Institutions replace overt force with internalized distorted communication that legitimates power.

Evidence

This language-game interpretation of the psychoanalytic theory of the development and cure of symptoms as a process of de-symbolization and re-symbolization had been inspired by Alfred Lorenzer, one of Habermas’s colleagues at Frankfurt. By analogy, Habermas was also attempting to derive from Freud a theory of the development and dissolution of institutions and ideologies. Freud comprehends institutions as a power that has exchanged acute external force for the permanent internal compulsion of distorted and self-limiting communication. Correspondingly he understands cultural tradition as the collective unconscious, censored in varying measure and turned outwards, where motives that have been split off from communication are driven incessantly about and are directed by the excluded symbols into channels of substitute gratification. These motives, rather than external danger and immediate sanction, are now the forces that hold sway over consciousness by legitimating power. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 673

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Habermas’s Freudian model of institutions as frozen distorted communication rather than coercive apparatuses.
• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School intellectual-history lineage: Lorenzer as Habermas’s Frankfurt colleague, and the Institute’s turn from Marx to Freud.