Psychoanalysis reduces the social to the psychological by axiom

Evidence

Adorno had a tendency to see the form of psychological analysis which he practised as simultaneously representing the sociological analysis required, or at least a decisive part of it. This attitude was analogous to his characteristic view that the deeds of a great artist, working as a monad, coincided with the objective movement of the timesa view he had taken since his earliest analyses of the New Music. Psychoanalytic individual psychology held to the orthodox theory of the unconscious and the repression of the instincts, and to the ideas of the ego, id and superego, and did not involve itself either in the question whether individual psychological states could be transferred to societies or in any revisionist sociologization of psychology. In Adorno’s opinion, psychoanalytic individual psychology registered those objective forces at work within the individual which were the most formative ones and which at the same time the individual was not aware of. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1838 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Psychoanalysis is undone by the external super-ego it identified; Fromm argued destructiveness varies across social groups, contradicting Freud — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 346; Fromm’s early social psychology critiqued Freud’s purely libidinal account of authority — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 417 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno treated orthodox psychoanalytic theory as simultaneously a sociology #complicates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1838