Adorno wanted therapy to intensify the reality principle rather than soften it.

Evidence

Adorno, along with Pollock and Marcuse, was one of the three members of the Institute who had not been analysed, as opposed to Fromm, Lowenthal and Horkheimer, who had. His conception of a correct form of psychoanalysis was not, as Fromm thought, to let the patient experience something of what things ought to be like; nor, as Freud prescribed, to approach the patient as a tolerant representative of the reality principle. Instead, it was to confront the patient as someone who would take the reality principle to its extreme, who would bring the patient into a darkness in which the light of hope would begin to shine. Adorno did not ask himself whether what might be true at the level of aesthetic theory or the theory of class struggle would be applicable without further difficulty to individual therapy. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 289

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Adorno’s ‘no right life in the wrong one’ and his later Minima Moralia critique of therapy and adaptation.
• CANDY: The arch anti-Freudian was himself one of the three Institute members who never underwent analysis — a neat biographical irony.