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“In Psychoanalysis Nothing Is True but the Exaggerations”: Freud and the Frankfurt School

In his classic essay “The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood,” émigré psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson stressed the role played by psychological projection in the anti-Semitic denigration of Jews. He then added, “While projections are hostile and fearful distortions, however, they are commonly not without a kernel of profound meaning. True, the projector who sees a mote in his brother’s eye overlooks the beam in his own, and the degree of distortion and the frightfulness of his reaction remains his responsibility. Yet there usually is something in the neighbor’s eye which lends itself to specific magnification.”¹ Having already published his essay in 1950, a year before Adorno’s Minima Moralia, Erikson could not have known of his fellow émigré’s evocation of the same biblical passage for somewhat different purposes. But it is striking that both would be drawn to it as a way to stress the importance of projection, at once cognitive and psychological, as a source of both the distortion and illumination—or, more precisely, magnification—of reality. Both were also convinced that familial dynamics and childhood development were crucial in the formation of adult political inclinations, although Erikson was somewhat less pessimistic about the crisis of the traditional bourgeois family. Unlike other émigré analysts of totalitarianism in general and fascism in particular—Hannah Arendt and Carl Joachim Friedrich come immediately to mind—Erikson and members of the Frankfurt School understood the necessity of applying psychoanalytic insights to make some sense of the seemingly inexplicable appeal of nightmare politics in the twentieth century.

Erikson, to be sure, is normally grouped with either the ego psychologists or neo-Freudian revisionists who were disdained as social conformists by the Frankfurt School. Despite his having been born in 1902 in Frankfurt, only a year before Adorno, and emigrating from Nazi Germany in 1933, first to Denmark and then America, Erikson seems to have had little sustained contact with members of the Frankfurt School. An essay he wrote in 1942 entitled “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth” was, to be sure, cited approvingly several times in The Authoritarian Personality,² and he was included in the celebrated lecture series in 1956 at the reconstituted Institute in Frankfurt, which brought Freud back to Germany after the war. But rather than discern ominous signs in America of the continuation of fascism by other means, he celebrated its culture during the Cold War (despite ultimately criticizing the war in Vietnam) and had little interest in the marriage of Marx and Freud. He was, moreover, a practicing clinician who had been trained by Anna Freud and worked throughout much of his career with children.

It was precisely a disdain for the therapeutic function of Freud’s theories that distinguished Marcuse and Adorno from Erikson and most other émigré psychoanalysts. Nor did Marcuse and Adorno champion the smooth integration of the psychological level of analysis with the social, which set them apart not only from Erikson but also from their erstwhile colleague Erich Fromm. But what perhaps most of all distinguished Critical Theory’s use of Freud from that of Erikson, Fromm and virtually all other defenders of his legacy was its proponents’ insistence on the biological moment in Freud’s work, including his much maligned instinct theory. Against the grain of those who saw it as a warrant for pessimism about the rigidity of human nature, they argued it could also inspire very different thoughts in a political imaginary that led not to dystopian fascism, but dreamt instead of utopian redemption.

Inherent in psychoanalysis is the protest against reality. Equilibrium on the basis of inner freedom. Non conformism.

Max Horkheimer³

When Herbert Marcuse, one of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School, was asked by a skeptical questioner how Marx and Freud could be unified in one coherent theory, he defiantly replied: “I think they can easily be married, and it may well be a happy marriage. I think these are two interpretations of two different levels of the same whole, of the same totality.”⁴ Leo Löwenthal, another founding member of the School, would likewise recall that “the systematic interest that must have spawned this fascination with psychoanalysis for me and many of my intellectual fellow travelers was very likely the idea of ‘marrying’ historical materialism with psychoanalysis.”⁵ The metaphor of marriage was often, in fact, employed to characterize the bold integration of Marx and Freud in the Critical Theory developed at the Institute of Social Research, out of which the Frankfurt School emerged.⁶ It suggests more than just a conceptual integration, but also one charged with affect, expressing an emotional bond between two loving partners joined together harmoniously and capable of producing heirs inheriting the best traits of each.

But whether it was a true and enduring marriage—let alone a happy, harmonious and productive one—is a question that needs to be reopened. For it is still not clear that two such seemingly different traditions—one stressing socioeconomic relations, confident in scientific rationality and radically political; the other individualist in focus, dwelling on unconscious irrational desires and cautiously therapeutic—can ever find the theoretical and practical equivalent of connubial bliss. Among the Marxist skeptics was Walter Benjamin, himself loosely associated with the Institute of Social Research in the 1930s, who denounced “capitalism as a religion” and argued that psychoanalysis “belongs to the hegemony of the priests of this cult. Its conception is capitalist through and through.”⁷ Other, later commentators also invested more in Marx than Freud have concluded with Fredric Jameson that “we have all probably overstressed the ‘Freudo-Marxism’ of the Frankfurt School, which is finally realized only in Marcuse.”⁸ For, if a marriage did take place, he went on, it was profoundly unequal, because the Frankfurt School applied Freud’s categories as “a kind of supplementary social psychology … but never as any centrally organizing concept.”⁹ Defenders of Erich Fromm, who, ironically, was largely responsible for the Frankfurt School’s initial attempt to combine the two before his break with the Institute in 1939, likewise came to praise him as a champion of Marxist humanism who recognized the ahistorical, biologistic limitations of psychoanalysis.¹⁰

Purist exponents of Freud, for their part, stressed Marxism’s fundamental indifference to psychological questions and its radical historicization of human nature (which they trace back to the founder himself), and thus the sterility of the forced marriage.¹¹ In the words of Philip Rieff, “Marx followed Hegel in his anti-psychological orientation. Capitalism elicits personality types; personality types do not first elicit capitalism.”¹² Later pro-Freudian skeptics have pointed to theorists like Jacques Lacan, whose “return to Freud,” according to one recent account, “reflected the waning of the New Left and the end of its hopes for a Marx/Freud synthesis.”¹³

Such a counterintuitive synthesis, call it marriage or not, was, of course, envisaged well before the Frankfurt School emerged as a distinct intellectual formation. Intimations of it can be traced as far back as Leon Trotsky in Soviet Russia, before it was explicitly proscribed when Stalin came to power and Pavlovian behaviorist conditioning became the reigning orthodoxy. One can find even more determined advocates in interwar Central Europe, such as Siegfried Bernfeld and Wilhelm Reich, and among the surrealists in France.¹⁴ What came to be called “the Freudian Left” included even non–explicitly political figures such as Géza Róheim and underground radicals such as Otto Fenichel.¹⁵ But the abiding interest in Freud shared by most theorists associated with the Frankfurt School—and one would have to include second- and third-generation members such as Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth¹⁶—makes Critical Theory an illuminating test case for the fruitful combination of the two traditions.

In what follows, I focus on four motivations that overlapped but emerged to prominence at different moments in the Frankfurt School’s history and which compelled the first generation of members to serve as marriage broker between Marx and Freud. The first incentive for the matchmaking, apparent even before Max Horkheimer took over official directorship of the Institute in 1930, was the hope that psychoanalysis might help answer the exigent question generated by the failure of orthodox Marxist theory to generate revolutionary practice: why did the working class fail to assume the leading role assigned to it by historical materialism in the overthrow of capitalism? The second reason was the complementary insight it might offer into the unexpected success of a political movement, fascism, that traditional Marxism had not foreseen and that stubbornly survived after World War II in what might be called the “fascism with a human face” of an “administered society” comprised of “one-dimensional men.” The third motivation, evident especially in Marcuse’s mature thought, grew less from the dystopian anxiety driving the first two than paradoxically from a stubbornly residual utopianism. It drew on an imaginative reading of Freudian theory to envisage a civilization very different from the one whose discontents Freud himself accepted with resignation as inevitable in any conceivable alternative. And, finally, the Frankfurt School, in particular Horkheimer and Adorno, looked to psychoanalysis as a resource in the philosophical struggle to defend a plausible materialism against idealism or “consciousness philosophy” and its denigration of somatic pleasure and indifference to the sufferings and needs of the creaturely self.

Before, however, exploring each of these motivations and their consequences, we have to clarify one important premise of the Frankfurt School’s approach concerning the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and therapeutic practice. Three of the early members of the Institut für Sozialforschung had in fact themselves undergone psychoanalytic treatment: Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal and Max Horkheimer. The first two had been involved in the early 1920s with a therapeutic community that had Jewish religious ties and was organized by Frieda Reichmann, who was for a while Fromm’s wife.¹⁷ Fromm went on to become an analyst himself, training with Karl Landauer, a leading figure in the German psychoanalytic movement. In 1927, Horkheimer was analyzed by Landauer, albeit only for a year and apparently with little concrete effect beyond the loss of anxiety about lecturing without notes.¹⁸ But, because of his enthusiasm for the intellectual content of Freud’s theories, Horkheimer encouraged the creation of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute in 1929, led by Landauer and Heinrich Meng, even inviting it to take up quarters in the Institute of Social Research’s newly constructed building. Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann were among its most prominent collaborators, and other members of the Institute of Social Research often joined in their discussions. Löwenthal recalls that “the mere fact that a psychoanalytical institute was allowed to use rooms on a university campus was then almost a sensation,”¹⁹ and also proudly recalls his role in helping Freud get the city of Frankfurt’s Goethe Prize in 1930.

Communications with Freud himself followed in which he praised the Institute for bringing his ideas into a university setting for the first time.²⁰ In a letter written by Horkheimer in March 1932 in which he sought Freud’s advice about a substitute for Fromm, who was then temporarily sidelined with tuberculosis, at the Institute’s branch in Geneva, the importance of psychoanalysis to the interdisciplinary project of the Institute was emphasized: “I am convinced that without the use of psychoanalytic knowledge [Kenntnisse] our project will not be fruitfully realized, and I believe and hope I am allowed to say that such a participation in social scientific research will not be without value for the development of psychoanalysis itself.”²¹

What is perhaps most revealing about this letter is Horkheimer’s stress on the cognitive payoff of psychoanalysis rather than the therapeutic. During his student days in Frankfurt, he cultivated an enthusiasm for Gestalt research into the holistic workings of the mind, which helped him overcome the hostility to psychology typical of most philosophers of the era but did not lead him toward anything like the efforts made by contemporaries like Reich, with his Sex-Pol clinics to alleviate the suffering of sexual alienation.²² Although assuring Freud that he had been personally analyzed by Landauer, he gave no indication that the Institute would emulate the model of Reichmann’s religious/therapeutic community or even Landauer’s Institute, whose leaders were active analysts, but instead would rigorously separate theory from practice. In one of the aphorisms in his pseudonymously published collection Dawn and Decline, Horkheimer had already expressed his distrust for the ideal of “inner health” as an antidote to “objective suffering” and asked scornfully if the revolutionary can “determine at any given moment how healthy, neurotic, at one or at odds with himself he may be? These bourgeois categories reflect their own world and not the struggle which proposes to unhinge it.”²³ Although here the distinction was between political activism and therapeutic practice, when the former grew less likely, radical theoretical speculation informing interdisciplinary social science replaced it as therapy’s antonym.²⁴

Significantly, the same attitude came to characterize the Frankfurt School’s approach to two other traditions that had vigorously sought to unite theory and practice: religion and socialism. Despite the frequent introduction of theological ideas into critical theory, they were never tied to the observation of religious practices.²⁵ A similar pattern can be seen in their complicated attitude toward the unity of radical theory and revolutionary political practice, the shibboleth of Marxism ever since the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. Horkheimer himself distinguished a genuinely “critical” theory from a “traditional” one explicitly in terms of the former’s insistence that social emancipation rather than disinterested contemplation was its goal.²⁶ But the failure of the working class to be the vehicle of that transformation meant that the gap between theory and practice yawned wider, and the Frankfurt School increasingly resisted well-intentioned but vain efforts to bridge it.