In September 1927, a twenty-four-year-old Theodor Adorno penned a letter to Max Horkheimer, then his colleague in the Philosophy Faculty at the University of Frankfurt, regarding the habilitation thesis he had submitted a month prior.Footnote 1 Eight years Adorno's senior, Horkheimer had completed his own habilitation in 1925 under the philosopher Hans Cornelius, who also served as Adorno's adviser. Adorno hoped for a speedy award of the habilitation, the degree required for obtaining authorization to teach at German universities. His ability to remain in Frankfurt and pursue an academic career, Adorno wrote to his longtime mentor, Siegfried Kracauer, hinged on Cornelius's acceptance of the habilitation thesis, not least because “I am being threatened at home to ‘ensure’ [that I will undertake] legal study with state examinations, for which I have no inclination.”Footnote 2 Entitled Der Begriff des Unbewussten in der transzendentalen Seelenlehre (The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of Mind), Adorno's study addressed the concept of the unconscious in relation to both the philosophy of Cornelius and the psychoanalytic method of Sigmund Freud.
After nearly two years of work on the thesis, Adorno found his efforts to rise through the ranks of the German academy stymied. In November 1927, Cornelius rejected the manuscript and advised Adorno to withdraw his inquiry about receiving the habilitation, leading Adorno to lament that Cornelius “let me down shamefully at the last moment.”Footnote 3 Explaining his decision in a note to the Frankfurt Philosophy Faculty, Cornelius contended that Adorno's study was merely derivative of his own writings.Footnote 4 Adorno, of course, would not follow his parents’ admonitions to pursue a legal career. After a stint as a music critic in Vienna, he returned to Frankfurt to successfully complete a habilitation thesis on Kierkegaard under Paul Tillich, finally obtaining the venia legendi enabling him to lecture at German universities in February 1931.Footnote 5 The retracted habilitation thesis on the unconscious remained unpublished until 1973, four years after Adorno's death.
Scholars of Adorno, largely concurring with Cornelius's assessment, have traditionally regarded Concept of the Unconscious as an exemplar of “school philosophy,” marking the conclusion of an early, neo-Kantian phase of Adorno's intellectual career to be succeeded by the development of the distinctive variety of philosophical materialism that Adorno would come to characterize as negative dialectics.Footnote 6 Classic studies of the genesis of the critical theory of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research have focused on the final passages of Concept of the Unconscious, which linked irrationalist theories of the unconscious to their social and economic origins. The conclusion of the retracted habilitation thesis, these studies argue, formed a bridge away from neo-Kantianism and toward a Marxist critique of ideology.Footnote 7 More recent works have focused greater attention on Adorno's criticisms of Kant in the 1927 text. Pointing toward continuities with Adorno's later rejection of a dualism between transcendental conditions of knowledge and material reality, Brian O'Connor demonstrates that Adorno's earliest writings already “identified inconsistencies in [Kant's] transcendental idealism.”Footnote 8 Nevertheless, Adorno's writings as a student of Hans Cornelius have occupied only a marginal place in the voluminous scholarship on the critical theory of the Frankfurt school.
This essay suggests a new interpretation of Adorno's little-examined Concept of the Unconscious by situating the study within both its immediate context of interwar German philosophy and the arc of Adorno's engagement with Freudian psychoanalysis over the course of his intellectual career.Footnote 9 It asks how Adorno's earliest interventions in philosophical debates about the unconscious in the 1920s shaped his later theorization of the relationship between society and the psyche. Such an analysis, this essay argues, complicates interpretations of Adorno's early intellectual trajectory as an unqualified shift from idealism to materialism, supporting Robert Hullot-Kentor's contention that “Adorno no more started off as a neo-Kantian . . . than he matured in any simple sense as a Marxist.”Footnote 10 In his later works, to be sure, Adorno would defend a distinctive concept of materialism as a bulwark against identity thinking and premature dialectical closure.Footnote 11 Nevertheless, Adorno's mature writings refused to reduce the subject to a mere expression of social conditions. Instead, Adorno would maintain a psychoanalytic understanding of the mind as a site of competing forces, which internalized societal expectations but could also critically reflect on them. Adorno's early engagement with psychoanalysis therefore sheds light on a crucial problem in his wider philosophical corpus: his account of the possibility of a subject who could gain critical purchase on the social world, in spite of material conditions that tended toward the deindividuation of subjects and the neutralization of critical self-reflection.
Concept of the Unconscious belonged to an early stage of Adorno's philosophical writings at which Adorno aimed to mediate between contemporary neo-Kantian and phenomenological currents. He thereby sought an epistemology that corrected the dogmatic aspects of Kant without succumbing to an anti-Kantian irrationalism. On the one hand, the explicit aim of the text—to demonstrate “the possibility of a transcendental determination of the concept of the unconscious”—reflected an effort to rehabilitate a form of Kantian transcendental idealism that could overcome objections posed by irrationalist philosophies of the unconscious.Footnote 12 Yet Adorno's 1927 habilitation thesis was hardly a recapitulation of neo-Kantian orthodoxies that he would subsequently abandon. Adorno's very choice to thematize the unconscious also signaled an emphasis on the psychological forces that constrained subjective autonomy, an emphasis that contemporary neo-Kantianism lacked. Moreover, Hans Cornelius's philosophy, as an amalgam of idealist and empiricist tendencies, provided resources for Adorno's critique of reigning neo-Kantian epistemologies. In Freud, Adorno found an intellectual compatriot who similarly eschewed idealist conceptions of spontaneous, world-generating subjectivity yet also remained suspicious of the irrationalist underpinnings of contemporary critiques of neo-Kantianism. The conclusion of Concept of the Unconscious drew on both Cornelius and Freud to outline a dialectical relationship between psychoanalysis and social theory. For Adorno, psychoanalysis reinforced the conclusions of Marxian social theory regarding the limits to autonomous subjectivity, while nevertheless pointing toward possibilities for the exercise of freedom amidst heteronomous social and psychological forces.
The retracted habilitation thesis in turn set the stage for Adorno's lifelong engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis. While he would never compose another full-length monograph on the unconscious, psychoanalysis served as a resource for Adorno's subsequent confrontations with a core problem of the German idealist tradition, the relationship between subjective consciousness and objective reality. Already in Concept of the Unconscious, Adorno developed an understanding of psychoanalysis as a resource for theorizing a modern subject who could resist being wholly subsumed into an oppressive and totalizing society, while avoiding the tendency of the idealist tradition to posit the dominance of the subject over the material world. Reconstructing the intellectual context for the young Adorno's construction of a psycho-social dialectic clarifies his hesitancy toward outlining a positive vision of psycho-social reconciliation in his postwar writings, which frequently resulted in polemics with leading psychoanalysts of the period.Footnote 13 From his critiques of the “revisionist” psychoanalysis of Erich Fromm and Karen Horney to his deployment of Freud as a counterpoint to Kantian idealism in Negative Dialectics, Adorno would continue to draw upon Freudian psychoanalysis as a source of critical subjectivity, rather than a means of reconciling the subject with the surrounding social world.
HANS CORNELIUS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Adorno's approach to neo-Kantianism and psychoanalysis in Concept of the Unconscious relied upon on the philosophical system of his teacher Hans Cornelius (1863–1947). Cornelius did not lead Adorno to replicate the neo-Kantianism dominant in academic philosophy in early twentieth-century Germany, however. Rather, the significance of Cornelius's influence on the young Adorno lies precisely in the former's departure from established philosophical camps. Though remembered mainly as an early adviser to Horkheimer and Adorno, Cornelius was a figure of wide-ranging interests not only in epistemology and psychology but also in art and music, whose career as a philosophy professor at Munich and Frankfurt spanned the final decade of the nineteenth century until the late 1920s. While he maintained contact with many of the leading German-language philosophers of his day, including a decade-long exchange with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, Cornelius did not align himself with any single philosophical school.Footnote 14 Originally trained in chemistry, Cornelius retained a commitment to empiricism and the “individuality of concrete phenomena” at odds with neo-Kantian idealism.Footnote 15 At the same time, he upheld a characteristically Kantian concern with the a priori conditions of knowledge, and by the first years of the twentieth century he had abandoned an earlier interest in logical positivism.Footnote 16 Cornelius's epistemology instead sought to mediate between the major currents of interwar German philosophy: a neo-Kantianism that aimed at a scientific, non-metaphysical reinterpretation of Kant by casting off Kant's notion of a noumenal thing-in-itself and newer developments in phenomenology and philosophical anthropology that sought to ground philosophy in the concreteness of lived experience rather than the abstractions of transcendental categories.Footnote 17
The debate about the legacy of Kant that defined German philosophy during Adorno's intellectually formative years, and in which Cornelius's works intervened, centered on the capacity of the human subject to generate objective knowledge.Footnote 18 By the turn of the century, a leading school of neo-Kantian thought emerged around the Marburg philosopher Hermann Cohen, who radicalized Kant's notion that a priori categories form the basis for objective knowledge to argue that all “objects of possible experience” are not only known but “produce[d]” by an “a priori element” introduced by the mind.Footnote 19 Cohen's most prominent Weimar-era successor, the philosopher and cultural historian Ernst Cassirer, shifted from Cohen's focus on science to an analysis of culture, emphasizing the role of the “spontaneity of human consciousness” in generating the symbolic forms that serve as the foundation of all knowledge and expression.Footnote 20 Despite remaining dominant in university faculties, neo-Kantianism faced formidable opposition during the 1920s from a series of intellectual movements that sought to ground philosophy in lived experience rather than the constructive capacities of the mind. Jettisoning the neo-Kantian emphasis on spontaneity, proponents of existential phenomenology and philosophical anthropology foregrounded the constraints on autonomous action imposed by the environment in which subjects found themselves.Footnote 21 Critics of neo-Kantianism, moreover, set the terms for the philosophical reception of the unconscious in 1920s Germany. Among the most influential was Ludwig Klages, a proponent of philosophical anthropology who pitted a stultifying realm of intellect against “aura, life, and the secrets of soul.” Klages's followers, working in the traditions of vitalism and Lebensphilosophie, extolled Freud's concept of the unconscious for revealing the power of irrational forces within the psyche while criticizing Freud himself for attempting to tame the unconscious through rationalist methods of psychoanalysis.Footnote 22
Hans Cornelius's philosophical system, by contrast, resisted both a totalizing rationalism and a glorification of concrete experience unmediated by concepts. Cornelius laid out his idiosyncratic synthesis of idealism and empiricism in his 1916 magnum opus Transcendentale Systematik: Untersuchungen zur Begründung der Erkenntnistheorie (Transcendental System: Investigations of the Foundation of Epistemology). The work began with the Kantian dualism of things-in-themselves and appearances, and in standard neo-Kantian fashion promised to cleanse Kant of the “dogmatic presupposition” of the “transcendental thing-in-itself” in order to clarify the conditions for universally valid judgments.Footnote 23 However, whereas Marburg neo-Kantians would have emphasized the creative capacities of the human mind as the basis for such judgments, Cornelius insisted that the process of concept formation began with the individual's encounter with the external world through sense-perception. Philosophy, for Cornelius, must proceed from the “immediately known” realm of sense-experience, that which “I know, without this knowledge requiring knowledge of anything else.”Footnote 24 Universally valid, conceptual knowledge was not produced ex nihilo by the spontaneity of consciousness; this “mediate knowledge” was attained only through the accretion of one's sense-experiences into a unified totality, on the basis of which the mind could form general concepts.Footnote 25 The unity of consciousness, constructed upward from empirical phenomena, grounded the possibility of advancing universally valid claims. As Cornelius summarized the argument of Transcendental System, “The unity of personal consciousness proves to be . . . the final foundation for all universally valid judgments in the phenomenal realm and for all types of concept formation.” On this basis, “a reformulation of the Kantian system . . . is achieved.”Footnote 26
Cornelius's synthesis of neo-Kantianism and empiricism enabled him to offer one of the few interwar interpretations of the unconscious that did not rely on vitalist metaphors. In an overview of his philosophy, Cornelius characterized the unconscious as the composite of those mental processes that translated discrete sense-experiences into the unity of consciousness. Despite experiencing the world as a succession of sense-perceptions, Cornelius noted, we feel ourselves to be unified personalities. Consistent with the epistemology of Transcendental System, Cornelius argued that this unity could not be derived immediately from experience but was constructed through psychological mechanisms, principally memory, which formed connections among discrete experiences and operated beneath the level of conscious awareness. The “unconscious” was a redescription of these processes, a name for the “empirically known lawful connections of the contents of our consciousness.” As Cornelius explained, “these permanent lawful connections, which dominate our entire psychic life,” could be described as “the unconscious factors of our life” or “unconscious psychical facts.”Footnote 27 On this account, the unconscious was not a realm of irrational forces sealed off from the conscious mind but a logical postulate necessary to explain the unity of consciousness.
Cornelius's approach to the unconscious exemplified his position between the poles of Weimar philosophy. At one level he remained a neo-Kantian, insofar as he refused to present the unconscious as a domain inaccessible to the conscious mind. Cornelius did not deny the contingency of immediate sense-experience, but in Kantian fashion he insisted that experience became intelligible only via the unity of consciousness. However, Cornelius's larger philosophical project also stood at odds with important premises of Marburg neo-Kantianism. In particular, Cornelius described consciousness not as a fountain of spontaneity but as the accretion of discrete sense-perceptions linked through unconscious processes. Precisely the eclecticism of Cornelius's model made it a powerful source for the young Adorno's parallel effort to navigate between the competing camps of Weimar philosophy.
BETWEEN NEO-KANTIANISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: ADORNO'S TURN TO THE UNCONSCIOUS
Adorno's letters do not recount the precise circumstances of his decision to write a habilitation thesis on the concept of the unconscious. However, the manuscript's origins during his years as a student of Cornelius suggest that Adorno's turn to Freud can be explained less by the ferment of interest in psychoanalysis within the intellectual avant-garde of 1920s Central Europe than by the ongoing philosophical debate surrounding the legacy of Kant.Footnote 28 Adorno read Kant's critiques as early as his teenage years in private tutorials with Siegfried Kracauer, and he began studying epistemology with Cornelius in the spring semester of 1921, drawn to the Frankfurt philosopher's heterodox interpretations.Footnote 29 At a seminar in the winter semester of 1923–4 directed by Horkheimer, at that time Cornelius's research assistant, Adorno delivered a paper on “Kant's Critique of Rational Psychology” that foreshadowed the interpretation of Kant he would advance in the 1927 habilitation thesis.Footnote 30
Adorno's first extended foray into the philosophical debate about Kant and the subject–object relationship lay in a yet earlier work, a doctoral dissertation on Edmund Husserl's Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (Ideas on a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy) (1913) completed at Frankfurt in the summer of 1924, also under the supervision of Cornelius.Footnote 31 Husserl conceived of his phenomenology as a scientific account of consciousness, rather than training his phenomenological gaze on concrete human existence in the manner of his erstwhile student Martin Heidegger.Footnote 32 Nevertheless, Adorno's doctoral dissertation anticipated the central criticism he would later level against both Husserl and Heidegger: their approaches to phenomenology sustained an “undialectical dualism between subjective consciousness and material reality,” leaving them unable to break free of the Kantian dualism of things-in-themselves and appearances.Footnote 33 In his 1924 dissertation, Adorno applied this critique to the “transcendental reduction” at the core of Husserl's phenomenology, a move by which the philosopher bracketed out the naturalistic picture of a reality external to the human subject in order to describe the disclosure of the world to a “transcendental subjectivity” that formed “the condition of possibility for appearance as such.”Footnote 34 According to Adorno, Husserl's transcendental reduction collapsed into contradiction by insisting both that consciousness served as the subject's “sole source of knowledge” and that a transcendent objective world existed apart from consciousness.Footnote 35 To resolve this problem, Adorno appealed to Cornelius's Transcendental System, which jettisoned Husserl's notion of “pure consciousness.” Instead, for Cornelius, the unity of consciousness, produced by the interlinking of discrete sense-experiences through the operations of the mind, served as the foundation for all “scientifically valid” statements.Footnote 36 Adorno echoed Cornelius's own exchange with Husserl two decades earlier, in which Cornelius had insisted that universally valid judgments originated from experiential knowledge.Footnote 37 “The domain of phenomenological investigation is not ‘pure consciousness contrasted against reality,’” Adorno argued; rather, phenomenology “fulfills its task in the description of the laws of the unity of our experience.” Cornelius's framework, by linking immediately given sense-perceptions to mediately given judgments, dissolved the contrast between immanent consciousness and transcendent reality at the core of Husserl's phenomenology.Footnote 38
Adorno's first habilitation attempt, which he had begun planning already by December 1925, engaged similar themes while looking beyond the narrow scope of his doctoral dissertation.Footnote 39 Whereas the earlier study remained focused on Husserlian phenomenology, Concept of the Unconscious applied Cornelius's notion of the “unity of consciousness” toward a broader critique of the subject–world dualism in Weimar philosophy. In particular, Adorno developed Cornelius's conception of the unconscious as a set of mental processes that linked discrete sense-experiences into a larger unity and thereby formed a condition of consciously held knowledge. This notion of the unconscious provided an avenue for criticizing both neo-Kantianism and its phenomenological and vitalist detractors.
Adorno opened Concept of the Unconscious with sustained critique of post-Kantian philosophies of the unconscious, which he traced from late eighteenth-century critics of Kant such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi to “contemporary intuitionism and vitalism.”Footnote 40 If nineteenth-century German philosophers advanced a wide range of interpretations of the unconscious—from Friedrich Schelling's mental “activity” that formed the ground of individual self-determination to Friedrich Nietzsche's collective Dionysian impulse—then Adorno constructed a unified post-Kantian tradition as a foil to his own effort to situate the concept of the unconscious within Kantian transcendental philosophy.Footnote 41 According to Adorno, the entire lineage from Herder to Weimar-era vitalism had gone awry by abandoning “the primacy of consciousness in the critical philosophy [of Kant].”Footnote 42 Post-Kantians correctly recognized the inconsistency of Kant's concept of an unknowable thing-in-itself, which threatened to lapse into dogmatism. Rather than rectifying this error, however, philosophers such as Schelling replaced the thing-in-itself with an “unconscious” realm of the “spiritual” that was independent of and causally prior to experience—violating Kant's condition that all knowledge began from sense-experience.Footnote 43 Nineteenth-century philosophers thereby invoked the unconscious to overturn the entire Kantian edifice: “The philosophical content that the Kantian critique forfeited and did not allow to be ordered in a philosophy of consciousness flowed together and formed the philosophy of the unconscious . . . that wished to dispense with the objective results of Kantian philosophy through a—likewise philosophically intended—turn to the unconscious.”Footnote 44
At the center of Adorno's lineage of nineteenth-century theorists of the unconscious stood the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.Footnote 45 In The World as Will and Representation (1818) and later essays, Schopenhauer famously identified the Kantian thing-in-itself with an unconscious “will,” a force that motivated the events of the phenomenal world while remaining unknown to the conscious subject.Footnote 46 Such a construal of the thing-in-itself, according to Adorno, exaggerated the most dogmatic elements of Kant. Schopenhauer's “unconscious activity” amounted to a “metaphysically hypostatized” version of Kant's notion of the “causality of reason” that transcended the laws of “natural causality.”Footnote 47 Adorno linked Schopenhauer's metaphysical notion of unconscious will to Nietzsche's “concept of will” and to Henri Bergson's élan vital, the “vital force” that underlay organismic development, which in turn served as a formative influence on Weimar-era vitalists.Footnote 48 In all of these cases, philosophy posited a form of causality that departed from any grounding in empirical reality. Yet in a gesture that would prove characteristic of his emergent style of dialectical interpretation, Adorno claimed that the irrationalist concept of the unconscious developed by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson rested not simply on a misreading of Kant but on a logic immanent to Kantian idealism. According to Adorno, Kant's insistence on the “spontaneity of consciousness” reflected a dogmatic presupposition that surpassed the bounds of possible experience and therefore could not be justified on the terms of Kant's own epistemology.Footnote 49 Proto-vitalist philosophers relied on a similar conception of spontaneity as “the independence of ‘life’ from constant transcendental factors.”Footnote 50 Advancing on his earlier criticisms of Husserl, Adorno suggested that both neo-Kantian theorists of human spontaneity and their vitalist critics radicalized the gap between sources of agency, whether conceived as individual human consciousness or as world-constituting “life,” and the objective world.
Adorno's criticisms both of Kantian “spontaneity” and of the irrationalist Lebensphilosophie that he traced back to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson already foreshadowed the materialist moment of his later thought, insofar as he stressed the irreducibility of empirical reality to consciousness or will. In Concept of the Unconscious, Adorno remained tethered to Cornelius's epistemology that held the “unity of consciousness” to be the basis for knowledge, rather in than embracing the “preponderance of the object” at the core of his negative dialectics. Yet Cornelius already provided resources for a critique of the subject–world dualism that Adorno located in both neo-Kantianism and irrationalist vitalism. In a crucial section of the text, Adorno traced the origins of this impasse, which he attributed to the entire post-Kantian tradition, to Kant's attempt to posit “consciousness” as an ontological unity, “hypostatized as an essence independent of experience.”Footnote 51 The problem could be specified by homing in on Kant's critique of rational psychology in the Critique of Pure Reason. In an extended passage on “The Paralogisms of Pure Reason,” Kant criticized proponents of rational psychology who sought to infer the substantiality and simplicity of the soul from the act of thinking, epitomized by Descartes's cogito ergo sum. Rational psychology, Kant argued, conflated the formal conditions of thought with empirical properties of the subject that could be given only through experience.Footnote 52 Yet according to Adorno, Kant stopped short of overturning the dualism between thought and embodied experience at the heart of rational psychology because Kant himself continued to interpret the thinking being of the Cartesian cogito as a pure “formal condition of knowledge.” For Adorno, by contrast, consciousness or thought was not simply a condition of knowledge but—following Cornelius—formed a unity constituted through the aggregation of empirical experiences. The “unity my consciousness,” Adorno argued, was the “unity of my experiences.” The “transcendental object” that enabled the possibility of knowledge was not a thinking being in the abstract but a consciousness formed through experience.Footnote 53 Cornelius's epistemology thereby enabled a “transcendental psychology” that grounded the transcendental conditions of knowledge in lived experience rather than in an inaccessible thing-in-itself. This psychology, Adorno believed, linked consciousness to material reality in a manner that Kant's critique of rational psychology foreclosed.Footnote 54
Adorno's effort to formulate a transcendental psychology on the basis of the connections among empirical experiences led him to reconceptualize the concept of the unconscious vis-à-vis its usage in post-Kantian philosophy. Rejecting Schopenhauer's notion of the unconscious as a metaphysical thing-in-itself, Adorno defined the unconscious in terms of mental processes that were logically necessary to explain the unity of consciousness:
The concept of the unconscious is described to us not as a specific class of experiences, but overall it finds its use where in the unity of our consciousness, facts confront us that neither are immediately given to us nor are clearly and distinctly remembered; but to which, on the grounds of the lawfulness of the unity of consciousness, existence must be granted, independent of our present perceptions.Footnote 55
Following Cornelius, Adorno held that immediate knowledge and mediated knowledge were linked through mental processes that translated sense-perceptions into conceptual structures. These processes were not perceptible by the conscious mind but accounted for the generation of consciously held knowledge.Footnote 56 The concept of the unconscious that Adorno developed on the basis of Cornelius's epistemology aimed to link the structuring unity of consciousness to a lived sequence of concrete experiences, thereby overcoming the Kantian antinomy through which he stated the problem. This definition contained significant epistemological implications regarding the boundary between consciousness and the unconscious. In particular, while the unconscious was a condition for the unity of consciousness, retaining the status of a transcendental object, it also remained immanent to and accessible through the operations of the conscious mind. As Adorno summarized his conclusion, the unconscious was not the “irresolvable opposite to consciousness” but “a particular class of facts of consciousness.”Footnote 57 By defining the unconscious in such a manner, Adorno eschewed the equation of the unconscious with a metaphysical thing-in-itself. At the same time, he challenged the tendency of Marburg neo-Kantianism to neglect the unconscious entirely.
Cornelius's epistemology provided Adorno with an opening to Freudian psychoanalysis, whose “empirical knowledge” of the unconscious, Adorno claimed, found its “grounding” in the theoretical model developed over the course of Concept of the Unconscious.Footnote 58 The particular phase of Freud's work that Adorno appropriated offers a telling indication of his aims. Although Freud had already introduced a tripartite model of id, ego, and superego in The Ego and the Id (1923), Adorno restricted himself to citing Freud's earlier Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, delivered at the University of Vienna in the winter of 1915–16. In this middle phase of his career—following his development of the theory of unconscious drives in the late 1890s but before his introduction of the tripartite model of the psyche—Freud proposed a division of the mind into permeable conscious, unconscious, and preconscious states, through which objects of knowledge could shift. The unconscious, in this model, was not a domain sealed off from the conscious mind but a logically necessary correlate to consciousness. As Freud explained in one of his papers on metapsychology that formed the basis for the Vienna lectures, one must presuppose the unconscious in order to account for the origins of “ideas that come into our head we do not know from where, and with intellectual conclusions arrived at we do not know how.” Unconscious states “have abundant points of contact with conscious mental processes,” and through the psychoanalytic method they “can be transformed into, or replaced by, conscious mental processes.”Footnote 59
Adorno's decision to discuss the Introductory Lectures speaks to the epistemological framework he shared with Freud's writings of the 1910s. Like Adorno, Freud called into question neo-Kantian assumptions about the spontaneity and transparency of human consciousness, while still aiming to map the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. Freud developed his theory of unconscious desires between 1895 and 1900 as a result of his turn away from the “orthodox neo-Kantianism” of his erstwhile mentor Ernst Brücke, for whom “the autonomy of the subject of rational thought and moral action was assumed but not placed under scrutiny.” Abandoning the naturalistic model of his earlier seduction theory, Freud's writings from The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) to the papers on metapsychology (1912–15) emphasized the psyche itself as a source of unconscious drives that shaped subjective perception and motivation.Footnote 60 At the same time, Freud maintained a strong therapeutic aim. Freud did not treat the unconscious as Schopenhauer's world-constituting will, a metaphysical entity whose operations lay beyond the control of the individual, but as a distinctive domain of the individual psyche.Footnote 61 According to Freud's writings of this middle period, the unconscious could be brought to light, at least in part, through the psychoanalytic method. Although Freud's post-1923 tripartite model of the psyche continued to posit that the ego could attain at least partial “mastery . . . over the world,” Freud now “made the decisive point that many of the mental operations of the ego, and of the super-ego as well, are inaccessible to direct introspection.”Footnote 62 Such a conclusion strayed farther than the Introductory Lectures from Adorno's effort to illuminate unconscious processes as a condition of conscious knowledge.
Analogies between their models of the mind formed the basis for Adorno's appropriation of Freudian psychoanalysis in Concept of the Unconscious. Freud's discussions of parapraxes and dreams in his Vienna lectures, which contended that the conscious phenomena were caused by unconscious desires and drives, provided Adorno with ample evidence to demonstrate the compatibility of psychoanalysis with Cornelius's “transcendental system.” Both hinged on the emergence of meaning in the laws relating consciousness to the unconscious. For Freud, Adorno pointed out, the “meaning” of a parapraxis was determined by the relationship between what one said and what one meant to say, while the manifest content of a dream could be interpreted only in relation to the latent memories or experiences by which the dream was caused.Footnote 63 Insofar as psychoanalysis established a precise relationship between conscious and unconscious events, it attested to the ordered lawfulness of the psyche. Freud's effort to map the lawful relations between conscious and unconscious domains, moreover, distinguished psychoanalysis from alternative psychiatric methods such as characterology, which did not systematically relate the unconscious to conscious processes.Footnote 64 This conclusion confirmed the principal arguments about the unconscious that Adorno established in the earlier portion of the text. The unconscious did not constitute an independent metaphysical realm; all psychological processes were connected in a coherent totality, such that the unconscious could be brought to consciousness.
THE DIALECTIC OF PSYCHE AND SOCIETY IN ADORNO'S CONCEPT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
The aims of Adorno's 1927 habilitation thesis were not confined to demonstrating the compatibility of psychoanalysis with Cornelius's transcendental system, however. Adorno's interpretation of Freud in Concept of the Unconscious also enabled him to elaborate a dialectical concept of the relationship between psyche and society that would continue to resonate with his later writings on psychoanalysis. Here, the distinctions between Cornelius and Freud proved significant. Despite its modifications to the dominant Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, Cornelius's epistemology remained rooted in a Kantian framework, concerned with elaborating the conditions for generating universally valid knowledge. Freud, notwithstanding his structurally similar model of interchange between consciousness and the unconscious, placed greater emphasis than Cornelius on the limits posed by the unconscious to the autonomy of the subject. As Freud argued in his Vienna lectures, although psychoanalysis empowered patients to understand the sources of their neuroses, the ego must still “content itself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind.”Footnote 65 Rather than being fully translatable to the conscious mind, the unconscious was, for Freud, only partially so. Adorno could draw on Freud's description of the unconscious to develop a concept of psychological determinism that eschewed both total freedom and total heteronomy—a central element of his mature configuration of the psycho-social dialectic.
Adorno raised the problem of determinism toward the conclusion of Concept of the Unconscious as a correlate to the epistemological questions about the conditions of knowledge discussed over the course of the work. If Marburg neo-Kantianism stressed the world-creating spontaneity of the subject and Husserl's phenomenology sought a “pure consciousness” unblemished by empirical reality, then Freud's theory of unconscious drives threatened to undermine the psychological autonomy of the subject entirely. Adorno posited a novel application of Cornelius's distinction between immediately and mediately given objects to address this dilemma. According to Adorno, “will” could not be reduced to a mere expression of pre-given laws or conditions. Rather, “phenomena of will” were “immediately given”; that is, although discrete sense-experiences attained “meaning” in relation to the “their lawful unity” as given symbolically to the mind, the irreducible encounter of the subject with the external world was not mediated by psychological laws. Coupled with Freud's description of psychoanalysis as a process of enlightenment, this argument enabled Adorno to reject a “psychological determinism” that “denied” acts of will altogether.Footnote 66 As Adorno noted, Freud chided his audience in Vienna for believing in an “illusion of psychical freedom.” Yet by this Freud meant
nothing other than the necessary and overall relatedness of our experiences to the whole of our conscious process, to the “unity of personal consciousness.” . . . The unconscious never functions in psychoanalysis as a final principle of clarification, which would be used as the hypothetical ground of a vague determinism, but psychoanalysis, like the transcendental method, grounds its knowledge in experiences and their relations, and stops before the fact of acts of will.Footnote 67
While emphasizing that psychoanalysis preserved the possibility of “acts of will,” Adorno also maintained that psychoanalysis could be understood as deterministic in one sense, “insofar as it does not treat any experience as contingent but strives to attain knowledge of the place of all experiences in the lawfulness of consciousness.”Footnote 68 Rather than denying subjective intentionality altogether, psychoanalysis established a procedure for relating meanings to broader psychological patterns. In this way, psychoanalysis could repudiate the irrationalist view of the unconscious as a source of unconstrained will, while still offering an account of the possibilities for subjective autonomy despite the power of the unconscious as a source of hidden motivations.
This reading recasts the most significant interpretive problem of Concept of the Unconscious, Adorno's seemingly abrupt shift to a materialist explanation of the unconscious in the concluding passages. In the final pages of the text, Adorno turned to consider the broader social and political implications of his investigation. Psychoanalysis, Adorno now argued, served as a bulwark against the “vitalist–teleological” understanding of the unconscious dominant among his contemporaries. The vitalist notion of the unconscious as an organic life force, irreducible to rational conceptualization, not only failed on epistemological grounds but also signaled an ideological misrepresentation of extant social and economic realities. Contemporary social life was dominated by an “economic tendency toward rationalization” and a “flood of economic competition.” By positing a metaphysical realm of the unconscious not subject to the rules of economic rationality, vitalist theories created an illusion of individual freedom while obscuring the “social relations” that in fact constrained the subject. At worst, vitalist philosophies of the unconscious served to justify current social circumstances, seeking to provide a “rest from economic pressure” through a spurious “glorification of the vital.”Footnote 69 Adorno concluded Concept of the Unconscious with a call to action implying that, in contrast to vitalist interpretations, the unconscious was in the final instance a product of social reality: “The discovery of decisive unconscious content presupposes a transformation of current social conditions, and in any case nothing is achieved with the discovery of unconscious facts so long as the state of social reality remains unchanged.”Footnote 70
The final passages of Concept of the Unconscious are often read as an announcement of Adorno's abandonment of Cornelius's neo-Kantianism and turn toward a Marxian critique of ideology.Footnote 71 Certainly, Adorno's abrupt invocation of social reality departed from the epistemological ambition that framed the bulk of the text, the development of a transcendental concept of the unconscious as a universal condition of knowledge. Yet an overemphasis on Adorno's embrace of Marxian historical materialism elides the manifold ways in which psychological analysis would continue to inform his mature social theory, as well as the extent to which Adorno's early encounter with Cornelius and Freud prefigured his later conception of the relationship between psyche and society. Building upon the revisions to neo-Kantianism he proposed in the earlier chapters of Concept of the Unconscious, Adorno's concluding social-theoretical argument reinforced, rather than departed from, the model of the mind he developed over the course of the text. Adorno's conclusion adumbrated a dialectical conception of the psycho-social relation, according to which both psychoanalysis and social theory pointed toward the limitations on human autonomy, but also the possibilities for freedom, under modern socioeconomic conditions. Earlier in the text, Adorno developed a model of the lawful interchange between consciousness and the unconscious, which he drew from both Cornelius and Freud, leading him to posit a concept of psychoanalytic determinism that mediated between absolute free will and absolute heteronomy. Adorno's concluding turn to social theory transposed this psychological argument onto the realm of society. Capitalist economic relations rooted in the principle of competition, as the overwhelming fact of modern social life, now appeared as a structure that both constrained and determined the possibilities for individual freedom.
At one level, Adorno's argument at the conclusion of the retracted habilitation thesis followed from Cornelius's revisions to the dominant Marburg model of neo-Kantianism. As Adorno acknowledged, his effort to ground the unconscious in material circumstances was consistent with Cornelius's philosophical system, which sought to relate the unity of consciousness back to the empirical realm of the immediately given: “After everything that we have said about the transcendental–idealist possibility of a lawful connection between the material and psychical world, it cannot surprise us if knowledge of unconscious facts as well as their constitution depends upon the material world, namely society.”Footnote 72 Adorno's concluding argument against irrationalist philosophies of the unconscious, moreover, advanced on his earlier critique of the concept of spontaneity, which was strongly influenced by Cornelius's emphasis on the structured relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. If Adorno's invocation of a “transformation of current social conditions” linked philosophy to politics in a manner absent from Cornelius's writings, Adorno fully concurred with his teacher that no concept of the unconscious could rely upon an appeal to a transcendent realm wholly independent of the “material world.”
The signal point on which Adorno departed from his teacher—and outlined a framework that he would develop in his later writings—was his description of the “material world” from which the unconscious emerged not as individual sense-experience but as social reality. With this move, Adorno turned from Cornelius's empiricist critique of Marburg neo-Kantianism to a Marxian critique, according to which the incoherencies of idealist philosophies were rooted in the historically produced social forms from which they emerged. Even here, however, Adorno did not propose a reductive concept of materialism, according to which psychology would appear epiphenomenal to social and economic causality. Rather, Adorno's emergent defense of materialism continued to emphasize the significance of the unconscious as a necessary correlate to consciously held knowledge and a mediator between individual subjectivity and sociohistorical processes. Adorno endorsed Freud's claim that certain psychological ailments could be traced back to social circumstances, while continuing to regard the unmasking of the unconscious as an emancipatory endeavor in itself.Footnote 73 In particular, through its “disenchantment of the unconscious,” psychoanalysis provided resources for a social and political critique of vitalist philosophies of the unconscious, paving the way toward a more adequate conception of the psycho-social relation:
Insofar as the unconscious is understood as a transcendental, general and necessary lawfulness, it loses its value-laden and normative character, it represents itself no longer as the prerogative of a higher man, but only as a condition of psychological coherence that is valid for all . . . Therefore, we appraise the significance of psychoanalysis so highly, because it serves the knowledge of the unconscious without burdening the unconscious with a metaphysical pathos it is not due . . . and is thus a sharp weapon against any vitalist metaphysics and the deification of mere dull, organic life.Footnote 74
Adorno's concluding critique of vitalism reinforced his earlier claim that the unconscious could not serve as a source of radical freedom, insofar as the unconscious was only a redescription of the psychological processes underlying the unity of the conscious mind. Rather than positing the unconscious as a source of emancipation from socioeconomic conditions, Adorno instead insisted upon the intertwining of structuring forces exerted by the psyche and by society, as well as the significance of psychoanalysis as a method for bringing both to light. The conclusion of Concept of the Unconscious thereby outlined a dialectical conception of the psycho-social relation that Adorno would further develop in his later writings.
PSYCHE AND SOCIETY IN THE LATER ADORNO
In the years following Cornelius's rejection of Concept of the Unconscious, Adorno moved beyond the constraints of Cornelius's epistemology to develop his distinctive philosophical voice. In particular, Adorno's works of the 1930s turned away from his earlier search for invariant conditions of knowledge that characterized his writings as a student of Cornelius. Instead, Adorno developed a method of “immanent critique” that criticized the ambition of post-Kantian idealism, and what Adorno viewed as idealism's heirs in contemporary phenomenology and existentialism, to posit a final reconciliation of subject and object. Adorno now aimed to expose the unreconciled elements of philosophical arguments as “expressions of deeper social and historical contradictions.”Footnote 75 In this effort, he built on the materialist moment of the conclusion of Concept of the Unconscious.
Adorno's philosophical maturation of the 1930s precluded his further development of key aspects of the model of the unconscious advanced in the retracted habilitation thesis. Already in a discussion with Horkheimer in November 1931, Adorno departed from Cornelius's notion of the “immediately given” to suggest that “the concept of givenness” must always be “understood in relation to the process of social production.”Footnote 76 Adorno elaborated on his critique of immediacy in a study of Husserl undertaken in exile at Oxford in the mid-1930s, published two decades later as Metacritique of Epistemology. According to Adorno's study, Husserl “models all mediated knowledge on immediacy” because Husserl's phenomenology could not accommodate forms of objectivity that exceeded the grasp of the subject.Footnote 77 While Adorno expanded upon the critique of Husserl's notion of “pure consciousness” that he articulated as early as his 1924 doctoral dissertation, Metacritique of Epistemology also marked a departure from the epistemology of Cornelius, who regarded “immediately given” sense-perceptions as the origin of all knowledge. Above all, Adorno came to believe that his earliest engagement with psychoanalysis was insufficiently attentive to the material grounds of psychological processes, including the relationship of the psyche to the physical human body. In a letter to his student Rolf Tiedemann several weeks before his death, Adorno recounted that the “major error” of Concept of the Unconscious was its purely epistemological treatment of Freud and neglect of “the materialist moment present in Freud from the beginning, which he described through the fundamental concept of organ pleasure.”Footnote 78
Notwithstanding these shifts, however, the dialectical model of the psycho-social relation developed in Concept of the Unconscious continued to inform Adorno's mature conception of the interplay between psychological and social forces in constituting the subject–object relation. Psychoanalysis, for Adorno, remained a hermeneutic that demonstrated the incomplete mastery of the subject over the surrounding world but also enabled the partial illumination of heteronomous forces that threatened to dissolve the subject entirely. By embedding the unconscious within a materialist analysis of the subject–object relation, as he did already at the conclusion of Concept of the Unconscious, Adorno did not succumb to a reductionist determinism but elaborated a more complex conception of freedom within the objective, material world. Psychoanalysis, now conceived as a mode of inquiry that broke down the barriers between consciousness and the material determinants of subjectivity, played a significant role in this effort. Much of Adorno's engagement with psychoanalysis took place in the context of the empirical studies of fascist personality types undertaken by the Institute for Social Research in American exile during the 1940s.Footnote 79 Three moments stand out for Adorno's postwar philosophical theorization of the psycho-social relationship, however: Adorno's critique of “revisionist” psychoanalysis, his subsequent systematic exposition on “Sociology and Psychology,” and his investigation of Kantian notions of subjectivity at the conclusion of Negative Dialectics.
If Adorno published little that directly addressed psychoanalysis in the two decades after Concept of the Unconscious, he remained intently engaged in debates about psychoanalysis among German émigré intellectuals during the 1930s and 1940s, which motivated him to situate his conception of the psycho-social relationship within a wider philosophy of nonidentity. Paramount among these was the ongoing controversy that emerged in the mid-1930s between Horkheimer and Adorno on the one hand and exponents of the neo-Freudian “revisionist” school of psychoanalysis on the other. Represented most prominently by the social psychologist and erstwhile institute member Erich Fromm and the Berlin-trained psychoanalyst Karen Horney, revisionism emphasized the cultural rather than biological roots of psychological processes. Fromm criticized Freud's theories of instinct and libido, instead emphasizing Freud's concept of Eros as a basis for resisting the absorption of the individual into mass society.Footnote 80 Western culture, according to Fromm, still possessed reservoirs of “spontaneity” to strengthen the individual against the repressive conditions of “bourgeois–capitalist society.”Footnote 81 Horney in turn rejected Freud's “biological determinism” to stress the environmental origins of neuroses, as well as the significance of psychoanalysis for reconciling “instinctual drives” with “the demands of reality.”Footnote 82
By the mid-1930s, Adorno emerged as an implacable critic of psychoanalytic revisionism. Adorno's increasingly close relationship with Horkheimer, who assumed the directorship of the Institute for Social Research in 1930, contributed to a growing breach with Fromm over the institute's stance on psychoanalysis, culminating in the termination of Fromm's employment at the institute in 1939.Footnote 83 Fromm's work, Adorno wrote to Horkheimer in 1936, was characterized by “a mixture of social democracy and anarchism, above all a severe lack of the dialectical concept.” Fromm criticized Freud merely for his lack of “benevolence,” failing to engage with the specificity of psychoanalytic concepts.Footnote 84 Adorno reacted even more vehemently against the writings of Karen Horney. According to an address Adorno delivered in April 1946 before the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society, Horney endorsed an all-too-hasty “adaptation” to extant social realities, making psychoanalysis “part of the industrialized mass culture . . . an instrument of appearance in which society and the individual, adaptation to the all-powerful reality and happiness coincide.”Footnote 85
In light of these polemics, recent scholarship has charged Adorno and his Frankfurt school colleagues with unfairly dismissing Fromm as a “vulgar popularizer” and neglecting the critical potential of Fromm's discussion of Eros.Footnote 86 If Adorno was an ungenerous reader of neo-Freudians, however, continuities in Adorno's dialectical conception of the psycho-social relation illuminate the political impetus of his critique. In particular, Adorno understood revisionism through the lens of his earlier arguments against vitalist theories of the unconscious. As in his 1927 habilitation thesis, Adorno remained wary of deployments of psychoanalysis that purported to negate a present state of unfreedom by appealing to emancipatory psychological forces. Rather than setting off social repression against a realm of psychological autonomy, Adorno's mature writings continued to hold that psychoanalysis and social theory unmasked mutually reinforcing constraints on the autonomy of the subject. In Concept of the Unconscious, Adorno criticized vitalist philosophies for describing the unconscious as a life force removed from social realities and even as a domain of unmitigated freedom.Footnote 87 Adorno's writings of the 1940s characterized revisionist psychoanalysis as the mirror image of the irrationalist model. Horney, according to Adorno, suggested that the subject achieved freedom through undialectical reconciliation with the object, and Fromm similarly failed to posit a dialectical subject–object relation. By contrast, Freud maintained a tension between society and the psyche in order to lay bare “the antagonistic character of social reality.” Freud failed to recognize that the split of psyche and society was the result of social processes of alienation and atomization, and in this sense he remained a “radical bourgeois thinker” bereft of Marxian insights into social transformation under capitalism. Yet Freud's theory of unconscious drives that resisted social control attested to the reality of the rupture between individual and society in contemporary life, a reality obscured by the revisionist impulse toward reconciliation.Footnote 88 As Adorno put the point succinctly in his San Francisco lecture, “Freud was right where he was wrong”—or more famously in his 1951 Minima Moralia, “In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.”Footnote 89
Adorno's most systematic mature treatment of the relationship between social and psychological analysis linked his dialectical model of the psycho-social relation to the critique of Kant's transcendental idealism that he had begun to chart as early as Concept of the Unconscious. Published in a Festschrift for Horkheimer's sixtieth birthday in 1955, Adorno's “Sociology and Psychology” argued that both Kantian idealism, and the reductionist logic of psychoanalytic revisionism, rested on an undialectical contrast between realms of freedom and unfreedom.Footnote 90 If the “conscious superego” of revisionist psychoanalysis sought to reconcile the individual to the expectations of society, then Kant developed his concept of freedom precisely in opposition to such a “psychology”: “The play of forces with which psychoanalysis is concerned belongs in [Kant's] system to the ‘phenomenal’ realm of causality.”Footnote 91 Kant's dualism between phenomena and noumena, however, merely displaced the problem of subjective freedom onto an immaterial realm of the transcendental thing-in-itself. Having long rejected an idealist conception of spontaneous subjectivity, Adorno could not accept Kant's claim that a noumenal realm of freedom lay outside the phenomenal realm of causality. As in Concept of the Unconscious, a critique of this Kantian dualism led Adorno to reject solutions to the problem of autonomy that looked toward the Kantian thing-in-itself, or a metaphysical “will,” for a moment of subjective self-determination.
At this juncture, confronting an analogous problem, Adorno extended the model of the psycho-social relation that he first elaborated in his 1927 habilitation thesis. Adorno again posited a homology between the heteronomous forces of society and the heteronomous forces within the unconscious: “A brutal, total, standardizing society arrests all differentiation, and to this end it exploits the primitive core of the unconscious. Both conspire to annihilate the mediating ego; the triumphant archaic impulses, the victory of id over ego, harmonize with the triumph of society over the individual.”Footnote 92 At the same time, as in his earliest work on the unconscious, Adorno employed psychoanalysis to explore the possibilities for individual freedom despite the multitude of forces, both social and psychological, seeking to dominate the subject. The effort to locate a locus of subjective autonomy amidst manifold sources of repression motivated Adorno's insistence on “the need for differentiation” within the psyche in the final portion of the essay. A “psychoanalytic logic” that “cancel[ed] out the differentiation synonymous with the emergence of ego,” Adorno argued, became “the ally of regression, its own worst enemy.” By contrast, Freud's emphasis on the differentiation of the psyche, which contemporary psychoanalysis threatened to forget, provided resources for resisting the logic of reconciliation. The ego, Adorno concluded, “has separated off from the pure immediacy of the instinctual impulses” and could serve as a bastion of autonomy and rationality against the drives of the id. “The ego . . . is both so much instinct and something else.”Footnote 93 While refusing to explicate the content of this “something else,” Adorno's formula implied that psychoanalysis pointed toward the possibility for the individual's exercise of a degree of autonomy at the interstices of deterministic conditions.
With his 1966 magnum opus Negative Dialectics, the final major work published in his lifetime, Adorno returned to the problem of the subject–object relationship from the perspective of the critique of identity thinking that he had developed in the foregoing decades. Whereas Adorno's earliest philosophical writings posited the unity of subjective consciousness as a transcendental condition of knowledge, his mature conception of negative dialectics fastened upon the failure of the subject to ever fully grasp the objective world. Through his penultimate work, however, Freud continued to serve as an important interlocutor for Adorno's conceptualization of the relationship between consciousness and society. As in his prior writings, Adorno drew on Freudian psychoanalysis to counter idealist conceptions of the world-constituting subject. At the same time, Adorno now suggested that the critique of idealist notions of subjectivity afforded by psychoanalysis pointed toward the possibility for transcendence within the material world. Adorno's seemingly paradoxical effort to unite materialism and metaphysics was rooted in the conviction that only the promise of transcendence contained in metaphysical speculation opened the possibility of thinking beyond extant social and cultural conditions. At the same time, Adorno remained a staunch critic of the idealist assumptions that grounded traditional concepts of metaphysics in Western philosophy, in particular the privileging of an ahistorical subject that produces “invariant” categories of knowledge prior to experience.Footnote 94
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno invoked the categories of Freudian psychoanalysis to defend such a metaphysics beyond idealism. The closing passages of the text undertook a trenchant critique of Kant's epistemology, drawing together the concerns about the separation of subject and object, consciousness and material reality, that had preoccupied Adorno since his earliest engagement with Weimar neo-Kantianism. Kant's effort to banish metaphysics from philosophical inquiry, Adorno now suggested, facilitated the rise of modern scientific positivism and a bourgeois society governed by the monolithic logic of the commodity. Kant's philosophy heralded not the arrival of Enlightenment and autonomous subjectivity but the individual's increasing subordination to anonymous social forces.Footnote 95 In order to overcome the impasses of Kantian philosophy, Adorno pointed toward the possibility of a redemptive metaphysics, one that emerged not through the absolute Spirit of idealist philosophy but negatively, through a moment of “transcendental objectivity” at which the failure of idealist ambitions to grasp the totality of objective reality revealed itself.Footnote 96 Psychoanalysis offered tools for grasping the alternative subject–object relation that would ground such a metaphysics. Commenting on the antimetaphysical prejudice set in motion by Kantian philosophy, Adorno wrote, “The indifference of the consciousness towards metaphysical questions, which are by no means resolved through satisfaction in this world, is by no means a matter of indifference to metaphysics itself. Hidden therein is a horror, which, if human beings did not repress it, would take their breath away.”Footnote 97 By banishing metaphysical questions from the realm of legitimate philosophy, then, Kant contributed to the self-alienation of the modern epoch. Under such conditions, only a renewed theorization of metaphysics could prefigure the human freedom that would emerge beyond the totalizing pressure toward conformity under contemporary society. Invoking the language of psychoanalysis, Adorno concluded that
the possibility of metaphysical experience is the sibling of that of freedom, and only the developed subject, which has torn the bonds praised as holy, is capable of it. The socially sanctioned, dull-witted intuition of allegedly blissful times is by contrast related to the naive positivistic belief in facts. The ego must be historically strengthened in order to conceive of the idea of that which is more than existent, beyond the immediacy of the reality principle.Footnote 98
Adorno's use of psychoanalytic categories to theorize the possibility for a critical subjectivity at the conclusion of Negative Dialectics reflected the importance he attached to the differentiation of the psyche as a bulwark against the premature reconciliation of psyche and society. If the “objective potential” of bourgeois society was to “choose total destruction . . . rather than bringing itself to reflections which might threaten its foundations,” then only the critical self-reflection of subjects could serve as a prerequisite to social transformation.Footnote 99 The reality principle, which encouraged the control of the id by the ego and superego in order to fulfill the behavioral expectations of the surrounding society, established the independence of the ego from unconscious drives. At the same time, the strengthened ego had not only to control the desires of the id but also to move beyond the reality principle, in order gain a genuinely critical stance on that society. Consistent with the logic of Negative Dialectics, Adorno held that any possibility of transcendence would not rely on an escapist leap out of society but could be achieved only through reflection on the limits of identity and reconciliation. Adorno therefore appealed not to the revisionist vision of the reconciliation of the ego with the objective world—which undialectically reflected contemporary realities—but to Freud's notion of psychoanalysis as a buffering force that preserved the individual's critical capacities without purporting to offer unmediated emancipation from repressive social forces. Psyche and society, rather than being reconciled, remained in dialectical tension.
CONCLUSION
Scholarship on the place of psychoanalysis in critical social theory has criticized Adorno for his hesitancy to bring together the two modes of inquiry in the service of human emancipation. Adorno's hostility toward psychoanalytic concepts of sublimation and identification, according to this line of argument, limited his vision of the possibility for advancing human freedom amidst extant social conditions.Footnote 100 The psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook has suggested that for Adorno, only the “advanced work of art” could “provide a glimpse of the mode of social and psychic integration that would obtain in an emancipated society” beyond prevailing forms of reification.Footnote 101 The political theorist Amy Buzby has pointed toward Fromm's conception of Eros—a psychological force that enables the individual to escape “primary ties” in order to achieve “mature bonds based on equality, love, and solidarity”—as an alternative basis for theorizing the individual's relation to society, absent from dominant Frankfurt school uses of psychoanalysis.Footnote 102 Adjudicating in debates over the plausibility of Adorno's view of psychoanalysis is beyond the scope of this essay. But an analysis of the historical development of Adorno's appeals to Freud and the language of psychoanalysis clarifies his hesitancy toward outlining a positive vision of psycho-social reconciliation. In Fromm's psychoanalytic revisionism, Adorno found an undialectical counterposing of psychological autonomy and sociological heteronomy, mirroring his critique of post-Kantian philosophies of the unconscious in his 1927 habilitation thesis.
Moreover, in light of his writings on psychoanalysis, Adorno cannot be considered a sociological determinist. Rather, it was precisely the unreconciled relation between psyche and society, to which Freudian psychoanalysis gave voice, that opened the possibility for a critical subjectivity even amidst the hegemony of ideological and social repression. In Adorno's earliest work, still framed around a search for the transcendental conditions of knowledge, the “unity of consciousness” that formed the basis of all knowledge did not preclude subjective “acts of will.” Adorno's mature writings instead emphasized the social determinants of consciousness. Even here, however, Adorno drew on psychoanalysis to propose that the ego could gain a critical stance on the surrounding society when it remained differentiated from other forces within the psyche. In neither case did Adorno provide for the possibility of radically undetermined action in a realm outside social and psychological structures. Yet Adorno viewed as the ultimate task of philosophy, as he wrote in Minima Moralia, to “contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.”Footnote 103 Psychoanalysis remained for Adorno one lodestar in a philosophical constellation that enabled a critical stance on extant social realities.Footnote 104
