Lazarsfeld’s milieu fused Austrian Marxism and Adlerian psychoanalysis from childhood

Evidence

Lazarsfeld was born to a Jewish family in Vienna in 1901. Victor Adler, Rudolf Hilferding and Otto Bauer, among others, were frequent visitors to the family home. His mother, Sophie Lazarsfeld, had studied under Alfred Adler, and was a practising psychoanalyst and author of a series of aggressive books about women’s liberation. So he was familiar from an early age with Austrian Marxism and with the Adlerian version of psychoanalysis, which Austrian Social Democrats held in high esteem. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 675

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader Frankfurt School institutional history — Lazarsfeld as the empiricist foil to the Institute’s philosophically-oriented critical theory.