Rejecting biological determinism can slide into ignoring how social conditions distort instinct itself.
Evidence
For Horney, an insight into the formative nature of social realities and norms became the springboard for a theory which released all forms of behaviour, perception and thinking from their embeddedness in instinctual structure and, in combination with the priority given to determination by social factors, left room for a redefinition and reshaping of the behaviour of women, for example. … But her exposure of the premiss of biological determination as merely a piece of ideology developed into a conception in which the distorting effects of social conditions on instinctual structures were ignored, and in which better upbringing and better analytical therapy were supposed to provide a relatively simple solution to the difficulties of various cultures. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 292
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s existing material on how social-constructionist frameworks quietly smuggle in voluntarist fixes — e.g. the essentialist/anti-essentialist debates in the Cultural Studies and Black Marxism notes. — connects to: Theorizing instinct as socially produced can accidentally naturalize existing social conditions. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 292; Horney’s cultural determinism slid into ignoring social distortion of instinctive structure; Adorno-Horkheimer’s instinct-based utopian critique rested on unproven biological assumptions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1121
- DEFINE: Fixes the precise sense of ‘revisionist’ in the Frankfurt School lexicon: a neo-Freudian who shifts causation from biology to culture.
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Theorizing instinct as socially produced can accidentally naturalize existing social conditions. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 292; Horney’s cultural determinism slid into ignoring social distortion of instinctive structure; Adorno-Horkheimer’s instinct-based utopian critique rested on unproven biological assumptions — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1121