Psychology’s true subject is the animal, not the disordered human

Evidence

To resort to psychology in order to understand one’s fellow man is an effrontery; to use it to account for one’s own motives is pure sentimentality. Animal psychology, however, has lost sight of its true purpose and, in its games with traps and mazes, has forgotten that it is to the animal alone that it can turn to discuss and conceive the soul. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 251

Categorization

• QUESTION: Would be worth chasing whether Adorno’s claim that only animal life is governed by mental impulses is rhetorical or meant literally.
• XREF: connects to: Attention to how animals see us dissolves human-centered categories and anxiety — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 102; Human status is socially learned like language, not animal instinct — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 62; Dehumanizing language retroactively framed coerced abuse as the victims’ natural animal behavior — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 598
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Attention to how animals see us dissolves human-centered categories and anxiety — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 102; Human status is socially learned like language, not animal instinct — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 62; Dehumanizing language retroactively framed coerced abuse as the victims’ natural animal behavior — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 598

Broader Connections

• Dehumanizing language retroactively framed coerced abuse as the victims’ natural animal behavior #complicates (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 598
• Human status is socially learned like language, not animal instinct #complicates (0.78) — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 62