Horkheimer rejected Freud’s death instinct for implying passive acceptance of oppressive social order

Evidence

During the first years of emigration Horkheimer shared Fromm’s distaste for the death instinct. As late as 1936, in “Egoism and the Movement for Emancipation,” 76 he attacked the resignation it implied. Freud’s earlier work, Horkheimer argued, was more dialectical, his later, more biological and positivistic; his belief in a destructive drive was like the medieval attribution of evil to a mythical devil. By missing the historical component in oppression, Freud had absolutized the status quo and become resigned to the necessity of a permanent elite to keep the destructive masses down. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 352

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader critical-theory question of whether Freud’s instinct theory is historical or biological, which resurfaces in later Frankfurt School work like Eros and Civilization. — connects to: Fromm interpreted the death instinct as the need to destroy, diverging from Freud — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 346; Horkheimer saw psychoanalysis as a conformist tool at odds with radical critique. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1110