Adorno treated orthodox psychoanalytic theory as simultaneously a sociology

Evidence

Adorno had a tendency to see the form of psychological analysis which he practised as simultaneously representing the sociological analysis required, or at least a decisive part of it. This attitude was analogous to his characteristic view that the deeds of a great artist, working as a monad, coincided with the objective movement of the timesa view he had taken since his earliest analyses of the New Music. Psychoanalytic individual psychology held to the orthodox theory of the unconscious and the repression of the instincts, and to the ideas of the ego, id and superego, and did not involve itself either in the question whether individual psychological states could be transferred to societies or in any revisionist sociologization of psychology. In Adorno’s opinion, psychoanalytic individual psychology registered those objective forces at work within the individual which were the most formative ones and which at the same time the individual was not aware of. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1838

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did orthodox 1930s-40s psychoanalysis differ from the Freudian ego psychology and revisionist schools Adorno resisted? Worth pinning down for the reference-level account.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno prized psychoanalysis as a weapon against instinct metaphysics. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 329; Adorno held that individuals were so socialized that psychology dissolved into sociology. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1815; Adorno feared de-economised sociology collapsing into psychology in disguise — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1110

Broader Connections

• Adorno feared de-economised sociology collapsing into psychology in disguise #qualifies (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1110