The Institute read Freud’s later works as anthropological critique, not clinical psychology

Evidence

That turn of his philosophy proves that he, in his particular work, realized the changes pointed out in the chapter of the article on Reason [probably part of Horkheimer’s “Reason and Self-preservation”] devoted to the decline of the family and the individual. Psychology without libido is in a way no psychology and Freud was great enough to get away from psychology in its own framework. Psychology in its proper sense is always psychology of the individual. Where this is needed, we have to refer orthodoxically to Freud’s earlier writings. The set of concepts connected with the Todestrieb [the death instinct] are anthropological categories (in the German sense of the word). Even where we do not agree with Freud’s interpretation and use of them, we find their objective intention is deeply right and that they betray Freud’s great flair for the situation. His development has led him to conclusions not so far from those of the other great thinker of the same period, Bergson. Freud objectively absented himself from psychoanalysis, whereas Fromm and Horney get back to commonsense psychology and even psychologize culture and society” Expressed in this letter were several fundamental differences of opinion with Fromm. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 355

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the crucial Institute distinction between ‘anthropological categories’ (their reading of the death instinct) and clinical individual psychology — a distinction undergirding their whole appropriation of Freud.
• XREF: Directly sets up the Freud-Fromm conflict; Fromm is faulted here for reverting to ‘commonsense psychology’ — the precise charge that led to his expulsion from the Institute.