Freud’s turn to the death instinct paralleled the historical decline of the bourgeois family

Evidence

I think you should be simply positive. We really are deeply indebted to Freud and his first collaborators. His thought is one of the Bildungsmachte [foundation stones] without which our own philosophy would not be what it is. I have anew realized his grandeur during the last weeks. You will remember that many people say his original method was particularly adequate to the Viennese sophisticated middle class. This is, of course, totally untrue as a generality, but there is a grain of salt in it which does not do any harm to Freud’s work. The greater a work, the more it is rooted in the concrete historical situation. But if you take a close look at this connection between liberalistic Vienna and Freud’s original method, you become aware of how great a thinker he was. With the decline of middle-class family life, his theory reached that new stage as expressed in “Jenseits des Lustprinzips” and the following writings. That turn of his philosophy proves that he, in his particular work, realized the changes pointed out in the chapter of the article on Reason [probably part of Horkheimer’s “Reason and Self-preservation”] devoted to the decline of the family and the individual. Psychology without libido is in a way no psychology and Freud was great enough to get away from psychology in its own framework. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 355

Categorization

• XREF: Jay’s treatment of the Institute’s ambivalent relationship with Freudian orthodoxy connects to later splits over Fromm’s revisionism — the passage anticipates the Fromm vs. Horkheimer/Adorno clash over libido theory documented elsewhere in this chapter. — connects to: Psychoanalysis itself was born from sublimated bourgeois political frustration — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 210; Hobbesian pessimism about human nature anticipated Freud’s later views — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 97; Freudian mental categories are historical products of bourgeois subject disintegration — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 74

Broader Connections

• Hobbesian pessimism about human nature anticipated Freud’s later views #corroborates (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 97
• Psychoanalysis itself was born from sublimated bourgeois political frustration #complicates (0.72) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 210