Institute critics rejected psychoanalytic ideology readings that ignored material class conditions

Evidence

Horkheimer was following the same pattern when, at about the same time, he criticized the sociology of knowledge. He accused the sociology of knowledge of putting considerations of intellectual history before inquiries into the complex ways in which the objective struggles of human beings condition their ideas', and of reinterpreting objectively existing contradictions as oppositions between ideas, “styles of thought” and “systematic world-views”’. With both Fromm and Horkheimer, the nub of the criticism lay in drawing attention to conditions, such as the misery and oppression of the lower classes, which produced various ideas, world-views and religions. They went on to show that any view of intellectual phenomena which did not start with the fundamental role of the mode of production and the division of society into classes would be perpetuating the suppression of any awareness of the misery and injustice which were the basis of such phenomena. It would be doing this even when it was modified by psychoanalysis or the sociology of knowledge. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 220 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

I have always felt uneasy about the use of psychoanalysis in cultural critique since it is so culture-specific in its provenance. Like many others, I too have felt that Marxism, focusing on something on a higher level of abstraction than the machinery, production, and performance of the mental theater, and as obviously global as capitalism, is not open to this particular charge. (To say capitalism is all over the place is not as universalist as to say everyone’s psyche is patterned the same.) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1449 (#expands, via linked claim)

In the present society, then, it would be a mistake to see intellectuals asfreischwebende (free-floating), to use the term Mannheim had taken from Alfred Weber and popularized. The ideal of a “freefloating” intellectual above the fray was a formalistic illusion, which should be discarded. At the same time, it would be equally erroneous to see the intellectual as entirely verwurzelr, rooted in his culture or class, as had volkisch and vulgar Marxist thinkers.’ Both extremes misconstrued subjectivity as either totally autonomous or totally contingent. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 301 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: New School exiles rejected the Institute’s work on ideological grounds; Horkheimer rejected non-class-based accounts of ideas as perpetuating suppression — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 220; Psychoanalysis is too culture-specific for general cultural critique while Marxism is not — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1449 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Horkheimer rejected non-class-based accounts of ideas as perpetuating suppression #corroborates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 220
• Psychoanalysis is too culture-specific for general cultural critique while Marxism is not #expands (0.78) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1449
• Critical Theory rejected both free-floating and rooted views of the intellectual #corroborates (0.77) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 301
• The Frankfurt School rejected philosophical anthropology and eternal human essence #corroborates (0.76) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 226
• Polanyi rejected sociologically determinist histories of ideas #corroborates (0.73) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 748
• New School exiles rejected the Institute’s work on ideological grounds #qualifies (0.72)