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The paper discusses the problem of the possible relation between psychoanalytic concepts and social critique in the perspective of Adorno's social thought. The title refers to Adorno's idea that psyche as individual spontaneity has now lost the weight it used to have in the liberal era. As a brief introductory remark, I clarify the status of theory for Adorno, i.e., the circularity between interpretation and description as grounded by the nature of the social object itself. Then I analyse his core idea of “social objectivity” as an impersonal mechanism which is at the same time produced by men and reified, heteronomous for them, and I argue that, for Adorno, the discontinuity existing between individual and society prevents an immediate shift of psychoanalytic concepts to the social world: the example of fascism clearly proves that the determining social forces today, while instrumentally exploiting deep psychical materials, are not themselves psychological. In the final part, I show how, for Adorno, psychology and sociology nevertheless need to be mediated with each other, while avoiding the superficial synthesis the so-called “revised psychoanalysis” aims to, and I point out some similarities between psychoanalytic practice and social critique as conceived by him.
The Frankfurt School has often been associated to the project of “marrying” Freud’s psychoanalysis with a Marxian critique of capitalist societies. This article offers however another version of the link between Critical Theory and psychoanalysis. After having briefly sketched the notion of a “critical theory of society”, the Author shows how a critique of modern capitalist societies and Freudian psychoanalysis actually meet at a “methodological” level for which the marriage between Hegel and Freud seems to be the relevant one. As a conclusion, the Author contrasts two kinds of social critique that can be found in the Frankfurt School, which are deeply linked with the first and the latest generation of the Frankfurt School considered in their relation to
psychoanalysis.