) the development of psychoanalysis as organon – basic conceptual instrumentation – of a genealogy of West civilization, i.e., of the theory of the fundamental relationships between 1

human beings and nature - theirinner nature and the extern one -, laying at the basis of this civilization. This is the subject matter of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/47); c) the attempt to turn the genealogy of repressive society and repressed individual into a genealogy of free society, taken up by Herbert Marcuse in his book Eros and Civilization (1955); d) the development of psychoanalyticinquiry as empirical research, as achieved by Adorno in The Authoritarian Personality (1951). The different constellations correspond to the four theme, which we are dealing with in the second part of our course. In the present lesson we’re addressing the first topic. It should be noticed that such an interest in psychoanalysis differentiated Frankfurt circle from traditional Marxism, and from theoryand practice of labour movement. Marxist main streams were used to regard psychoanalysis as an ideology, merely reflecting the crisis of bourgeois individual in the age of decline of capitalism. In the perspective of Marxism of labour organizations one needed no specific discipline to know and explain the behaviour of social classes: they could be simply deduced from the general class structure ofsociety, or influenced by political struggle. The recourse to psychoanalysis represented therefore a relevant moment of Frankfurt updating Marxian theory. It presupposed a specific awareness of the historical situation as an almost new one, in which the conscience and acting of social classes have to become subject matter of knowing process. Even proletarian conscience and behaviour were no moreobvious: they also became an epistemic object. But why did their project of a critical social theory require just the conceptual instrumentation of psychoanalysis? The idea of a pathological development in contemporary history was here playing a relevant role: the emergence of widespread authoritarian behaviours (mass consent for the «Führer») and terrorizing practices seemed to reveal a power of...