Horkheimer defended Freud against Fromm’s critique of bourgeois elements in his thinking

Evidence

Expressed in this letter were several fundamental differences of opinion with Fromm. First, Horkheimer denied the accusation that the bourgeois elements admittedly present in Freud’s thinking were unequivocally unfortunate. As he had argued in “Traditional and Critical Theory,” 82 no thinker can escape his social origins entirely. “The greater the work, the more it is rooted in the concrete historical situation,” he wrote Lowenthal. Thus, Freud’s notion of the death instinct had an “objective intention” that was “deeply right,” not because it corresponded to a biological universal, but because it expressed the depth and severity of modern man’s destructive urges. Second, Freud’s putative blindness to the role of the family as agent of society, which Fromm so strongly stressed and which played a part in the Institut’s early work on authority, was really a reflection of his sensitivity to the decline of the family in modern life. This was a change that Horkheimer was to discuss at some length in his subsequent work. And finally, Freud had realized that psychology was necessarily the study of the individual. Thus the libido, which implied a stratum of human existence stubbornly out of reach of total social control, was an indispensable concept. It was thus a mistake to sociologize the individual. By the same token, the revisionists were wrong in trying to “psychologize culture and society.” Underlying Horkheimer’s refusal to collapse psychology into sociology or vice versa was that stress on nonidentity so central to Critical Theory. Not until contradictions were socially resolved could they be methodologically reconciled, a critical point to which Adorno was to return much later in a discussion of “Sociology and Psychology.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 356

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth checking how Horkheimer’s ‘decline of the family’ discussion develops in his later work — this anticipates a major Critical Theory theme.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s later ‘Sociology and Psychology’ essay and to Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, both within the same tradition. — connects to: Psychology-socialism debates shaped Horkheimer’s turn to Freudian theory — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 317; Adorno defended Freud’s instinct theory against neo-Freudian revisionist critiques — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 358; Fromm interpreted the death instinct as the need to destroy, diverging from Freud — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 346 (+3 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies the meaning of ‘nonidentity’ as the methodological refusal to collapse psychology into sociology.