File spoon-archives/frankfurt-school.archive/frankfurt-school_2000/frankfurt-school.0004, message 9


Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2000 10:35:08 -0400
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: ADORNO VIZ. LUKACS?


Sorry to be so mysterious, inadvertently.  In my original query I mentioned
certain works of Lukacs and Adorno illustrating the basis of my
interest--the hard core of philosophical method, ontology and epistemology.
 In response, I was told about how Adorno and Lukacs have been compared in
two areas I did not enquire about--aesthetics and psychoanalysis--but I've
still not received any useful information that pertains to the focus of my
query.  Now it's true that I've been interested in the struggle of Adorno
with Lukacs over literary modernism, though it is not the focus of my
present inquiry.  But I just have no interest in any detailed comparison of
how Adorno and Lukacs differ with respect to Freud.

As for any actual interest, say, in how Adorno appropriated Freud, well
.... Freud passed into general intellectual culture so long ago that in
some generic sense people all have at least a general sense of Freudianism
and its releavnce as they vaguely know many other things that are now
commonly accepted parts of a modern scientific world view, Newton and
Einstein and others ....  Freudianism doesn't seem to be the hot issue it
once was.  I don't feel an urgent need to rehash the specifics.  The only
thing that still interests me about the Frankfurt appropriation of Freud is
how Freud appeals to the needs of certain intellectuals beyond its actual
scientific merits and the degree of Freudian orthodoxy that is accepted by
intellectuals who are not themselves professional psychoanalysts.  In this
regard the work of Neil Maclaughlin on Erich Fromm is very interesting,
documenting the shabby way that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse treated
Fromm, kowtowing to the most orthodox, reactionary establishment wing of
the pyschoanalytic movement.

So what in general do I think of Freud and his appeal to intellectual
snobbery?  I'd say my reaction is as contradictory and ambiguous as Freud's
real ideological role itself.  Freud is seen in his best light as an
Enlightenment figure who wanted to make the irrational rational and the
unconscious conscious.  That is the party line.  While it has partial
validity, there is another side: that is the covert appeal of Freud to
intellectuals who love to wallow in their own superiority over the
hopelessly and groundlessly irrational mass of humanity, who have
surrendered to the voluptuous pleasures of alienated, gratuitous cynicism
and sadomasochistic, reductionistic pessimism concerning human nature.
>From this point of view and only as far as it is applicable, Lukacs is
certainly correct to identify Freud as part of the anti-proletarian,
irrationalist heritage of lebensphilosophie.  C.L.R. James also sussed out
the narcissistic appeal of psychoanalysis to intellectuals and went on a
rampage against its influence, in the USA, in the late 1940s.  James's one
misstep was his dogmatic blindness to the important truths revealed by
Erich Fromm in ESCAPE FROM FREEDOM, which accomplished more in enlightening
humanity than all the rest of the Frankfurt pisspots put together.

At 09:29 AM 04/26/2000 -0400, Ken wrote:
>
>On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 01:41:13 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> wrote:
>
>> I must confess a near total indifference to the question of
psychoanalysis...
>
>Is there a non-obvious explanation as to why? I'm curious. The bulk of what 
>happens in the world makes little sense without some notion of the
unconscious 
>as something that mixes it all up, to explain why we do what we do.



   

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