The Frankfurt School’s contempt for science stemmed partly from Freudian psychoanalysis’ non-disciplinary status.

Evidence

The Horkheimer circle never attempted to rescue the various scientific disciplines from the grasp of positivism and the system of bourgeois academic scholarship. Instead, they showed growing contempt for the sciences as well as for positivist philosophy of science. This was made easier by the fact that Freudian psychoanalysis, in the way in which it had been presented in its classic period, could not be classified as a specialized scientific discipline. Instead, Freud’s psychoanalysis, which not only Fromm but also Horkheimer and Adorno had to thank for many of their most fruitful ideas, continued the tradition of the psychologically or anthropologically oriented `dark’ novelists of the bourgeois epoch. It was a central factor in giving Horkheimer and the most important of his fellow theoreticians the sense that important insights could also be achievedor even better achievedby skipping over the specialized disciplines. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 757

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the later Frankfurt School critique of instrumental reason and the ‘dark novelists’ lineage the Institute placed itself in — echoes the Marxist critique reading where ideology critique refuses disciplinary compartmentalization. — connects to: Psychoanalysis justified the Frankfurt circle’s contempt for specialized academic disciplines; Marxist theories of false consciousness merged with Freudian psychoanalysis in the Frankfurt School. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 100; Psychoanalysis’s undisciplined status made the Frankfurt circle’s contempt for specialized science easier — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 206

Broader Connections

• Marxist theories of false consciousness merged with Freudian psychoanalysis in the Frankfurt School. #qualifies (0.78) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 100