Adorno defended Freud against leftist critique because dialectics requires retaining the concept of authority.

Evidence

After reading the article, Adorno wrote to Horkheimer in March 1936 that Fromm had put him in the paradoxical situation of defending Freud. The article is sentimental and wrong to begin with, being a mixture of social democracy and anarchism, and above all shows a severe lack of the concept of dialectics. He takes the easy way out with the concept of authority, without which, after all, neither Lenin’s avant-garde nor dictatorship can be conceived of. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 288

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A founding moment of the Adorno-Fromm rift: anti-authoritarianism as theoretically unserious, authority as conceptually indispensable to any revolutionary politics.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno defended Freud’s instinct theory against neo-Freudian revisionist critiques — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 358; Adorno defended empirical methods by citing depth-psychological techniques against superficiality. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1941; Adorno defended authority as indispensable for communist avant-garde politics. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 648
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Adorno defended Freud’s instinct theory against neo-Freudian revisionist critiques — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 358; Adorno defended empirical methods by citing depth-psychological techniques against superficiality. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1941; Adorno defended authority as indispensable for communist avant-garde politics. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 648