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‘This remarkably well-curated book offers us tremendous insight into the
horrors of our planet, ranging from authoritarianism and anti-Semitism
to racism and colonialism. The esteemed editors and contributors have
provided us with much depth-psychological wisdom and have reminded
us of the importance of studying the core concepts of critical theory and
psychoanalysis. Every politician should read this text!’
Professor Brett Kahr, Senior Fellow, Tavistock Institute
of Medical Psychology, London, and Honorary
Director of Research, Freud Museum, London

‘Comprised of scintillatingly eloquent essays, this volume ranges from

philosophically nuanced accounts of the place of psychoanalysis within
Critical Theory, penetrating discussions of the concept of transgenerational
transmission of trauma and illuminating analyses of the growing propensity
towards authoritarianism in certain quarters of the Left, to critical, yet
nuanced and judicious, encounters with contemporary critical race theory,
whiteness studies, and much more besides. It’s essential reading for anyone
seriously interested in understanding and appreciating the rich and enduring
theoretical legacy of the sophisticated synthesis of Marx and Freud forged
by members of the Frankfurt School in the early decades of the previous
century, after the moment to “realize philosophy” was missed.’
Samir Gandesha, Professor of Humanities and Director
of the Institute for the Humanities, Simon Fraser
University, Vancouver, Canada

‘The papers collected in Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis demonstrate

the continuing relevance of the Frankfurt School by applying their synthesis
of Marxism and psychoanalysis to show the richness of their confluence;
and how key thinkers in the tradition appropriated psychoanalysis in
their critical social theory, engagement with Freud, and the social and
political issues of the day. These original papers exhibit the vibrancy and
timeliness of the Frankfurt School’s appropriation of Freud to key issues
of contemporary psychoanalytic and social theory.’
Douglas Kellner, Distinguished Research
Professor of Education, UCLA
Critical Theory and
Psychoanalysis

Critical theory has traditionally been interested in engaging classical

psychoanalysis rather than addressing postclassical thought. For the first
time, this volume brings critical theory into proper dialogue with modern
developments in the psychoanalytic movement and covers a broad range
of topics in contemporary society that revisit the Frankfurt School and its
contributions to psychoanalytic social critique.
Theoretical, clinical, and applied investigations in social pathology are
explored in relation to new directions in critical cultural discourse from
a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. In this volume, internationally
acclaimed social political theorists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, cultural
critics, and scholars of humanities examine contemporary issues in social
critique that address a myriad of topics.
Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis will be of interest to philosophers,
psychoanalysts, political scientists, cultural theorists, sociologists,
psychologists, religious studies, academe, and those generally interested
in the humanities and social sciences.

Jon Mills, PsyD, PhD, ABPP, is a Canadian philosopher and psychoanalyst.

He is an honorary professor, Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic
Studies, University of Essex, UK, and is on faculty in the postgraduate
programs in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, Adelphi University, and
the New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, USA.

Daniel Burston, PhD, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at

Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and the author of numerous books and
journal articles on psychoanalysis and critical theory. His most recent
book is titled Anti-Semitism and Analytical Psychology: Jung, Politics and
Culture (Routledge, 2021).
Philosophy & Psychoanalysis Book Series
Series Editor
Jon Mills

Philosophy & Psychoanalysis is dedicated to current developments and

cutting-edge research in the philosophical sciences, phenomenology, her-
meneutics, existentialism, logic, semiotics, cultural studies, social criti-
cism, and the humanities that engage and enrich psychoanalytic thought
through philosophical rigor. With the philosophical turn in psychoanalysis
comes a new era of theoretical research that revisits past paradigms while
invigorating new approaches to theoretical, historical, contemporary, and
applied psychoanalysis. No subject or discipline is immune from psycho-
analytic reflection within a philosophical context including psychology,
sociology, anthropology, politics, the arts, religion, science, culture, phys-
ics, and the nature of morality. Philosophical approaches to psychoanalysis
may stimulate new areas of knowledge that have conceptual and applied
value beyond the consulting room reflective of greater society at large. In
the spirit of pluralism, Philosophy & Psychoanalysis is open to any theo-
retical school in philosophy and psychoanalysis that offers novel, schol-
arly, and important insights in the way we come to understand our world.

Titles in this series:

The Emergent Container in Psychoanalysis

Experiencing Absence and Future
Ana Martinez Acobi

Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis

From the Frankfurt School to Contemporary Critique
Edited by Jon Mills and Daniel Burston

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Philosophy-and-Psychoanalysis/book-series/PHILPSY
Critical Theory and
Psychoanalysis

From the Frankfurt School

to Contemporary Critique

Edited by Jon Mills and

Daniel Burston
Designed cover image: “Leave of Absence” State of the Arts
© Bob Omar Tunnoch, bobomartunnoch.com
First published 2023
by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
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Names: Mills, Jon, 1964– editor. | Burston, Daniel, 1954– editor.
Title: Critical theory and psychoanalysis : from the Frankfurt
school to contemporary critique / edited by Jon Mills and
Daniel Burston.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. |
Series: Philosophy and psychoanalysis | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022028685 | ISBN 9781032104287 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781032104270 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003215301 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences and psychoanalysis. | Critical
theory.
Classification: LCC BF175.4.S65 .C75 2023 |
DDC 150.19/5—dc23/eng/20220824
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028685

ISBN: 978-1-032-10428-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-10427-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-21530-1 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003215301
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Contents

About the Contributors ix

Preface xiii
DANIEL BURSTON

1 Psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School 1

JOEL WHITEBOOK

2 Communism and Ambivalence: Freud, Marxism,

and Aggression 26
ADRIAN JOHNSTON

3 Recapitulation and the Vicissitudes of Progress,

From Freud to the Frankfurt School: “The Germ
of the Regression” 66
FRANK PITTENGER

4 Analytical Psychology and the Dialectic of Enlightenment 95

PAUL BISHOP

5 Dysrecognition and Pathos 115

JON MILLS

6 Critical Theory and Anti-Semitism: Implications

for Politics, Education, and Psychoanalysis 131
BENJAMIN B. STROSBERG

7 Critical Theory, Left-Wing Authoritarianism,

and Anti-Semitism 158
DANIEL BURSTON
viii Contents

8 The Evolutionary Anthropology of Erich Fromm:

The Frankfurt School, Second Nature, and the Existential
Crisis of Consciousness 185
GARY CLARK

9 Colonizing the American Psyche: Virtue and the Problem

of Consumer Capitalism 211
JOHN R. WHITE

10 No Sex Without Coffee: The One Nature and Its

Superstructures: Elements of Freudian Materialism 231
ROBERT PFALLER

11 Shrinking Vistas: Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis,

and the Postmodern Mire 247
KURT JACOBSEN

12 Mapping the White Unconscious: Critical Race Theory,

Whiteness Studies, and Psychoanalysis 264
DANIEL BURSTON

13 Critical Theory and Contemporary Psychoanalysis 287

JON MILLS

Index 303
About the Contributors

Paul Bishop is William Jacks Chair of Modern Languages at the Univer-

sity of Glasgow and has published on various topics relating to analytical
psychology and intellectual history. His most recent publications include
Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life (Routledge, 2019), and he is
currently co-editing with Leslie Gardner and Terence Dawson a volume
on the archaic and the abyss for Routledge.

Daniel Burston has a PhD in social and political thought and a PhD in
psychology, both from York University in Toronto. He is Associate Pro-
fessor of Psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and the author
of numerous books and journal articles on psychoanalysis and critical
theory, ranging from The Legacy of Erich Fromm (Harvard University
Press, 1991) to Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Postmodern University
(Palgrave McMillan, 2020). His most recent book is titled Anti-Semitism
and Analytical Psychology: Jung, Politics and Culture (Routledge, 2021).
Burston is a member of Cheiron – the International Society for the His-
tory of the Behavioral and Social Sciences, and a lifetime supporter of the
Nexus Institute.

Gary Clark, PhD, is an Australian writer and researcher. He is currently

a visiting research fellow in the University of Adelaide Medical School.
His research focus is in paleoanthropology and the evolution of music,
language, and human ritual life. He has a particular interest in situating
Jungian psychology in the context of current debates in evolutionary
neuroscience.

Kurt Jacobsen, PhD, is co-editor of the UK-based journal Free Asso-

ciations and a research associate in the Political Science Department at
the University of Chicago. He is author or editor of 11 books, including
x About the Contributors

Freud’s Foes: Psychoanalysis, Science and Resistance; International Pol-

itics and Inner Worlds: Masks of Reason under Scrutiny; Pacification and
Its Discontents; and the forthcoming coedited (with R. D. Hinshelwood),
Psychoanalysis, Science and Power: Essays in Honour of Robert Maxwell
Young. He also is a regular contributor to the international press and is an
award-winning documentary filmmaker.

Adrian Johnston, PhD, is Distinguished Professor in the Department

of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and a
faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta. He
is the author of Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the
Drive (2005), Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of
Subjectivity (2008), Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The
Cadence of Change (2009), and Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism,
Volume One: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (2013),
all published by Northwestern University Press. He also is the author of
Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contempo-
rary Thinkers (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). He is the co-author,
with Catherine Malabou, of Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psycho-
analysis, and Neuroscience (Columbia University Press, 2013). His most
recent books are Irrepressible Truth: On Lacan’s “The Freudian Thing”
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek, and
Dialectical Materialism (Columbia University Press, 2018); and Prole-
gomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume Two: A Weak Nature Alone
(Northwestern University Press, 2019). With Todd McGowan and Slavoj
Žižek, he is a co-editor of the book series Diaeresis at Northwestern Uni-
versity Press.

Jon Mills, PsyD, PhD, ABPP, is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, and retired

clinical psychologist. He is Honorary Professor, Department of Psycho-
social and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex, Colchester, UK;
Faculty member in the Postgraduate Programs in Psychoanalysis and Psy-
chotherapy, Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University,
NY, and the New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, CA; and is Emeri-
tus Professor of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, Adler Graduate Profes-
sional School, Toronto, Canada. Recipient of numerous awards for his
scholarship, including four Gradiva Awards, he is the author and/or editor
of over 30 books in psychoanalysis, philosophy, psychology, and cultural
 About the Contributors xi

studies, including most recently Psyche, Culture, World: Excursions in

Existentialism and Psychoanalytic Philosophy. In 2015 he was given the
Otto Weininger Memorial Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Cana-
dian Psychological Association.

Robert Pfaller is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Art and

Industrial Design in Linz, Austria. Founding member of the Viennese
psychoanalytic research group “stuzzicadenti,” he received the Paul
Watzlawick Ring of Honor in 2020, awarded by the Viennese Medical
Chamber (Ärztekammer Wien), and “The Missing Link” award by Psy-
choanalytisches Seminar Zurich, Switzerland, in 2007. His many works
include Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment (Edinburgh
University Press, 2017) and The Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions
without Owners (Verso, 2014), which was awarded the American Board
and Academy of Psychoanalysis Book Prize for best book in 2015.

Frank Pittenger, PhD, is a clinical psychologist in private practice and

Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennes-
see. He received his PhD in clinical psychology from Duquesne Univer-
sity and holds degrees in religious studies from Florida State University
and Haverford College. His doctoral thesis, “The Anxiety of Atavism,”
addressed the history and afterlife of biogenetic recapitulationism within
psychoanalysis and evolutionary psychology. His contribution to this vol-
ume is part of a broader reappraisal of the place of the biogenetic law
within psychoanalysis and social theory.

Benjamin B. Strosberg is a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at

Duquesne University. His research focuses on the continued relevance
of Frankfurt School Critical Theory for psychology and psychoanalysis.
He has published on topics such as teletherapy, phenomenology, anti-
Semitism, racism, and Lacanian theory.

John R. White, PhD, Jungian Diplomate, is a practicing Jungian psycho-

analyst and licensed mental health counselor. His original training was
in philosophy. He completed his doctorate in philosophy at the Interna-
tional Academy of Philosophy and subsequently taught philosophy at
three different institutions over the span of 20 years. His publications are
mainly in continental philosophy, ethics, environmental philosophy, and
xii About the Contributors

the philosophy of psychoanalysis. He is currently a scholar-in-residence

at the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center, Duquesne University,
Pittsburgh, PA. He obtained his masters in mental health counseling and
his diploma as a Jungian psychoanalyst from the Inter-Regional Society
of Jungian Analysts. He is a member of the Pittsburgh Society of Jun-
gian Analysts and of the Board of Directors of the Pittsburgh Psychoana-
lytic Center. He is the author of Adaptation and Clinical Practice: Robert
Langs’ Adaptive Psychotherapy in the Light of Analytical Psychology.

Joel Whitebook received his PhD in philosophy from the New School
for Social Research, a PhD in clinical psychology from the City Univer-
sity of New York (CUNY), and received his psychoanalytic training at the
New York Freudian Society. He has been in private practice for decades
and has taught at the New School, Columbia University, as well as in a
number of clinical settings. He is currently on the faculty of Columbia’s
Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is the former direc-
tor of its Psychoanalytic Studies Program. His books include Perversion
and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory and Freud: An
Intellectual Biography.
Preface

We live in dangerous times. Almost everywhere we look, climate change,

income inequality, corruption, and the erosion of democratic norms and
institutions undermine the stability of civil society. As a result, xenopho-
bia, nativism, and hostility to immigrants have grown alarmingly, propel-
ling far-right nationalist and populist governments to power in Russia,
India, the United States, Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Italy, Turkey, the Phil-
ippines, and elsewhere. Moreover, parties that embrace and espouse hos-
tile attitudes to “outsiders” are steadily gaining popularity, posing serious
electoral challenges to ruling parties and governing coalitions throughout
Europe and Scandinavia.
Meanwhile, income inequality jeopardizes the living standards and
future prospects of the middle and working classes, diminishing trust in
mainstream politicians and fueling the proliferation of wild conspiracy
theories and extremism on both sides of the political spectrum. In many
parts of the world, rising sea levels, prolonged droughts, and catastrophic
weather events are causing rising prices and chronic shortages of food,
water, and fuel. These conditions are already feeding into violent conflicts
in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, sending large waves
of refugees to Europe and the United States seeking asylum. These sources
of global anxiety and uncertainty are only compounded by North Korea’s
development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, China’s support for
Russia and its menacing stance toward Taiwan and Australia, ongoing tur-
moil in Israel/Palestine, and Iran’s proxy wars with its Sunni neighbors.
Worse yet, Vladimir Putin’s brutal and senseless invasion of Ukraine on
February 24, 2022, provoked what promises to be a new nuclear arms
race, a seismic shift in international defense postures and policies, all con-
jured up by the specter of yet another world war.
xiv Preface

In the midst of these burgeoning crises, the Far Right exploits the sense
of victimization felt by middle and working class people by providing
them with scapegoats who are depicted as dangerous or expendable, rather
than as vulnerable human beings who are entitled to dignity and human
rights. Anti-Semitism is a prominent feature of many of these movements,
which often use hostility to immigrants and minorities as their primary
recruiting tool. Many have scripted George Soros, a Jewish billionaire, in
the role of a demonic Jewish adversary who is using his wealth to flood
their respective countries with immigrants and criminals. He is accused of
undermining national sovereignty and traditional values through his sup-
port of liberal civic organizations. This idea is expressed repeatedly in the
official media in Victor Orban’s Hungary. And we heard a variation on the
same message (in abbreviated form) among the neo-Nazis who marched in
the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, chanting, “The
Jews will not replace us!”
The Far Left’s narrative about Jews is quite different, of course. In the
United States, many left-wing activists now insist that Jews enjoy all the
perks of White privilege and therefore “uphold” rather than oppose White
supremacy, the very thing Far Right activists insist Jewish people are
secretly intent on destroying. Despite the recent uptick in anti-Semitism
in communities of color, and the enduring influence of Louis Farrakhan,
many activists still claim that anti-Semitism is just a “White on White”
issue that has nothing to do with White supremacy or systemic racism
and is therefore not worthy of their attention or concern. Unlike right-
wing extremists, who abhor multiculturalism and promote Islamophobia,
the Far Left espouses a strange brand of multiculturalism that typically
excludes and devalues Jewish experience but often embraces Islamist
movements and organizations in what it imagines is a progressive, anti-
imperialist coalition.
As democracy falters and authoritarianism spreads, some aspects of our
current crises resemble the situation in the years preceding WWII. For
example, racism and conspiracy theories abound, and Jewish people and
institutions are now targeted by mobs and vigilantes much as they were
in the 1930s across Europe and the United States, when Father Charles
Coughlin and industrialist Henry Ford spread their anti-Semitic venom
all across this continent. However, as illuminating and disturbing as these
parallels may be, it is important to remember that Jews are merely the pro-
verbial canaries in the coal mine, that the scale and severity of the chaos
 Preface xv

already unfolding in our backyards will soon engulf everybody and have
a far more damaging impact on our planet than the two world wars that
ravaged the twentieth century.
Strange as it sounds, in the midst of these worrisome developments,
many conservative pundits nowadays blame critical theory for our current
societal malaise and, more specifically, for spawning something called
“cultural Marxism,” which ostensibly threatens our cultural cohesion. But
what is cultural Marxism, actually? A term coined by the Norwegian mass
murderer Anders Breivik, adopted by White supremacist Kevin MacDon-
ald and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (Braune, 2019). Despite its inaus-
picious derivation, the term “cultural Marxism” shows up with surprising
regularity in the podcasts and publications of more mainstream media
personalities like Christopher Rufo and Jordan Peterson, among others,
who repeat the popular mantra that proclaims that Marxism begat criti-
cal theory, which begat postmodernism, which (supposedly) begat cultural
Marxism.
The problem with this narrative is that it is simply not true. It is a straw
man, which only seems plausible if you cherry-pick and decontextualize
ideas from these various schools of thought, something Christopher Rufo is
particularly skilled at doing. Unfortunately, this popular mythology about
critical theory and cultural Marxism encourages a kind of smug, know-it-
all attitude that masks intellectual laziness and complacency among many
contemporary conservatives, who crafted this oversimplified narrative to
assure themselves that they are right to mistrust and dismiss all critical
social theory. There is also something ahistorical and conspiratorial about
this line of thinking, as if the radical thinkers of today are simply putting
old wine into new bottles, instead of putting forward genuinely new ideas
of their own in response to new social and political realities. In truth, how-
ever, there are profound differences between Marxism and critical theory,
and between critical theory and postmodernism. In order to grasp them
clearly, one has to understand the social and historical contexts in which
these movements arose.
To put these reflections in context, please consider the following. In
1794, Nicholas de Condorcet (1743–1794) wrote a book titled Sketch for
a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. Condorcet was
a leading figure in the French Enlightenment who depicted progress as a
slow but inexorable process that would eventually dispel ignorance and
superstition through the development of science and confer previously
xvi Preface

undreamed-of moral and material benefits on all humankind, ending pov-

erty, abolishing slavery, and granting women full legal and political equal-
ity with men, etc.
At its inception, Marxism was really a radical extension of the French
Enlightenment project, predicated on a belief in progress and a program
for universal human emancipation. Marx shared the Enlightenment’s
belief in equality but stipulated that progress is not a simple, easy, or lin-
ear process. On the contrary, it is marked by oppression and exploitation,
class conflict, and class struggle. He called his analysis of capitalism and
his program for the transformation of society historical materialism and
believed that the working class had a special role to play in transforming
society and would soon acquire “class consciousness,” working together
across national boundaries to inaugurate a classless society, promoting the
emancipation of all humanity and not just the bourgeoisie.
Unfortunately, this never happened. On the contrary, when World War
I broke out, the working classes in England, France, Germany, and Austria
rallied to the defense of their respective countries, participating actively in
what V. I. Lenin condemned as an imperialistic war designed to benefit the
ruling class alone. Because capitalist modes and methods of production
had not yet penetrated the vast Russian Empire, Russia lacked an indus-
trial proletariat, and as a result, the Russian revolution of 1917 resulted
from a collaboration between alienated members the intelligentsia (mostly
professionals, like Lenin himself) and the Russian peasantry. Once the
Bolsheviks seized power, Russia withdrew from the conflict, and Lenin
swiftly banished or killed the Social Democrats (or Mensheviks) who had
helped him and his followers overthrow the Czar.
Not surprisingly, the fact that Russia underwent a revolution despite
the absence of a strong working class obligated Lenin to rework certain
features of Marxist theory. One upshot was the theory of revolutionary
vanguardism, which stipulated that the Communist Party represents the
interests of the working class and, in the interests of creating a centralized
and unified movement, must adopt an organizational structure known as
democratic centralism. Unfortunately, despite its name, democratic cen-
tralism stifled dissent within its own ranks, and after the death of Lenin
in January of 1924, a power struggle ensued between the followers of
Leon Trotsky and those of Joseph Stalin. Stalin won and modified Marx’s
ideas and program even more profoundly than Lenin had, creating an ide-
ology known as “dialectical materialism” by its proponents and “vulgar
 Preface xvii

Marxism” by its critics, an ideology that was used to justify a bloody reign
of terror.
Then, in 1929, the stock market crashed – the biggest crisis of capitalism
to that point – and contrary to expectation among Western Marxists, the
European proletariat did not mobilize on cue to mount the revolution that
Marx had predicted should eventually ensue. Indeed, critical theory arose
primarily as a response to the failure of Marx’s predictions at this histori-
cal juncture. Granted, the first director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social
Research was an orthodox Marxist. But his successor, Max Horkheimer,
who took over in 1930, was not. Horkheimer and associates rejected revo-
lutionary vanguardism and claimed that the European and British working
class were failing in their historic mission because of social psychologi-
cal processes that orthodox Marxism was not equipped to elucidate or
address. So with the help of Erich Fromm, the only analyst working among
the institute’s faculty, Horkheimer and associates attempted to develop a
Marx-Freud synthesis that would account for the failure of the working
class to lead the transition to a classless society.
In addition to integrating psychoanalytic perspectives on social psychol-
ogy, critical theorists deviated from orthodox Marxism by rejecting eco-
nomic determinism and promoting interdisciplinarity, integrating ideas and
insights from a wide range of non-Marxist theorists in sociology, anthropol-
ogy, philosophy, and literature. In the process, as Perry Anderson observed,
their emphasis shifted away from the pragmatics and exigencies of class
struggle toward a critique of social factors that Marx had deemed to be
“superstructural,” notably, literature, the arts, radio and cinema, popular
music, and propaganda, which they deemed to be more consequential than
Marx had ever imagined in perpetuating the status quo (Anderson, 1983).
Finally, remember that Marx shared the Enlightenment’s enthusiasm for
technological innovation, nowadays called technophilia. He believed that
new technologies were intrinsically liberating and should be welcomed
because they dramatically altered social conditions and power relations
between classes of people, hastening the crisis of capitalism that would
set the stage for the proletariat to seize the means of production from the
capitalist class and effect a more equitable distribution of goods, services,
and opportunities for education and personal self-expression.
Though they still clung to Enlightenment ideals, Horkheimer and
Adorno et al. had witnessed the galloping Nazification of Germany at close
quarters before they fled Germany in 1935. As a result, they were quite
xviii Preface

critical of the concept of progress, arguing that scientific and technologi-

cal progress often masked and facilitated a collective regression to barba-
rism, culminating in the Holocaust (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947). This
led to a rather gloomy philosophy of history, very unlike Marx’s, which
anticipated a “happy ending” (or a new beginning) for humankind after
the revolution. Indeed, critical theory’s attitude toward the Enlightenment
could only be described as profoundly ambivalent, sharing the Enlighten-
ment’s aspirations for human emancipation and equality but lacking any
faith in the ability of relentless scientific and technological innovation to
bring it all about.
That being so, it is probably no coincidence that in 1930 – one year
after the stock market crash and the same year Horkheimer became direc-
tor of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research – Sigmund Freud pub-
lished Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud believed in progress but
stipulated that it always comes with a hefty price tag attached. According
to Freud, progress is only achieved through the domestication and sec-
ondary transformation of our instinctual drives, creating a good deal of
sexual privation and anguish, rendering everyone “an enemy of civiliza-
tion” in the depths of their unconscious. He also noted that scientific and
technological progress have given us godlike powers undreamed of by
our ancestors, but that the very same discoveries that confer power over
nature can be harnessed in the service of our innate aggression. Indeed,
he warned that unless or until we learn to harness or deflect our instinc-
tive aggression, we are menaced by the prospect of technologically medi-
ated self-extinction in the not-too-distant future. Nowadays, of course,
the prospect of species-wide extinction is far more than a theoretical pos-
sibility. On the contrary, it is a specter that haunts each and every human
being alive today, and few informed observers would now dispute that
Freud’s words in 1930 were somewhat prophetic. But in 1930, orthodox
Marxists were scandalized that the Frankfurt School incorporated Freud-
ian ideas and perspectives into their work, not least because Freud was a
fierce critic of the Soviet Union.
Unlike critical theory, which was born in Weimar, postmodernism arose
in response to the mass protests that roiled France, and above all Paris,
in May of 1968. Following in the wake of yet another failed revolution,
it wrestled with the theoretical problems and possibilities bequeathed to
French intellectuals by the structuralist movement initiated earlier that
decade by Claude Levi-Strauss (Anderson, 1983). Furthermore, unlike
 Preface xix

critical theory, which has its roots in Marx and Freud, postmodernism
borrows extensively from anti-Enlightenment thinkers like Friedrich
Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. This was an odd and unprecedented
move for Left-leaning intellectuals, because Nietzsche and Heidegger had
nothing but contempt for the masses and no interest whatsoever in pro-
moting a program of universal human emancipation. Indeed, Nietzsche
argued forcefully for the continuation of slavery, while Heidegger was
an unrepentant Nazi. That being so, this gradual migration of intellec-
tual capital from right-wing philosophers to left-wing theorists in the
Cold War era is one of the strangest episodes in the history of philosophy
(Burston and Frie, 2006).
Generally speaking, postmodernists and post-structuralists are dismiss-
ive of historical materialism and the very idea of progress, which they
regard as just one more “grand narrative” that is vacuous, self-serving, or
ripe for deconstruction. And unlike Marx and Freud, they claim that there
is nothing like a universal human nature that all people share, which ren-
ders it possible for us to empathize with the experience of someone whose
cultural context is radically different from our own. On reflection, then,
the differences between Marxism, critical theory, and postmodernism are
pretty clear and pivot largely around their attitudes toward the Enlighten-
ment. Marx was unabashedly enthusiastic about the Enlightenment, while
Critical Theory, informed by Freud, waxed ambivalent toward it. Postmod-
ernism and post-structuralism, by contrast, are generally quite dismissive
or derisive in their appraisals of Enlightenment thought. Besides, Marx
stressed the primacy of praxis, labor, and economics in the shaping of
society, while Freud and his followers stressed the primacy of instincts and
their vicissitudes, or “the economics of the libido.” By contrast with both
Marx and Freud, postmodernists and post-structuralists generally stress
the primacy of language, which they often maintain is culture constitutive.
Despite the gravity of our current situation, the essays in this volume
attest to the continuing vitality and relevance of critical theory today, but
they do so in different ways and from differing perspectives. When we
circulated our call for papers, we deliberately solicited contributions from
relative newcomers as well as from well-established scholars. In that, we
succeeded. Moreover, rather than seeking to promote uniformity of opin-
ion, we welcomed the efforts of scholars who have engaged seriously with
the legacy of the Frankfurt School but without attempting to minimize or
ignore their differences. The result is a collection of essays whose subject
xx Preface

matter converge and overlap in many ways but without giving anyone
“the final word.” So for example, Joel Whitebook’s chapter relates how
three generations of critical theorists have fruitfully engaged with psycho-
analysis. The papers of Adrian Johnston and Robert Pfaller probe some of
the subtler, far-reaching implications of Freud’s brand of materialism and
ponder the extent to which it was (or could be rendered) compatible with
a more Marxist understanding of (historical) materialism. Kurt Jacobsen’s
paper takes aim at what he describes as the quietist and stoic implica-
tions of Lacanian theory. Three other papers – those of Benjamin B. Stros-
berg, Paul Bishop, and John R. White – delve deeply into the substance
of Horkheimer and Adorno’s book The Dialectic of Enlightenment and
its relevance to contemporary social thought. Frank Pittenger’s delight-
ful essay dwells on problems in Freud’s metapsychology and its impact
on Adorno and Marcuse, while Gary Clark offers us a refreshing new
look at Erich Fromm’s contributions to critical theory and his intellectual
development after leaving the Frankfurt School. Daniel Burston’s papers
apply the lens of critical theory to the study of left-wing authoritarianism
and the impact of critical race theory and whiteness studies on contempo-
rary psychoanalytic discourse. Finally, Jon Mills’s two papers address the
prevalence of dysrecognition in contemporary culture and offers a critique
of Axel Honneth’s recent reflections on the relationship between psychoa-
nalysis and critical theory.
As our planetary crises deepen, right-wing populism and ethno-
nationalism pose the gravest threats to democracy, not critical theory,
and certainly not the mythical boogeyman manufactured by conservative
pundits. Evidence for this, if any is needed, was furnished by the insur-
rection on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, and more recently by Putin’s
brutal and senseless invasion of Ukraine. But with that said, there are
some worrisome developments on the Left that should be addressed as
well. In Chapter 16 of Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt
School, Stuart Jeffries notes that the concept of left-wing authoritarianism –
which Habermas dubbed “Left Fascism” – only arose in critical theory
circles long after the publication of The Authoritarian Personality, and
more specifically, in 1967–1968, when aggrieved students occupied the
Institute for Social Research and disrupted Theodor Adorno’s lectures,
which were thronged by noisy students attempting to de-platform him for
not lending his unqualified support to their movement (Jeffries, 2017).
While Adorno never published anything on this topic, he did discuss it
 Preface xxi

(with considerable bitterness) in his correspondence with Herbert Mar-

cuse shortly before his death. And in an article titled “The Authoritarian
Personality Reconsidered: The Phantom of ‘Left Fascism,’ ” Gandesha
points to more recent developments of an even more disturbing nature.
He writes as follows:

Today, we possibly see some of the very tendencies identified by

Adorno . . . afoot in certain quarters of the Left both in the contem-
porary university and beyond it. We have seen ample evidence of the
Left’s reluctance to tolerate dissent within its own ranks. For exam-
ple, we have seen it in the students’ demands at Evergreen College
in Olympia, Washington, for the resignation of tenured professors
who made principled objections to political actions that they under-
stood as re-instituting forms of segregation in the name of combat-
ting it (Hartocollis, 2017). We’ve seen it in the case of a letter signed
by over 800 academics (see Vigo and Garano, 2017), demanding
the retraction of an article on “trans-racialism” by a young assistant
professor, Rebecca Tuvel (2017), in the feminist philosophy journal
Hypatia. . . . Beyond the university, we’ve seen it in the demand
made by British New York-based artist, Hannah Black (2017), that
“non-Black” artist, Dana Shultz’s (2017) painting of Emmett Till,
not simply be criticized but . . . actually . . . destroyed. Perhaps
more consequentially, sections of the Left have defended figures
like Milosevic, Vladimir Putin, Baathist regimes of Saddam Hussein
and Bashar al-Assad, (despite evidence that all of these regimes bru-
tally suppressed and murdered their own people) (Al Yafai (2017),
under the banner of anti-imperialism on the basis of the logic of “my
enemy’s enemy is my friend” (Hensman, 2018). Moreover, recently
Steve Bannon, former advisor to Donald J. Trump and architect of a
new fascist international recently shared pleasantries with left-wing
firebrand George Galloway.
(Gandesha, 2019, pp. 602–603)

So if Gandesha is right – and we believe he is – left-wing authoritarian-

ism poses a less potent and immediate threat to democracy than right-wing
authoritarianism but remains a significant longer-term threat because it
has infiltrated our universities. In fact, many accomplished scholars and
gifted teachers are already leaving higher education for other careers
xxii Preface

because they feel that their departments or universities have been thor-
oughly captured or compromised by the new activist Zeitgeist. So while
cultural Marxism is indeed a myth, cancel culture is not (German, K. and
Lukianoff, G., 2022). Indeed, we have many friends and colleagues in aca-
demia who live in fear of losing their livelihoods, or being “cancelled” for
saying or doing something that offends the activist sensibilities of their
colleagues and students. The resulting self-censorship places invisible
constraints on academic freedom. It is therefore detrimental to the basic
functioning of the university. And let’s not kid ourselves. Thriving democ-
racies actually need intact universities to foster critical thinking and an
informed and responsive citizenry. Absent these qualities, citizens devolve
into mere consumers and conformists who lack the judgment, resolve, and
the sense of solidarity with others to mobilize in defense of their increas-
ingly fragile freedoms.
Sadly, the crisis in our universities is also compounded by the aston-
ishing growth of the managerial caste in the last four decades. While
the numbers of administrators in universities and colleges grows in
leaps and bounds, the number of tenured professors is shrinking stead-
ily, and those that remain have been drastically de-professionalized.
Rather than treating them as colleagues and respected professionals,
university administrators frequently treat faculty as mere employees
who should meekly forgo any meaningful role in the governance of the
university and accept their decisions without question (Burston, 2020).
Indeed, even tenured faculty are increasingly regarded as expendable
and certainly not worthy of the increasingly extravagant salaries and
bonuses administrators routinely award themselves. Worse yet, this
trend toward administrative bloat was accompanied by the precipitous
decline of the liberal arts and the explosive growth of diversity, equity,
and inclusion programs, which are now an $8 billion industry in the
United States, although evidence for their long-term effectiveness is
vanishingly scarce. So why do university administrators insist on them?
To boost enrollments? Certainly. But promoting DEI programming of
various kinds is also a vehicle for collective virtue signaling, helping
administrators cultivate an image of themselves as good people who
are genuinely concerned about social justice, even though they are too
timid or indifferent to come to the defense of faculty who are unjustly
 Preface xxiii

accused and harassed, and increasingly happy to dismiss them for trivial
offenses, without just cause or due process.
We conclude with a quote from Max Horkheimer, who addressed the
student activists of the 1960s and 1970s in a preface to an earlier collection
of essays on critical theory as follows:

An open declaration that even a dubious democracy, for all its defects,
is always better than . . . dictatorship seems necessary for the sake
of truth. . . . Rosa Luxemburg, whom many students venerate, said
fifty years ago that “the remedy of Trotsky and Lenin have found, the
elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is sup-
posed to cure.” To protect, preserve and where possible, to extend the
ephemeral freedom of the individual in the face of the growing threat
to it is a far more urgent a task than to issue abstract denunciations of
it or endanger it by actions that have no hope of success.
(Horkheimer, 1972, p. viii)

Horkheimer then went on to characterize much of the Left as “pseudo-

revolutionary” and to chastise the radical Right for being “pseudo-
conservative.” Why? In his own words, because

a true conservatism which takes man’s spiritual heritage seriously is

more closely related to the revolutionary mentality, which does not
simply reject that heritage but absorbs it into a new synthesis than it
is to the radicalism of the Right which seeks to eliminate them both.
(Horkheimer, 1972, p. ix)

Sadly, according to Horkheimer’s criteria, genuine conservatives are

quite rare nowadays, while “pseudo-conservatives” are plentiful, and for
now, at least, still backing Donald Trump. For all our sakes, let’s hope that
thoughtful American conservatives rally to their senses, repudiate Trump
and Trumpism, and reject the other toxic demagogues in their midst. And
if the Left can rein in or repudiate the authoritarians in their own ranks, we
may yet manage to restore a measure of sanity to our political discourse,
as we prepare to confront the grim realities that lie ahead.
Daniel Burston
xxiv Preface

References
Al Yafai, F. 2017. “The cult of Bashar extends from the far right to the far left.”
Retrieved from www.thenational.ae/opinion/the-cult-of-bashar-extends-from-
the-far-right-to-the-far-left.-1.621909.
Anderson, P. 1983. In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. London: Verso.
Black, H. 2017 (March 21). “ ‘The painting must go’: Hannah Black pens open
letter to the Whitney about controversial biennial work.” Art News. Retrieved
from www.artnews.com/2017/03/21/the-painting-must-go-hannah-black-pens-
an-open-letter-to-the-whitney-about-controversial-biennial-work/.
Braune, J. 2019. “Who’s afraid of the Frankfurt school? ‘Cultural marxism’ as
an anti-semitic conspiracy theory.” Journal of Social Justice, vol. 9, pp. 1–25.
Burston, D. 2020. Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Postmodern University.
Cham: Palgrave MacMillen.
Burston, D. and Frie, R. 2006. Psychotherapy as a Human Science. Pittsburgh:
Duquesne University Press.
Gandesha, S. 2019. “The ‘authoritarian personality’ reconsidered: The phantom of
‘left fascism’.” The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 79, pp. 601–624.
German, K. and Lukianoff, G. 2022 (March 25). “Don’t stop using the term ‘can-
cel culture’.” The Daily Beast. Retrieved from <thedailybeast.com>.
Hartocollis, A. 2017 (June 16). “A campus argument goes viral. Now the campus is
under siege.” New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2016/06/16/
us/evergreen-state-protests.html.
Hensman, R. 2018. Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution and the Rheto-
ric of Anti-Imperialism. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books.
Horkheimer, M. 1972. Critical Theory: Selected Essays. New York: Continuum
Books.
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. 1947. The Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated
by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Jeffries, S. 2017. Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School. London:
Verso.
Shultz, D. 2017. Open Casket [Painting]. New York: Whitney Museum.
Tuvel, R. 2017 (March 29). “In defense of trans-racialism.” Hypatia. Retrieved
from https://doi.org/10/11/11/hypa.1237.
Vigo, J. and Garano, L. 2017. “Open letter on the hypatia controversy.” Feminist
Current. Retrieved from www.feministcurrent.com/2017/05/25/open-letter-
hypatia-controversy/.
Chapter 1

Psychoanalysis and the

Frankfurt School
Joel Whitebook

Introduction
In the 1930s, the philosophers and social scientists of the Institute for Social
Research were the first members of the conservative German academy to
not only treat the disreputable avant-garde new discipline of psychoanaly-
sis seriously – whose membership was almost entirely Jewish – but also to
accord Freud the same stature as the titans of the philosophical tradition.
The radicalism of psychoanalysis fit with the radicalism of the position
they were attempting to develop, and the appropriation of psychoanalysis
provided one of the pillars on which critical theory was constructed (Jay
1973: 86–112).
In addition to the theoretical affinity between the Frankfurt School and
psychoanalysis, the relationship between the two intellectual movements
was also practical. The Institute for Social Research and the Frankfurt Psy-
choanalytic Institute shared a building, in which they held their classes in
the same rooms, and jointly sponsored public lectures by such eminent
analysts as Anna Freud, Paul Federn, Hans Sachs, and Siegfried Bernfeld.
Indeed, the connection between the two organizations went even further.
Max Horkheimer, the director of the Institute for Social Research, sat on
the board of the analytic institute, while Eric Fromm – a trained analyst
and member of both groups – helped the critical theorists educate them-
selves about the workings of psychoanalysis.
A major concern that led the critical theorists to turn to psychoanalysis
was a deficit in Marxian theory: it lacked a so-called subjective dimension
and tended to treat subjectivity simply as an epiphenomenon, that is, as a
reflection of the material base. With the economic crisis of the 1930s, this
concern became especially pressing. Objective conditions obtained that
Marxian theory predictions should have produced the radicalization of the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003215301-1
2 Joel Whitebook

working class. But just the opposite was happening: a large portion of
the European proletariat was turning to fascism instead. Max Horkheimer,
Eric Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, among others, undertook Studies in
Authority and the Family to account for this supposedly anomalous fact
(Horkheimer 1936; Jay 1973: 113–142; Wiggershaus 1994: 149–156).
In one sense, the study was groundbreaking for, along with Wilhelm
Reich’s work, it represented the first attempt to incorporate psychoanalysis
into Marxian theory. But in another sense, its innovations remained lim-
ited. Studies on Authority and the Family still remained Marxist – albeit,
of highly heterodox sort – insofar as it retained the general framework of
political economy. Furthermore, the work drew on the less radical the-
ories in the Freudian corpus, for example, those pertaining to character
formation, rather than Freud’s late, more scandalous cultural texts, which
Horkheimer and Adorno turned to in conjunction with their reconstitution
of critical theory in the 1940s.
After immigrating to California, Adorno joined with colleagues outside
of the institute to conduct another psychoanalytically oriented interdiscipli-
nary research project that returned to many of the same themes contained
in Studies on Authority and the Family. Their findings were published
in The Authoritarian Personality: Studies in Prejudice (Adorno 1982).
Despite its initial influence, the work was later criticized on methodologi-
cal grounds and fell out of fashion. But as Peter Gordon has recently sug-
gested, with the election of Donald Trump and the rise of authoritarian
leaders around the world, revisiting The Authoritarian Personality might
be in order (Gordon 2017).

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

“Beneath the known history of Europe,” Horkheimer and Adorno observe,
“there runs a subterranean one [that] consists of the fate of the human
instincts and passions repressed and distorted by civilization” (Horkheimer
and Adorno 2002: 192). It can be argued that for these two philosophers,
the sustained excavation of this subterranean history, as well as a focus on
the body in general, constitutes a condition sine qua non of their position –
as distinguished from what Horkheimer referred to as traditional theory
(Horkheimer 1972). This orientation, moreover, comprised an essential
aspect of the materialist perspective – of the “preponderance of the object,”
as Adorno called it – that they sought to maintain (Adorno 1973: 183).
 Psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School 3

When Horkheimer and Adorno received news that the Nazis had set
the final solution into motion and that their colleague Walter Benjamin
had committed suicide while trying to escape the Gestapo on the Spanish
frontier, they concluded that it was necessary to radicalize their theory in
order to do justice to the enormity of the catastrophe that was unfolding in
Europe (Rabinbach 1997). That catastrophe, as they saw it, involved more
than the failure of the proletariat to fulfill its historical task. It resulted
from the self-destruction of the project of Enlightenment itself. “Why,”
they asked, was “humanity . . . sinking into a new kind of barbarism” pre-
cisely at the point where, according to the (Baconian) Enlightenment, the
material conditions had been created that could produce a “truly human
state” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: xiv)?
The radicalization of critical theory consisted in a move from the cri-
tique of political economy to the philosophy of history centering on the
domination of nature (Jay 1973: 253–280). In addition to Freud, the two
philosophers drew on Nietzsche, Weber, Mauss, as well as others to write
a depth-psychological and depth-anthropological Urgeschichte or primal
history of civilization. The new position was articulated in Dialectic of
Enlightenment, which became the defining text of the Frankfurt School
during its classical phase. Where the domination of nature in general – as
opposed to economic exploitation and class struggle – became the over-
arching theme of the new philosophy of history, the idea of the domination
of inner nature provided the specific link through which Horkheimer and
Adorno incorporated Freud into their new theory.
For the mature Freud, the reality principle, understood as Ananke or Atro-
pos (necessity or the ineluctable), defined the human condition (White-
book 2017: Chapter 10). It designated the price that nature inevitably
exacted from us finite transient beings, in the form of physical suffer-
ing and decay, loss, and ultimately death. By reading Marx’s theory of
exchange back into prehistory, Horkheimer and Adorno sought to inte-
grate his economic theory with Freudian anthropology. They maintained
that the law of equivalence – the principle that everything that happens
must pay for having happened – governed mythical thought, and they
saw the capitalist principle of exchange as the latest and most complete
instantiation of the law of equivalence. The practice of sacrifice, which
aims at mitigating the law’s effects, follows from it. For example, the sac-
rifice that our so-called primitive ancestors performed to placate the gods
after a successful hunting expedition constituted an attempt to control
4 Joel Whitebook

the price they would have to pay for their good fortune by offering an
advanced propitiatory payment.
According to Horkheimer and Adorno, enlightenment consists in the
attempt to escape mythic fate and sacrifice. Deploying his cunning, which
was the precursor of instrumental reason, Odysseus, who is the prototype
of the enlightened individual, sought to outsmart the law of equivalence
through “the introversion of sacrifice.” Rather than sacrificing a piece of
external nature, for example, the hindquarter of an ox, Odysseus sacrificed
a piece of his inner nature, which is to say, renounced a piece of his
unconscious-instinctual life. By repressing his inner nature in order to
form a purposeful, autocratic, virile, and rational (qua calculating) ego,
Odysseus believed he could dominate external nature, thereby escaping
its dangers, outsmart mythical fate, and evade the law of equivalence.
Horkheimer and Adorno argue, however, that the strategy was flawed.
Their thesis is that “the denial of nature in human beings,” which consti-
tutes “the core of all civilizing rationality,” contains “the germ cell of pro-
liferating mythic irrationality” out of which the dialectic of enlightenment
ineluctably unfolds (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 42).
An erroneous Baconian assumption, which was taken over by Marx,
underlies the program of the domination of nature: namely, its demand
for renunciation is justified for, in the long run, the domination of nature
will create the material conditions that are the prerequisite for what Bacon
called “the relief of man’s estate” – or the emancipation of the humanity, to
put it in Marxian terms. But there is a hitch in this program, and it gener-
ates the self-defeating logic of the dialectic of enlightenment. Because it
represents “the introversion of sacrifice,” the renunciation of inner nature,
which seeks to escape sacrifice, remains a form of sacrifice, albeit a dis-
placed one. And as such, it is still subject to the law of equivalence. The
math, Adorno and Horkheimer maintain, does not work: “all who renounce
give away more of their life than is given back to them, more than the life
they preserve” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 43).
More concretely, the faulty math produces a calamitous result. In order
to carry out the domination of nature, the subject must form a purposive
calculating self by repressing its unconscious-instinctual life. It thereby
reifies itself at the same time and to the same degree that it reifies external
nature. It follows that at the point that nature has been thoroughly reified
and dominated in order to produce the presumptive material precondi-
tions for emancipation – which Horkheimer and Adorno assume had been
 Psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School 5

approximated by the first half of the twentieth century – the self will have
been thoroughly reified as well. In the process of creating the preconditions
for its emancipation, the subject has, in short, so deformed itself – has so
“annihilated” itself – that it is in no condition to appropriate those precon-
ditions and create a better form of life. Hence, the self-defeating logic of
the dialectic of enlightenment: “[w]ith the denial of nature in humans, not
only the telos of the external mastery of nature, but also the telos of one’s
one life becomes opaque and confused.” Instead of emancipation, barba-
rism results. It should be noted that, for Horkheimer and Adorno, “nature
in the human being” constitutes that which is sacrificed in the process
of dominating nature, as well as (in some unspecified fashion) that for
the sake of which the entire process is pursued (Horkheimer and Adorno
2002: 42).
Because of their anti-Hegelian opposition to all modes of final recon-
ciliation and their thesis of a totally administered world, Horkheimer and
Adorno opposed all utopian solutions, indeed, positive solutions as such.
Nevertheless, logically there is an unthematized utopian implication of
their hyperbolic analysis – which they would surely have rejected had
it been explicitly presented to them: that only the cessation of renuncia-
tion in toto, only the emancipation of inner nature and unfettered fulfill-
ment, could prevent the dialectic of enlightenment from unfolding. Short
of this implicit utopian solution, the most that Horkheimer and Adorno do
is hint at one other possible way out of the dialectic’s fateful logic, namely,
“the remembrance of nature within the subject” (Horkheimer and Adorno
2002: 32). But they do not provide the idea with much content.
After the war, however, there was one place where Adorno might have
speculated on non-reified forms of subjectivity. But his prohibition against
speculating on positive conceptions of the self prevented him from pur-
suing this path (Adorno 1968; Jay 1984: Chapter 5; Whitebook 1996:
152–164). Despite his reservations about false reconciliation, in his aes-
thetic theory, Adorno allows himself to speculate about non-reified forms
of synthesis – different relations between part and whole, particular and
universal. Borrowing an idea from Kant, he argues that the truly advanced
work of avant-garde art exhibits “a non-violent togetherness of the mani-
fold” that provides a glimpse of what a non-reified world might be like.
But Adorno stopped there, refusing to extrapolate from his aesthetic theory
in order to envision less violent and more desirable forms of the together-
ness of the self, that is, of ego-integration.
6 Joel Whitebook

Herbert Marcuse
But in an effort to break out of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Herbert
Marcuse did play the utopian card, first as a theoretical exercise, then as a
concrete theoretical program. In the midst of the seemingly closed world of
the 1950s, which appeared to confirm Horkheimer and Adorno’s progno-
sis, Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization attempted to provide a philosophical
demonstration that a “nonrepressive civilization” – that is, a civilization in
which the sacrifice-repression of inner nature was no longer necessary so
that it could be liberated – was possible. But it was just that, philosophical.
At the time, Marcuse did not advocate an attempt to realize that society
(Marcuse 1955: 5; Whitebook 1996: 26–41, 2004: 82–89).
In Eros and Civilization, Marcuse undertakes an immanent critique of
Freud, whose “own theory,” he argues, “provides reasons for rejecting the
identification of civilization with repression” (Marcuse 1955: 4). Mar-
cuse’s strategy is to historicize Freud’s basic framework. Where Freud
presented the fundamental opposition between the reality principle and
pleasure principle as transhistorical and therefore immutable, Marcuse,
with the aid of Marx, attempts to “de-ontologize” it by historicizing the
Reality Principle. His entire argument rests on this central move.
As mentioned earlier, the mature Freud understood the reality principle
as Ananke (necessity) or Atropos (the ineluctable). But in what amounts
to a Marxifying sleight of hand, Marcuse alters the meaning of that prin-
ciple and reconceptualizes it in economic terms. Instead of transhistori-
cal necessity, Ananke is recast as historically variable Lebensnot (scarcity)
and is defined in terms of “struggle for existence” (Marcuse 1955: 132).
The term now refers to the metabolism between humanity and nature that
will exist in any conceivable society and to the amount of toil that, to
one degree or another, will be necessary to extract the means of existence
from the natural environment at a particular level of economic develop-
ment. Toil requires unpleasure, that is, frustration, delayed gratification,
and the repression of the pleasure principle. Thus, insofar as the reality
principle refers to the quantum of toil that is necessary in a given society,
it also refers to the degree of repression of the pleasure principle – of inner
nature – that is required to carry it out.
The redefinition of Ananke allows Marcuse to introduce another distinc-
tion that is obviously modeled on Marx’s distinction between necessary
and surplus labor, that is, between basic or necessary repression on the one
 Psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School 7

hand and surplus repression on the other. Necessary repression denotes the
ineliminable quantum of repression that will be required in any conceiv-
able society in virtue of the fact that we are embodied beings who will,
to one degree or another, always have to extract the means of existence
from nature. Surplus repression, as the name suggests, refers to the excess
repression beyond the basic repression that could be eliminated in a given
society on the basis of the development of its scientific and technological
means of production. Marcuse’s thesis is that surplus repression is largely
exploitative and is enforced in the interests of the dominant class. Indeed,
the difference between necessary and surplus repression can be taken as a
measure of the degree of exploitation in a given society.
Marcuse maintains that surplus repression comprises the largest portion
of repression in advanced capitalist societies, and he refers to the particular
historical instantiation of it that obtains in them as the performance prin-
ciple. His claim is that the performance principle – which is maintained in
the economic interest of the capitalist ruling class – is perpetuated by the
endless creation of false consumerist needs in the population and through
capitalism’s perpetual production of (often useless) commodities that can
fulfill them.
There is, however, if not an outright contradiction, at least a serious
tension lurking in this configuration. The advanced state of the means of
production, according to Marcuse, generates the potential and therefore
the pressure for a qualitatively different socioeconomic order in which sur-
plus repression could in principle be eliminated. And this potential is at
odds with an arrangement where the performance principle is artificially
enforced. Given a differently constituted system of needs – one not based
on the incessant multiplication of false needs – advanced science and tech-
nology could be employed to vastly reduce the amount of toil necessary
to produce the material requirements not only for existence but also for
the satisfaction of true needs that were not artificially inflated. The tension
between the existing state of affairs and the potential of advanced science
and technology might, Marcuse suggests, contribute to the motivation for
a radical transformation of society.
Reinterpreting Marx’s notion of the transition from the realm of neces-
sity to the realm of freedom in psychoanalytic terms, Marcuse attempts
to envisage a utopian transformation of society. If the highly developed
means of production in the advanced world were to be properly appro-
priated, a social transformation could be affected that would drastically
8 Joel Whitebook

reduce the amount of toil necessary for securing the necessities of life.
With the elimination of scarcity, surplus repression could also be elimi-
nated. This, in turn, would make it possible to establish a nonrepressive
society – that is, one in which only the minimal amount of basic repression
remained – and to emancipate inner nature.
Marcuse draws on the psychoanalytic theory of perverse sexuality to
provide content for the vision of a utopian society beyond “the established
reality principle” (Marcuse 1955: 129). His rather questionable reason-
ing is this: because the sexual perversions have somehow eluded, indeed,
rebelled against the Oedipally structured historical reality principle, they
can offer an indication of what form a different arrangement of human sex-
uality might assume. Marcuse goes so far as to claim that primary narcis-
sism constitutes not only a stage of preoedipal psychosexual development
but also that the concept contains “ontological implications” that point
“at another mode of being” – one that would be reconciled with external
nature (Marcuse 1955: 107 and 109). What Marcuse fails to appreciate is
that perverse sexuality, whatever that may mean in today’s context, does
not constitute an unalloyed expression of the pleasure principle, but is,
like all psychical productions, multiply determined. (In a similar romantic
vein, the young Foucault made a related mistake when he maintained that
madness contained a privileged form of truth that had escaped contamina-
tion by normalizing rationality [Whitebook 2002, 2005].)
Freud never denied that the reality principle contained an economic
component. This is especially true in The Future of an Illusion, his most
Marxist book, which progressives regularly cite. But to reduce the con-
cept to economic scarcity is to substantially diminish its philosophical
depth. Paul Ricoeur has argued that the mature Freud’s introduction of
the term Ananke to denote the reality principle indicated a transformation
of the concept from a “principle of ‘mental regulation’ ” into “a cypher
of possible wisdom . . . beyond illusion and consolation” (Ricoeur 1970:
262 and 325). Freud was staunchly anti-utopian, and his tragic wisdom
consisted in the resignation to Ananke, that is, the disconsolate acceptance
of the fact that human reality is constituted by transience and inevitably
permeated with loss and death (Whitebook 2017: 329).
But Marxists typically dismiss Freud’s tragic vision as the ideologi-
cal prejudice of a fin-de-siècle bourgeois patriarch whose world and
worldview were crumbling. And it cannot be denied that a number of the
questionable anthropological assumptions upon which Freud’s political
 Psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School 9

pessimism is based must be criticized. Nevertheless, even in an emanci-

pated society – however one conceives of it – this tragic dimension should
not be eliminated. On the contrary, whereas the tragic register is systemati-
cally denied in the infantilism of mass consumerist society and the culture
industry, in an emancipated society, it would be actively engaged as it was
in most pre-capitalist societies. To accept Ananke is to accept our finitude,
and the acceptance of our finitude is not reactionary hogwash but an essen-
tial component of a truly human society. These themes are not entirely lost
on Marcuse, and he attempts to confront them (as well as the theme of
destructiveness). But his discussion of “the defeat of time,” while interest-
ing, remains unconvincing (Marcuse 1955: 232–237).
Whereas in the 1950s Marcuse treated the idea of a nonrepressive soci-
ety merely as a philosophical possibility, in the 1960s, it not only became
a plausible political program but also a necessary one. He argued that the
creation of a post-scarcity society, in which the species’ relationship to its
inner and outer nature had been radically transformed, was necessary to
prevent the world from slipping into a new form of barbarism and to avoid
the destruction of the earth’s ecosystem.
During the heady days of the 1960s, Marcuse published two provoca-
tively titled articles. One, “The End of Utopia,” maintained that insofar
as the concept of utopia literally meant “no place” – a topos that could
never be occupied – it had become obsolete (Marcuse 1970b: 62–83). Far
from constituting an unrealistic fantasy, the establishment of an emanci-
pated nonrepressive society, based on “the achievements of the existing
societies, especially their scientific and technical achievements,” had not
only become realistic but historically necessary. The argument of the other
paper, “The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man,” was in line
with his thesis in Eros and Civilization (Marcuse 1970a: 44–61). Because
Freud’s anthropology was predicated on the false ontologization of the
opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, and
because it was now possible to transcend the historical performance prin-
ciple, Freud’s concept of man, Marcuse argued, had also become obsolete
(Marcuse 1969: 22).
Like Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse subscribed to a version of the
totally administered society (Marcuse 1964: xxxvi). As we saw, he argued
that through the uninterrupted generation and fulfillment of false (consum-
erist) needs, the system could integrate all opposition and perpetuate itself
indefinitely. A break in this fateful process – which meant a Great Refusal
10 Joel Whitebook

that rejected the false system of needs and the creation of a “new sensibil-
ity” embodying an alternative to them – was a necessary condition for the
transformation of the established order and the creation of new form of life
(Marcuse 1969: 23–48). As opposed to Adorno, Marcuse guilelessly and
enthusiastically celebrated the countercultural and radical political move-
ments of the 1960s as an expression of that new sensibility, at least in an
incipient form (Adorno and Marcuse, “Correspondence” 1999: New Left
Review I/233, January – February).
But as those movements receded further and further into the past, his
position increasingly appeared hopelessly and perhaps even embarrass-
ingly naive. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s Counter-Revolution
successfully quashed the 1960’s vision of the good life and succeeded in
reinstating the pursuit of wealth as the summum bonum. The entrepreneur
in a pinstriped suit replaced the civil rights worker in overalls as the new
culture hero. Moreover, with the collapse of communism and the trium-
phant ascendance of liberal political theory, the discussion of the good as
opposed to the right was often condemned as illicit. Indeed, it was some-
times suggested that to countenance the distinction between true and false
needs, as Marcuse emphatically did, was to begin down the slippery slope
to totalitarianism. The liberal turn in political theory, in short, appeared to
exclude the notion of a new sensibility from legitimate discourse and to
limit its parameters to a consideration of rights.
But “after the brief interlude of liberalism,” which, one can argue, lasted
from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the economic crisis of 2008, the idea
of a new sensibility may not seem so daft (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002:
68). It might be the case that a rights-oriented politics cannot adequately
address the rapacious dynamics of the globalized capitalism – the system’s
incessant and methodical “colonization of the lifeworld” and the environ-
ment – and its lethal effects on the global ecosystem (Habermas 1989:
332–372). Furthermore, where liberal and postmodern critics tend to dis-
miss Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of the cultural industry as elitist,
the two critical theorists were, in fact, diagnosing embryonic tendencies
that have now developed beyond their wildest imagination. The capac-
ity of today’s social media and celebrity culture to deflect, disarm, and
confuse critical thinking, while simultaneously creating a simulacrum of
popular debate, has surpassed their worst fears. As unlikely as the emer-
gence of a new sensibility might seem given our current conditions, it is
difficult to imagine how, from a purely logical point of view, a social and
 Psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School 11

political movement that can address the problems that are confronting us
can be formed without one. On this point, Marcuse may not have been that
naive after all.

Jürgen Habermas
Because it occurred at the beginning of his career, Habermas’s only sus-
tained Auseinandersetzung with Freud is conflicted and difficult to sort
out. At the time, Habermas had one foot planted in the psychoanalytically
informed materialism of the first generation of the Frankfurt School. But
with the other, he was stepping into the world of linguistified Kantianism
that came to define him. Although the early Habermas tried on the mantle
of the first generation of critical theorists for size, because he possessed
substantially different pre-theoretical intuitions, he was never entirely at
home in it and therefore moved beyond it relatively quickly (Rabinbach
1997: 168–170).
The first generation’s experience, which was shaped by Weimar, emigra-
tion, the war, Nazism, Stalinism, and the Holocaust, resulted in the choice
between hyper-radical utopianism and quietist resignation. Habermas’s
experience was different. As someone who, as an adolescent, had been
glued to the radio listening to the broadcasts of the Nuremburg Trials and
who entered adulthood as the Federal Republic was being established, the
either/or of quietism versus revolution was unacceptable. Possessing the
instincts of a radical reformer, Habermas placed the solidification, cultiva-
tion, and defense of German democracy at the top of his political agenda.
And he cannot be commended enough for his exemplary career as a public
intellectual and for the many courageous political stances he has taken. At
the same time, however, it must also be admitted that his resolute defense
of democracy has often been coupled with excessive progressivist Whig-
gishness. This has not only led him to deny the darker antisocial forces in
human nature documented by Freud, but it has also prevented him from
effectively addressing the irrational forces that are so evident in today’s
politics around the globe. For example, while progressive Protestants or
reformed Jews might find his position on religion congenial, he sidesteps
the really hard problem: how to address fundamentalism. For someone
with a fundamentalist mindset would find the position he is advocating
well-nigh unfathomable. How does one enter into a rational dialogue with
someone who has not cathected the idea of rational dialogue?
12 Joel Whitebook

In the 1960s, Freud was required reading for a budding critical theorist,
and it is clear from Knowledge and Human Interests that Habermas’s Aus-
einandersetzung with the psychoanalyst’s work was comprehensive and
deep (Habermas 1971). But he did not share the first generation’s elec-
tive affinity with the founder of psychoanalysis. As Thomas McCarthy
observes, Habermas’s “orientation to Freud’s work” was less substan-
tive and “more methodological than was theirs” (McCarthy 1978: 195).
Furthermore, this methodological orientation was one aspect of a larger
point of difference separating their younger colleague from the authors
of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno were prepared to
resign themselves to the self-referential implication that followed from
their analysis: namely, that they could not elucidate their own theoreti-
cal standpoint. They therefore abstained in principle from any attempt to
clarify the methodological foundations of critical theory. At best, they dia-
lectically circled them.
For Habermas, this abstention was unacceptable on theoretical as well
as political grounds. Still situating himself within a Marxist vein, he drew
on the new working-class theory current at the time and argued that after
the Second World War, science and technology had come to occupy a new
strategically decisive position in the productive apparatus of the capital-
ist economy. Therefore, if critical theory hoped to influence a progres-
sive transformation of advanced capitalist society, it would have to engage
members of scientific and academic communities. To do so, it would be
necessary for critical theorists to clarify and defend the methodological
foundations of their position in a way that was acceptable to those commu-
nities of investigators. If the representatives of the first generation of the
Frankfurt School sometimes (and somewhat disingenuously) made a fet-
ish of being outsiders, Habermas wanted to challenge the academic com-
munity on its own terms, forcing its members to reflect on the dogmatic
assumptions underlying their positions.
Where Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse were attracted to psychoa-
nalysis because of its scandalousness, Habermas wanted to use it to make
the project academically legitimate and critical at the same time. Strange
as it may sound today when the field is in such disrepute, in the 1960s, he
believed that psychoanalysis provided a model of a social science that was
not simply successful but successful qua reflective and critical. “Psychoa-
nalysis is relevant to us,” he wrote, because it is “the only tangible example
of science incorporating methodological self-reflection” (Habermas 1971:
 Psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School 13

124). He believed that the discipline provided a model case from which
general methodological (and normative) principles for a critical theory of
society could be extrapolated. To accomplish this task – and to rectify what
he, like Lacan, mistakenly saw as Freud’s biologism – Habermas sought to
apply the findings of the linguistic turn, which was in full force at the middle
of the twentieth century, to psychoanalysis. He reinterpreted neurosis and
ideology as two structurally homologous forms of false consciousness and
conceptualized them as forms of systematically distorted communication.
It is at this point that the serious tensions emerge in Habermas’s posi-
tion. (A) On the one hand, he continues to not only use the language of
the first generation’s materialistically inflected interpretation of Freud but
also to gesture toward the substance of that interpretation. (B) On the other
hand, however, this strain of his argument is at odds with the linguistify-
ing and transcendentalizing dynamic that he introduces with the notion of
systematically distorted communication.
Regarding (A): when, for example, Habermas set out to refute
Nietzsche’s Darwinian reductionism, he deployed Freud’s instinct theory
(Triebtheorie) – a theory which, if he did not totally repudiate, he radi-
cally altered and diluted under the linguistifying pressures of his program.
Habermas responds to Nietzsche’s claim that reason is nothing but “an
organ of adaptation for men just as claws and teeth are for animals” in the
following way. He grants Nietzsche’s claim that reason is a natural organ
of self-preservation, but over the course of evolution, he argues, it also
develops into something more than nature. And Habermas uses the con-
cept of libido to explain that something more, that is to say, the “cultural
break with nature.” Human drives are excessive – superabundant – in that
they overshoot the requirements of self-preservation, of mere life. “Along
with the tendency to realize natural drives,” Habermas claims that the cul-
tural formations that have emerged over the course of evolution “have
incorporated the tendency toward release from the constraint of nature,”
latent in the excessiveness of the drives (Habermas 1973: 312).
At this point, Habermas bursts into a downright Marcusean panegyric to
the utopian significance of Eros: “an enticing natural force, present in the
individual as libido, has detached itself from the behavioral system of self-
preservation and urges toward utopian fulfillment” (Habermas 1973: 312).
Habermas also enlists Marcuse’s distinction between necessary repression
and surplus repression as a means for elucidating the critique of ideology
and as a device for measuring the amount of exploitation in a given society
14 Joel Whitebook

(Whitebook 1996: 27–29). He argues, moreover, that the degree of repres-

sion obtaining in a given society determines the extent to which it restricts
the public expression of libidinally based wishes. According to him, the
wishes that are excluded and repressed at a given level of economic devel-
opment tend to find alternative modes of fulfillment in pathological symp-
toms, fantasies, illusions, and ideologies, which are structurally homologous
formations. And insofar as these phenomena constitute disguised forms of
wish fulfillment, they “harbor Utopia” (Habermas 1971: 280).
Also in keeping with the vocabulary and sensibility of the first genera-
tion of critical theorists, Habermas borrows Adorno’s notion of “exact fan-
tasy” to formulate a normative theory in psychoanalytic terms. (It should
be noted that, as opposed to his later normative theory, this earlier itera-
tion of it is primarily concerned with the substantive question of the good
rather than with the procedural question of justification.) “The ‘good,’ ”
he writes, “is neither a convention nor an essence, but rather the result of
fantasy.” It must, however, be “fantasized so exactly that it corresponds to
and articulates a fundamental interest . . . in that measure of emancipation
that is objectively historically possible” (Habermas 1971: 228).
Regarding (B): the linguistic turn, however, took hold of Habermas’s
argument and led to a radical alteration of Freudian theory that is most
apparent in his account of repression and of the unconscious. Though
Freud’s approach contains an important interpretative dimension, it does
not comprise a pure hermeneutics. At its core, it is psychodynamic, which
means it combines the language of meaning with the language of force
(Ricoeur 1970: 65–67). Every psychoanalytically pertinent idea (Vorstel-
lung) has an affective charge attached to it and a pressure (Drang) behind
it. To be clinically effective, a psychoanalytic intervention requires more
than interpretation – the explication of meaning through meaning. As
Ricoeur insisted, it requires technique: that is, the ability to assess the psy-
chodynamic forces at work in a given situation and to successfully inter-
vene in them (Ricoeur 1974). For Freud, moreover, the source of psychical
forces is somatic. They emanate from the drives which he describes

• as a “frontier” concept lying “between the mental and the somatic,”

• as “the psychical representative [psychischer Repräsentant] of the
stimuli originating within the organism” that reaches “the mind,”
• “as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in conse-
quence of its connection with the body” (Freud 1915: 121–122).
 Psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School 15

To be sure, Habermas registers the right points in his discussion of Freud’s

clinical practice. He acknowledges the necessity of the dynamic point of
view and even cites the relevant aperçu from Freud. To simply present
patients with accurate information about the content of their unconscious
without addressing the psychodynamics of their resistances, Freud wryly
observes, would “have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous ill-
ness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger”
(Freud 1910: 225). Habermas also recognizes that the force of the defenses
and resistances encountered in the clinical setting requires that one posit
a force-like, which is to say, a nature-like (naturwüchsig), phenomenon
at work in the human psyche. As a result, to apprehend these phenomena
theoretically, psychoanalysis must, in addition to hermeneutical concepts,
employ causal-explanatory ones similar to those used in the natural sci-
ences. Indeed, these considerations have led the anti-positivist Haber-
mas to observe that Freud’s scientific self-understanding is not “entirely
unfounded” (Habermas 1971: 214).
But the linguistifying imperatives of his program have caused Haber-
mas to undo his correct observations concerning Freud’s clinical practice.
In his theoretical reflections on those practices – in his metapsychology,
as it were – Habermas equates repression with excommunication. Devel-
opmentally, he argues, repression arises in situations where children feel
it is too dangerous to express certain wishes publicly, that is, in the inter-
subjective grammar of ordinary language (secondary processes). Because
of the weakness of their egos and the superior power of the parental fig-
ures populating their environment, children are compelled to repress those
wishes. They do this by excommunicating them from the public domain –
including the internal public domain of consciousness – and banishing
them to the private realm that, for Habermas, comprises the unconscious.
The excommunication is accomplished by de-grammaticizing those dan-
gerous wishes. Their representations are thereby expelled from the gram-
mar of ordinary language and relocated in the de-grammaticized realm of
the unconscious. (The alogical mentation of the unconscious is the way
that Habermas understands primary processes.)
Habermas’s argument for the claim that repression is an entirely intra-
linguistic affair, consisting in the excommunication of forbidden ideas
from the intersubjective realm of ordinary language, borders on a tautol-
ogy. From the fact that repression can be reversed through the talking cure,
he wants to infer that it was a purely linguistic process to begin with. But
16 Joel Whitebook

as we have seen in his discussion of clinical practice, he acknowledges

that the undoing of repression is more than an interpretative enterprise. It
also involves the force-like phenomena of resistance that must be opposed
with the counterforce deployed by clinical technique.
Habermas denies a canonical distinction of Freudian psychoanalysis:
“the distinction between word-presentations and symbolic ideas,” he
declares ex cathedra, “is problematic,” and “the assumption of a nonlin-
guistic substratum, in which these ideas severed from language are ‘carried
out,’ is unsatisfactory” (Habermas 1971: 241; Whitebook 1996: 179–196).
The distinction between word-presentations and thing-presentations, how-
ever, is a linchpin for Freud’s entire construction. It is intended to mark
the difference between conscious, rational, and what one may call diurnal
thought and a radically different form of archaic mental functioning – the
language of the night.
And it is also meant to mark the essential division of the self. To deny the
existence of a “nonlinguistic” unconscious and to redefine it is as merely
protolinguistic – which means it can be translated into consciousness with-
out the special effort required by psychoanalysis – is to deny the radical
alterity of the ego’s “internal foreign territory” and to substantially soften
the essentially divided and conflicted nature of the self (Freud 1933: 57). It
is also to substantially domesticate the Freudian project. Furthermore, this
is one symptom of the general difficulty Habermas has accommodating the
“nonlinguistic” – the “nonconceptual,” as Adorno calls it – in his theory.
Habermas’s compulsion to think everything in terms of language is so
strong that his own position ends up as a variant of linguistic monism that
is difficult to distinguish from the Gadamerian hermeneutics he claimed
to oppose (Habermas 1980; Lafont 1999: 55–124). The thesis that repres-
sion is a purely linguistic affair ipso facto excludes the extralinguistic,
that is, the extralinguistic forces that act on language and distort it. And
it also leaves out the body, for, as we have seen, the body is the source of
the forces that impinge on the psyche and “mutilate” its symbolic texts.
Indeed, for Freud, the thing-representations of the unconscious are the
mental representations of somatic forces that lie just on the other side of
the frontier separating soma and psyche.
A political motive also leads Habermas to reject the distinction
between word-representations and thing-representations. It is based on a
mistaken presupposition that he shares with many thinkers on the Left:
namely, that to defend a progressive position, one must maintain it is
 Psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School 17

society or language all the way down – that “the self is socially consti-
tuted through and through” (Habermas 1992: 183). Given the reaction-
ary uses for which biology has often been employed in discussions of
race and gender – epitomized in the slogan “biology is destiny” – one
can understand the skepticism toward it among progressives. Neverthe-
less, as Jean Laplanche has pointed out, sociologism is every bit as much
in error as biologism, and both forms of one-sidedness must be avoided
(Laplanche 1989: 17ff).
The linguistic strain and the transcendental strain converged in Haber-
mas’s theory and steadily moved him away from the psychoanalytic mate-
rialism he had flirted with in Knowledge and Human Interests. The idea
of systematically distorted communication that Habermas introduced to
elucidate Freud’s theory of neurosis funneled his thinking into the increas-
ingly transcendental channel that he followed for the remainder of his
career. The concept of systematically distorted communication can be
compared to Descartes’s notion of totalized delusion, resulting from the
machinations of a malevolent genius, that the founder of modern philos-
ophy employed in his philosophical construction. And just as Descartes
required an Archimedean point outside the totalized delusionary cosmos,
so Habermas must locate a standpoint outside the structure of systemati-
cally distorted communication. On purely logical grounds, systematically
distorted communication requires a concept of undistorted communication
from which its distortions can be recognized as distortions and corrected.
As Habermas observes,

If the interpretation I have suggested is true, the psychoanalyst must

have a “prenotion,” or rough (sic) understanding, of the structure of
undistorted ordinary-language communication in order to be able at
all to trace systematic distortions of language back to a confusion of
two developmentally distinct stages of prelinguistic and linguistic
organization.
(Habermas 1975: 184)

To elucidate the notion of systematically distorted communication, Haber-

mas, in the wake of Knowledge and Human Interests, posited the notion of
an ideal speech situation. It consisted in a counterfactual, distortion-free
location from which the systematic distortions of actual communication
can be illuminated as distorted.
18 Joel Whitebook

The postulation of an ideal speech situation represented the first of many

attempts in which Habermas sought to delineate a (quasi-)­transcendental
standpoint to ground his position while avoiding the pitfalls of a full-
blown transcendental theory. It is often said that Aristotle is the philoso-
pher of the equivocal, of the “in some sense,” and what one makes of
Aristotle often depends on what one makes of his notion of the equivo-
cal. Something similar can be said of Habermas. At different points in the
development of his theory, he has employed prefixes like “quasi-,” “soft-,”
or “post-” to characterize his brand of modified transcendental theoriz-
ing. How the success of Habermas’s philosophical program as a whole is
evaluated depends in no small part on what one makes of his use of these
prefixes. Are they question-begging devices, or do they do the conceptual
work he claims they do?
Habermas maintains that he has de-transcendentalized his position
by formulating it in terms of the philosophy of language rather than
of the philosophy of consciousness. But he fails to recognize a fun-
damental point: his linguistically formulated “quasi”-transcendental
position remains every bit as much an instance of what Adorno calls
“constitutive subjectivity” as Kant’s paradigmatic rendering of tran-
scendental philosophy that was formulated in terms of the philosophy
of consciousness (Adorno 1973: xx). Transcendental intersubjectivity is
still transcendental subjectivity. The only difference is that the subject
is plural rather than singular. One might say that Habermas’s posi-
tion is one of “constitutive intersubjectivity,” and as such, it not only
retains some of the fundamental difficulties with transcendental phi-
losophy but also hypostatizes the “primacy of language” over the “pri-
macy of the object,” which, as we saw, was Adorno’s way of referring
to materialism.
In the same vein, Habermas’s transcendental quest not only led him
away from Freud in general but also resulted in one particular conse-
quence: all references to the body virtually disappeared from his thinking.
Because Habermas’s “investigation of the basic structures of intersubjec-
tivity is directed exclusively to an analysis of rules of speech,” Axel Hon-
neth observes, “the bodily dimension of social action no longer comes into
view.” Consequently, “the human body, whose historical fate Adorno [and
Horkheimer] had drawn into the center of their investigation . . . loses all
value within critical social theory” (Honneth 1991: 281).
 Psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School 19

Axel Honneth and Joel Whitebook

In the third generation of the Frankfurt School, Axel Honneth and I have
continued the attempt to integrate psychoanalysis and critical theory (Hon-
neth 1996: 92–237, 2012: 101–231; Honneth and Whitebook 2016; White-
book 1996, 2004, 2017). However, despite the fact that we have both drawn
on the preoedipal turn in psychoanalysis, our positions differ in substantial
ways. For Honneth, psychoanalysis plays a subsidiary role and is only one
element of his larger theory of recognition. Moreover, he has moved in the
direction of relational psychoanalysis, which, he believes, avoids the puta-
tive biologism and anthropological pessimism of Freudian drive theory
and provides support for his intersubjectivist position. For me, on the other
hand, psychoanalysis does not only retain a central role in my thinking, but
I have also remained closer to the classical Freudian position and the way
in which the first generation appropriated it.
Perhaps the major difference in our positions is this. Honneth, like many
other progressives who have taken up psychoanalysis, has turned to infant
research and the relational school to elucidate the pro-social forces in
psychic life and combat Freud’s postulation of “primary mutual hostil-
ity [between] human beings.” I too want to do justice to the pro-social
aspects of our psychological inheritance, which, to be sure, were often
overlooked in the Freudian tradition. I do not want to accomplish this,
however, by minimizing the antisocial forces – most notably, destructive-
ness and omnipotence – that are also part of that same inheritance. In my
opinion, Honneth, no less than Habermas, is guilty of that mistake. The
task of accurately elucidating the relation between the pro-social and anti-
social forces inherent in the human psyche, as I see it, is located high on
the contemporary psychoanalytic agenda.
Hegel, the philosopher of the World Spirit, and Donald Winnicott, the
theorist of the teddy bear, may strike one as an unlikely twosome. Never-
theless, as Jessica Benjamin had done before him, Honneth brings the two
thinkers together in an attempt to develop his version of critical theory
(Benjamin 1988). He sees their convergence as consisting in the fact that
both thinkers wanted to overcome a monadic starting point and maintained
that the self is a product of interaction. Thus, Hegel’s way of exiting the
philosophy of consciousness was to introduce the struggle for recognition.
And Winnicott – who famously stated that “there is no such thing as baby
20 Joel Whitebook

without a mother” – attempted to overcome Freud’s one-person psychol-

ogy, which began with primary narcissism, by introducing the notion of
transitional phenomena (Winnicott 1960: 587, n. 1).
In turning to the relational analysts, however, Honneth inherited three
difficulties that are characteristic of their position. First, he tends to share
their implicit and erroneous assumption that to demonstrate that the self is a
product of interaction – a claim that nobody would deny today – is to dem-
onstrate that the self is ipso facto sociable (Whitebook 2008: 382). Second,
like the Freud Left tradition in general, he tends to assume that antisocial
phenomena like destructiveness and omnipotence are not intrinsic features
of psychic life but are reactive, that is, the result of environmental fail-
ure. The implication is that they could be avoided through better familial
arrangements and child-rearing practices. And third, like the relational ana-
lysts, he tends to make selective use of Winnicott. It is true that ­Winnicott
is a preeminent two-person psychologist and that, with his theory of tran-
sitional phenomena, he has made an essential contribution to the field. But
it is also true that the British analyst posits a state of omnipotence – of
­complete “illusionment” – at the beginning of life and argues the mother’s
task is to disillusion the infant. Indeed, the whole purpose of the transitional
object is to make that disillusionment possible. The notion of transitional
phenomena would not make sense without the assumption of an original
state of omnipotence. By minimizing or denying the role of omnipotence in
psychic life, Honneth provides us with an overly socialized account of the
human animal and, despite his differences with Habermas, also, domesti-
cates psychoanalytic theory (Honneth and Whitebook 2016: 176).
In my estimate, in order to advance the integration of psychoanaly-
sis and critical theory, three difficulties have to be avoided: Adorno and
Horkheimer’s impasse and political quietism, Marcuse’s utopianism, and
Habermas’s domestication of psychoanalysis, which excluded the body
and denied the radical alterity of the unconscious. My program has been
to draw on the work of the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald and the philoso-
pher, psychoanalyst, and social theorist Cornelius Castoriadis, to return to
Horkheimer and Adorno’s notion of “the remembrance of nature within
the subject” in an attempt to provide it with content (Castoriadis 1984:
3–118, 1987: 101–114 and 273–339; Loewald 2000).
Before pursuing that program, however, a preliminary task is in order:
Horkheimer and Adorno’s (as well as Marcuse’s) notion of a totally
Another random document with
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weasel-faced. His mouth was fixed in a perpetual smirk, and I
formed a dislike for him—immediate and intense. I wondered what
the Kids would call him, and a suggestion immediately came to mind:
Uncle Jerk.
"Can't say as I approve of this place at all," said Pettigrew as we
climbed aboard the mono-car. "Matter of fact, I strongly disapprove."
"Well, sir," I said, trying not to gnash my teeth, "I don't quite see how
you can be certain until you've seen it."
"Principle. Matter of principle."
I didn't answer. Hoppy caught my eye and winked.

A rousing cheer came from the Kids down in the courtyard as we

climbed out of the car. Then I heard the brief, plaintive whimper of
Mommy's pitch-pipe and once again the "Welcome Song"
reverberated throughout Fairyland. The Uncles waved down at the
Kids, with the exception of Pettigrew, who fidgeted until the song was
finished. As we descended in the lift, he said: "This place must cost
the taxpayers a tidy sum."
"As a matter of fact, we're almost self-sustaining," I said. "A few tons
of reactor fuel per annum is all we require to—"
"Don't humor him, Harry," said Boswell. "Let him read the Report."
Pettigrew glared, but except for an inaudible mutter he took
Boswell's squelch without comment. I was wondering what
significance might be hidden in this addition of a fourth Uncle to the
Council, but I finally shrugged it off. Earthside politics bored the hell
out of me.
Mommy was waiting to greet us as we stepped out of the elevator
and Uncle Chub gave her a big hug. "How's the First Lady of the
Galaxy?" he said, and she brightened as though it were a
spontaneous compliment she was hearing for the first time instead of
the twentieth.
Then the Kids broke ranks and milled around us, squealing and
laughing and firing questions about Santa Claus. Being new,
Pettigrew received a good deal of attention. "Who are you?" "What's
your Uncle-name?" "Do you live with Santy Claus or with the
fairies?" "How cold is the cold side of Number One Sun?" "Do you
like merry-go-rounds better than rolly-coasters?"
The pelting of this verbal barrage sent him spinning like a crippled
spaceship and I wedged myself through the ring of Kids to rescue
him. "Come on, gang! Break it up!"
Pettigrew gave me a look of wide-eyed terror. "They're insane," he
whispered. "Look at them! They're adults, but they act like—like—"
"Like children," I said. "That's what they are, Mr. Pettigrew. I thought
the other Councilors had explained—"
"They did. But I never thought—well, I mean this is awful!"
I grinned, "You'll get used to it."
"Whole thing is ludicrous. Ludicrous!" He waved an all-
encompassing hand that included the Kids, Fairyland, its basic
concept, and me.
I was getting more disenchanted with this character all the time.
"Now just a minute, you—"
A strong hand closed over my arm and I looked around into the
grinning face of Hoppy. "Let's get the program started, eh?" he said.

The next three hours were a hodge-podge of well-rehearsed chaos.

The Council had to inspect everything so they could return a first-
hand report to the Solar Committee for Sociological Research, and
on the other hand all the Kids had to show off for the Uncles.
The first stop on the agenda was the Arts & Crafts Building where we
exhibited the drawings and clay animals and models and beadwork
and a thousand-and-one other items the Kids had made with their
own hands. From there we adjourned to the school where Ruth had
displayed a few samples of the work of each class.
"We only have one teacher," I explained to Pettigrew, "because each
class meets for just an hour a day. We stagger the classes,
kindergarten through third grade. The Kids spend an average of five
years in each grade, including kindergarten."
"Ridiculous!"
"There's nothing ridiculous about it," I said, patiently, "for the simple
reason that they're not in any hurry."
"Hmph. Well, I am. Let's get on with it."
From the school the procession migrated to the Recreation Hall. We
visited the game room for demonstrations by Checker Champ Mike-
One and Chess Champ Adam-Two, then witnessed exhibitions at the
Bowling Alley, Basketball Court, and the Ice and Roller Rinks. I
explained to Pettigrew that each Kid was Champ of something.
There were enough categories for everybody, and nobody was
allowed to be Champ of more than one thing at a time. Uncle Petty
mumbled something I didn't catch.
We skirted the Midway and took a tour of the Pretty Park. Here at
last was something Pettigrew could accept; he almost smiled as he
saw the huge flower beds raised by the Botany Team. But the
almost-smile disappeared as we explained to him the purpose of the
little cottages nestled among the trees. His eyes bugged and his face
became quite red, and his voice failed him so that he could only
sputter.
"We only retard the mind," I explained, "not the body. Playing House
is just another recreational activity, like riding the merry-go-round or
playing golf. The Kids enjoy it, but they don't make a big thing out of
it. We treat the whole subject quite casually, and frankly."
I'll say this for Pettigrew, he had spunk. He swallowed his moral
indignation, squared his thin shoulders, took a deep breath and
managed to find his voice. But it failed him again on the word
"pregnancy."
"We allow that to occur only rarely," I said. "We're building to a static
population of a hundred and forty. At the current rate of one Dolly per
year, in three more years we'll—"
"One what per year?"
"Dolly." I caught Hoppy's muffled snort behind me and managed to
hold down the size of my grin. "The Kids call it 'making a Dolly.' It's a
rare treat and the girls look forward to it."
When the danger of apoplexy had subsided, Mr. Pettigrew choked,
"This—this is ... monstrous! Monstrous!" And, having found the right
word, he savored it: "Monstrous."
There were too many kids around to pursue the discussion. Little
pitchers, I thought. I was especially concerned about Adam-Two,
who had been lurking as close to the group of Uncles as possible,
soaking in every word like a damp sponge. Twice I whispered to
Ruth to decoy him out of earshot, but she was too busy to keep an
eye on him all the time. She'd no sooner turn her back than he'd
edge up through the crowd again, a look of fierce curiosity on his thin
face.
From the Pretty Park we made our way to the Golf Course, the
Football and Baseball Fields, then the Tennis Courts and Swimming
Pool. Demonstrations were given at each stop, with much shouting
and applause. After the final demonstration by the Diving Champ, we
made a tour of the dormitories. Pettigrew went through a minor
tantrum again when the Dolly Team showed him through the small
Maternity Ward in the girls' dorm.
At last we filed into the Auditorium for the Happy Show. The Kids
who weren't Champs of some game or craft were all in the Happy
Show. We watched, listened, and applauded for the Song Champ,
the Somersault Champ, the Dancing Champ, the Yo-yo Champ, and
many more. The piece-de-resistance was a playlet entitled "The
Uncles' Visit," where three of the boys imitated Uncles Chub, Hoppy,
and Thin. (We hadn't been expecting Uncle Petty, so he wasn't in it.
Probably just was as well, I thought.) It was a riot.
After the show, lollipops were passed out to everybody and it was
Free Time until lunch. Mommy stayed below to keep an eye on
things and I herded the Uncles up to the conference room in the
Tower.
Uncle Chub Boswell rapped the meeting to order. He paid me the
standard compliment about how healthy and happy the Kids looked
and what a fine job Ruth and I were doing here, then asked me to
read the Annual Report.
Before I could get my papers in order, Pettigrew piped, "Mr.
Chairman, I'd like to ask a few pertinent questions."
"All right, Petty. Make it brief."
"Thank you. I should like to ask—er, what was your name again?"
"Barnaby," I said. "Harry Barnaby. Just call me Daddy."
He glared my grin into oblivion. "Mr. Barnaby, I would like you to
explain to me the purpose of this installation."
For some reason, the tone of his voice on the word "installation"
infuriated me. "What the devil are you driving at?" I snapped.
There was a faint suggestion of a sneer on his pasty little face. "I'm
interested in ascertaining, Mr. Barnaby, just how you justify the
continued conduction of this perpetual circus and picnic for the
mentally retarded, at tremendous expense to the taxpayers."
I felt an almost irresistible urge to lean across the conference table
and hit him in the mouth. I turned to Boswell and said, "Chub, I think
you'd better get this pip-squeak out of here."
Boswell glowered at Pettigrew. "Petty, I told you to watch your lip."
"I don't have to take that kind of talk from you, Boswell!"
"Yes you do, as long as I'm Chairman of this committee!"
"Don't be surprised if we have a new Chairman shortly after we
return to Earth," said Mr. Pettigrew smugly.
Boswell grinned at me. "Mr. Pettigrew figgers he's got influence,
Harry. He has a second cousin on the Senate Committee of the
Galactic Council. Figgers he'll have me sacked and make himself
Chairman. He ain't been a bureaucrat long enough to appreciate the
red-tape involved in that kind of caper."
I laughed, and managed to look at Pettigrew without wanting to hit
him. "I don't mind questions," I said, "as long as they're put to me in
a civil manner.
"I'll tell you, Mr. Pettigrew, what the purpose of this 'installation' is.
We're trying to find out how to make people happy. And we think
we've got the answer. Don't let them find out that there's no Santa
Claus, that everybody dies, that it doesn't always pay to be good.
Don't let them know that sex is dirty, childbirth is painful, and not
everybody can be a champion. Don't let them find out what a stupid,
sordid, ugly, ridiculous place the world is. In short, Mr. Pettigrew,
don't let them grow up!"
"Nonsense!"
"Nonsense, Mr. Pettigrew? You saw them. You saw how they live.
You saw their faces and heard them laugh. Judge for yourself."
Pettigrew scowled at me. "Am I to understand, Mr. Barnaby, that you
seriously propose that this quaint little ... er ... experiment be
adopted as a way of life, for everybody?"
"Why not?" I was warming to my subject now, and I leaned across
the table toward him. "Why not? We've had seven thousand years of
civilization. We spent the first six thousand learning more and more
subtle and complex reasons for hating one another and the last
thousand in developing more elaborate and fiendish ways of
destroying one another. And out of our so-called scientific
advancement, accidentally, has come a thing called automation. The
age of the laborer and breadwinner is past. What are we going to do,
Mr. Pettigrew? Let man use his leisure time to discover even more
effective ways of destroying himself ... or let him live in a Fairyland?"
Uncle Petty turned his head slowly, letting his gaze travel around the
room as if he were seeking moral support. He started to say
something, then shook his head.
"Think of it," I went on, "a whole world full of happy kids! And a new
kind of aristocracy—the Daddies and Mommies. They and their
children would be trained to supervise, to keep an eye on things, just
as Ruth and I do here. The Kids could be trained to do what little
maintenance the machines require—"
"You're insane!" Pettigrew exploded. "That's it! You're crazier than
the rest of them out there. You—"
I don't know whether or not I really intended to hit him, or how things
might have turned out if I had. Luckily, Boswell jumped to his feet
and pulled me back as I made a lunge across the table. "Take it
easy, Harry," he said quietly. Then he turned to Pettigrew. "Petty,
we've had enough out of you for today. Open your mouth again and
I'll lock you in the ship till we're ready to leave!"
Pettigrew slid lower in his chair and after a brief mumbling was silent.
I apologized to Boswell for losing my temper. "Forget it, Harry," he
chuckled. "Wanted to hit 'im myself lots of times.... Well, let's have
the Report, eh?"

The bulk of the Annual Report consisted of a lot of dry statistics

about the hydroponics crop, the weight and height and emotional
ratings of the Kids, reports on certain educational and recreational
experiments, and so on. The problem of Adam-Two was the last item
on the agenda, and as I read it they perked up their ears and
stopped yawning.
"... and in light of these developments, the under-signed
recommends that Adam-Two be transported to Earth and given a
normal education so that he may be assimilated into the society."
I stood for a moment, holding the papers in my hand, looking from
one to the other of that quartet of blank, silent faces.
Finally, Boswell cleared his throat. "Harry, let me get this straight.
You think this ... what's his name? Adam-Two. You actually think he's
—ah—growing up?"
I nodded. "There isn't a doubt in my mind, and Ruth agrees."
"And you think we oughta take him back to Earth with us?"
"Sure, I do. I think that's the only solution, don't you?"
Eaker coughed discreetly. "I'm afraid it isn't any solution at all."
"What would we do with him?" Hoppy wanted to know.
"Look," I said, "the kid is a misfit. He doesn't belong here. He
belongs on Earth where he can get an education and maybe a
chance to ... to make something of himself."
Boswell cleared his throat again. "Seems like he'd be a worse misfit
on Earth than he is here, Harry."
"He would not!" I snapped. "He's a sharp kid. He'd adapt himself in
no time."
Eaker spoke up again. "It seems to me we're overlooking an
important point here, gentlemen. Isn't Fairyland supposed to be a
sort of testing ground for a particular sociological theory? It seems to
me we'd be defeating our purpose if we removed this lad just
because he doesn't seem to fit. If the world is to be converted to a
Fairyland, there'll be more Adam-Two's from time to time. What's to
be done with them?"
"Nuts!" I said. "It's not the same problem, and you know it. If the
whole world were like this place, Fairyland would be the only reality
there was. Guys like Adam would have to accept it.... Why don't you
just admit that you don't want to be bothered with this?"
Boswell rapped for order. "Gentlemen, there's no need to waste any
more time with this.... Now Harry, you know we've got no real
jurisdiction in this. We're just advisory. The Kids are all wards of the
Solar State and if you want to appeal for help through official
channels, we'll be glad to initiate a request for you when we get back
to Earth."
I realized now that I might as well have saved my breath. It was the
old bureaucratic buck-pass. For twenty years, the Uncles' visit had
been merely an annual ritual—and they intended to keep it that way.
They had a nice, soft touch and they weren't going to let anything
spoil it. Sure, they'd initiate a report ... and by the time it filtered
through the spiral nebula of red-tape, Adam and I would both have
died of old age.
I gathered up my papers. "Just forget it," I said sourly. "If there's no
further business, let's adjourn for lunch and I'll take you back to the
ship."

At the spaceport we shook hands and Hoppy hung back after the
others had gone up the gangway. He put his hand on my shoulder.
"I'm sorry about this Adam thing, Harry."
"Forget it."
"I know how you feel, and I wish we could help. But you know how it
is...."
"Sure. I know how it is."
"The Administration's all wound up in the Rearmament Program.
Doubling the size of the space fleet. Everybody's edgy, wondering
whether there's going to be war with the Centauri crowd. Hardly
anyone remembers there is such a place as Fairyland. If we go back
and kick up a fuss, no telling what might happen. Most of the
Government budget is earmarked for defense. We might all find
ourselves among the unemployed."
I looked at him for a long time, until his eyes couldn't meet mine any
more. "Hoppy," I said quietly, "how long has it been since they
stopped thinking of Fairyland as a practical possibility?"
He shrugged, still not looking at me. "I don't know, Harry. Twelve,
maybe fifteen years, I suppose. There aren't many Happy Hooligans
around any more—at least they aren't working at it. They're all
getting rich off the defense effort."
"So they're just letting us drift along out here because it's easier than
disbanding the thing and trying to rehabilitate the Kids. That right?"
He nodded. "That's about it."
I took a deep breath, and shook my head. "Why, Hoppy? Why?"
"Oh, hell!" he blurted. "Let's face it, Harry. The whole idea just isn't
practical. It would never work."
"Never work!" I shouted. "It's been working for forty years!"
"Sure, sure—it works here. On an isolated desert planet a billion
miles from Earth, it works fine. But you can't remake the whole world
into a Fairyland, Harry. You just can't do it!"
There was a sinking, sickening feeling in my guts. "Okay, Hoppy.
Okay.... Blast off."
He stood looking at me for a moment, then turned and hurried up the
gangway.
Just as he reached the hatch, two figures emerged suddenly from
the ship. One wore the uniform of a Space Fleet astro-navigator. The
other was Adam-Two.
I ran up the gangway in time to hear the navigator telling Hoppy, "I
found him in the forward chart room."
"Adam!" I yelled. "What are you up to now?"
"I wanted to go along," he said. "I wanted to see if they were really
going to the cold side of Number One Sun."
I grabbed his arm and hustled him down to the mono-car. We slid
clear of the dock and about half a mile away I stopped the car to
watch them blast off.
Adam's eyes were wide with wonderment. "What makes it go?"
"Rocket motors," I said absently. I watched the ship, now just a mote
disappearing in the twilight sky. And I thought, There goes the tag
end of a twenty-year dream.
That was all it had ever been; I knew that now. Just a dream, and a
stupid one at that. I'd deluded myself even more than the Kids.
"What's a rocket motor?"
I looked at Adam. "What? What did you say?"
"I said, what's a rocket motor?"
"Who said anything about rocket motors?"
"You did. I asked you what makes it go and you said, rocket motors."
I frowned. "Forget it. Magic makes it go. Santa Claus magic."
"Okay, Daddy. Sure."
Something about his tone made me look sharply at him. He was
grinning at me; a cynical, adult-type grin. Yesterday it would have
made me furious. Today, for some crazy reason, it made me burst
out laughing. I laughed for quite a long time, and then as suddenly
as it began, it was over. I rumpled his hair and started the car.
"Adam," I said, "take a tip from your Daddy. Stop trying to find out
about things. Hang onto your dreams. Dreams are happy things, and
truth is sometimes pretty ugly...."

CHAPTER IV
That night after Taps I told Ruth about the Council meeting and
about my chat with Hoppy at the ship. She came and sat beside me
and, in the age-old manner of a loyal wife, assured me that
everything was going to be all right.
I stood up and began prowling around the room. "It's not all right.
The plain and simple truth is that we've thrown away twenty years on
this pipe dream. All for nothing!"
"You don't mean that, Harry. Not for nothing."
"The hell I don't! Remember how skeptical we were when we first
heard about this place? Then old Hogarth, Daddy-Two, came to see
us. Remember how we fell for it? We were going to be doing
something important! We were the vanguard of a world revolution—
the greatest thing since the invention of people. A great sociological
advancement.... What a laugh! Fairyland is nothing but a—an orphan
home! And mark my words, sooner or later they're going to come
and close the place down!"
Ruth patted the seat beside her. "Harry, come back and sit down."
I scowled at her. But I sat.
"Harry," she said, "I'm just a woman. I don't know much about world
revolutions or sociology. But I know one thing. No matter what
happens, these twenty years haven't been wasted. We've been
happy, Harry. And so have the Kids."
"I wonder.... Are they happy, Ruth? Do we even know what
happiness is?"
She smiled. "Darling, please don't go abstract on me. I know they're
happy."
"And what about Adam?"
She shook her head. "I suppose he's not. But the percentage is still
pretty high, don't you think? You said Fairyland is nothing more than
an orphan home, and maybe you're right. I guess I never really
thought of it any other way."
I stared at the woman who had been my wife for twenty-three years
as if I'd never seen her before. "You mean you never, not even at the
beginning, believed in the idea of Fairyland?"
"I just didn't think much about it, Harry. I believed in the Kids, that's
all. I figured that our job was to look after them and keep them happy
and well. We've done that job, and I think it's a pretty fine
achievement. I'm proud—for both of us!"
"Thanks," I said dully. "You know, Mommy, I'd almost forgotten...."
"Almost forgotten what, Daddy?"
I laughed shortly. "What it feels like to find out there's no Santa
Claus!"

In the two-week interval between Uncles' Day and Christmas-Two,

the air in Fairyland became super-charged with a kind of hushed
expectancy, and of course everybody was being extra-special good
in the manner of kids everywhere during Santa's Season. The
holiday spirit should have been contagious, but this season I wasn't
having any. My pet theory and private dream had been scuttled, so I
sulked around feeling sorry for myself.
Even Adam-Two was a model of juvenile deportment. Never late for
meals, always washed behind his ears, and—best of all—he stopped
asking embarrassing questions. This sudden change probably would
have made me suspicious if I'd been thinking clearly. As it was, I
merely felt grateful. And of course Mommy was too busy helping the
girls make popcorn and candy to concern herself with such things.
On Christmas Eve, I turned the weather machines to Snow—a
category specially reserved for our two Christmases—and the big,
soft white flakes came drifting lazily down into Fairyland. The lights
were out in all the buildings, the Kids were asleep, and our two
moons were bright and full. Ruth and I stood silently on the front
porch, watching the snow and the moonlight.
"Harry...."
"Mm?"
"Do you still think these twenty years were wasted?"
I slipped an arm around her waist. "It isn't fair to ask me that on a
night like this.... But if they were, I'm glad we wasted them together."
She leaned over and kissed my cheek. "Thank you, Daddy. Merry
Christmas."
"Merry Christmas, Mommy."
Next morning, I donned my pillow-stuffed Santa uniform and itchy
white whiskers and stood with Mommy on the Auditorium stage,
beaming into a bright sea of expectant faces.
"Merry Christmas, everybody. Mer-r-r-y Christmas! Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho!"
"Merry Christmas, Santa Claus!" came the answering chorus.
"Did you all manage to bust up your toys from last Christmas?"
"Ye-e-e-s!"
"Good!" I boomed. "Ho-ho-ho! Can't get new ones unless we bust up
the old ones, you know!"
We all sang "Christmas in Fairyland," and then it was Present
Passing Time. Santa's Space Sled was behind me, chock full of toys.
I reached back and pulled out a package.
"Julia-Three!"
"Here I am, Santy!" She came running down the aisle, a lovely
blonde of about twenty-five, curls flying.
"Have you been a good girl, Julia-Three?"
"Yes, Santy."
"And you wanted a new dolly?"
She nodded emphatically.
"You broke your dolly from last Christmas?"
"Yes, Santy."
"Fine."
She took her present and went skipping off the far side of the stage.
Everything went smoothly for perhaps half an hour and the sled was
about half empty when I snagged a small, flat package marked
"Adam-Two."
He strolled down the aisle and up onto the stage. His eyes were
bright—a little too bright—and there was just the hint of a smile on
his thin face.
"Well, well, Adam-Two! Have you been a good boy?"
"Not very."
I gave him a fierce Santa Claus frown. "Well, now, that's too bad. But
old Santa's glad that you're honest about it.... By the way, you didn't
send old Santy a letter, did you?"
"No. I didn't think I'd get a present because I wasn't good. Anyway, I
didn't know what I wanted." He was staring fixedly at my beard.
"Well, suppose we give you a present anyway, and you try very hard
to be good between now and next Christmas, eh? Ho-ho-ho-ho!"
We'd gotten him a set of chess men. He took the package without
looking at it. "Where's Daddy?" he asked suddenly.
It was so unexpected, so matter-of-fact, that it caught me off
balance. The Kids were always too excited on Christmas morning to
worry about where Daddy might be.
"Well, sir ... ho-ho-ho ... ah, Daddy was kinda sleepy this morning, so
he thought he'd rest up a bit and let Mommy and Santa Claus look
after things—Merry Christmas, Adam-Two! Now, let's see who's next
—"
I turned to pull another package from the sled, and Adam took one
quick step forward, grabbed my beard and yanked hard! It came
away in his hands, and there I stood with my naked Daddy-face
exposed to all the Kids.
The silence was immediate, and deadly.
Then I heard Adam's sudden, sharp intake of breath that was almost
like a sob. I glanced at him for just an instant, but in that instant I
glimpsed the terrible disappointment he must have felt. It was all
there, in his eyes and in his face. He hadn't wanted that beard to
come off. He'd wanted Santa Claus to be real....
He turned away from me and faced the Kids, holding that phony
beard high over his head. "You see!" he shrilled. "It's just like I said!
There really isn't any Santa Claus. He's just—just make-believe, like
the fairies and—and—" His voice broke and he threw the beard
down, jumped off the stage and ran toward the exit.
Ruth called to him. "Adam! Come back here at once!"
"Let him go, Mommy." I looked ruefully out at our stunned and silent
audience. "We've got something more important to do first."
I stepped forward and pulled off my Santa Claus hat. For a long
moment I just stood there, trying to decide what to say. Even if I'd
had my speech rehearsed, I don't think I could have talked around
the lump in my throat.
I couldn't shake the feeling that somehow I had failed them. It was a
feeling that went much deeper than my inability to cope with Adam-
Two and his problem. It was a real, deep-down hollow feeling that
stemmed from my conviction, ever since the Uncles' visit, that the
whole idea of Fairyland was a mistake. I wanted to talk to each and
every one of them, alone. I wanted to tell them, "It's going to be all
right. Mommy and Daddy love you and will always look after you, so
you mustn't worry."
And so I stood there on the stage in my ridiculous, padded Santa
suit, and somehow managed a smile. "Kids," I said, "Daddy's sure
sorry, but you see Santa Claus just couldn't make it today. He—his
spaceship broke down—like our merry-go-round, remember? So
Santa asked Daddy to sort of ... to pretend—"
Down in the front row, nine-year old Molly-Five suddenly began to
sob. Two rows behind her, thirteen-year old Mary-Three took up the
cry. Then across the aisle from Mary, another girl wailed, "I want
Santa Claus!" In the back of the Auditorium, fifteen-year-old Johnny-
Four shouted, "We hate you! You're a mean old Daddy!"
And there in the aisle, pointing an accusing finger at me, was thirty-
eight-year old Mike-One, who brought his Santa-problem to me—
was it only three weeks ago? Mike-One, his arm extended, his chin
trembling, yelling: "You lied to me! You lied, lied, lied!"
It took the better part of an hour to restore a semblance of order.
When the first shock was over and the hysterical, contagious tears
had subsided a little, Mommy and I managed to convince the Kids, at
least most of them, that Santa was alive and well, that he was very
sorry he couldn't make it, but if they'd be good and not fuss about it
they'd all get something extra special next Christmas. Just for good
measure, we doubled the Ice Cream Ration for the next two weeks.
When it was over, I went looking for Adam-Two.
I was boiling mad, and I knew I ought to wait until I cooled off before
having it out with him. But after what he'd pulled today, I didn't dare
trust him out of my sight that long. I knew that my anger was
irrational, but the knowledge didn't help much.
I found him behind the Picnic Grounds, throwing snowballs at the
Great Wall. He was using the force field like a billiard cushion to
bank his shots back in toward the trees.
He saw me coming and waited quietly, idly tossing a snowball from
one hand to the other. For a moment I thought he might be going to
heave it at me. But then he looked down at it, as if it were something
he'd outgrown, and tossed it indifferently aside.
The expression on his face was not one of defiance, or arrogance—
but neither was it that of a boy who was sorry he'd been naughty. I
guess it was a sort of waiting look.
"Well, son," I said, surprised that my anger had suddenly
evaporated, "you sure messed things up, didn't you?"
"I guess I did, all right."
"You're not sorry?"
"I had to find out."
I nodded. "And you figure you did find out, is that it?"
"Yes."
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you that Santa just couldn't get here
—that he asked me to pretend to be him so the Kids wouldn't be
disappointed?"
He shook his head. "No, I wouldn't believe it."
For a moment the anger boiled up in me again and I wanted to grab
him and shake him. I had a crazy notion that if I shook him hard
enough I could shake him back into the mold, and make him once
again just a Kid in Fairyland. Then everything would be all right....
I bent over and made a snowball and heaved it at the Wall, to give
my hands something to do. My throw was too straight and the force
field kicked it back at us. We both ducked as it whizzed over our
heads, then grinned at each other.
"Come on over to Mommy and Daddy's House," I said. "I want to talk
to you."
We trudged along through the three-inch snow, down the path
between the Circus Grounds and the dormitories. The Kids were
drifting back from lunch, and I noticed the noise level was
considerably lower than on any other Christmas I could remember.
They hadn't completely recovered yet, and they probably wouldn't for
a long time. I didn't know what to do about it except to sweat it out.
Ruth greeted us at the door. "Hello, Adam," she said. "Come on in."
"You're not angry with me?"
She shook her head. "We know you couldn't help yourself, don't we,
Daddy?"
"I guess so," I said drily.
We went into the living room and I waved Adam to a seat. I stretched
out in my favorite chair-lounge, feeling suddenly very old and very
tired. Adam sat forward in his chair, watching me with that waiting
look—defiant yet shy, courageous, yet a little afraid, resigned and yet
hopeful....
"Adam," I said at last, "what are you trying to prove? What is it you
want?"
He wet his lips and lowered his eyes for a moment. Then his gaze
met mine without flinching. "It's like I told you once before," he said
quietly. "I just want to know the truth, the real truth about everything!"
I got to my feet and began to slowly pace the floor. I paused in front
of Ruth's chair and looked down at her. She caught my hand, gave it
a squeeze and nodded.
I turned back to Adam. "You won't like it," I said.
"Maybe not. But I gotta know. I just gotta!"
"Not 'gotta'," Ruth corrected automatically. "'Have to'."
"I have to know."
I paced three more laps, still hesitating. I felt like a surgeon, trying to
decide whether or not to operate when it's a toss-up whether the
operation will kill the patient or cure him.
"All right, Adam," I said wearily. "You win. But you have to promise
me something. Promise me that you'll never say anything to the
other Kids about what I'm going to tell you."
Now it was his turn to weigh a decision, and I could feel the battle
going on behind those crystal-clear eyes. His innate honesty, battling
with his insatiable curiosity. He considered for perhaps a full minute,
then he nodded. "Okay. I don't think it's right not to tell Kids the truth
—but I promise."
"Cross your heart?"
"Cross my heart."
I took a deep breath, signalled Ruth to make some coffee, and
began.
"You were right about Santa Claus, Adam. He's just make-believe,
and so are the fairies. Santa Claus was invented by Mommies and
Daddies to represent the spirit of Christmas for kids too little to
understand its real meaning. People on Earth still observe the
holiday, although they've gradually forgotten what it really stands for.
I'll explain that part to you later."
"What's Earth, Daddy?"
"Earth is where everybody lived before there were any spaceships.
It's a big place, and some of it's nice and some of it not so nice. The
people live in houses, something like this one, and the ones in a
house are called families. There's a Mommy and a Daddy for each
family, and their kids live in the house with them."
"Where do the kids come from?"
"From the Mommy. It's the same as what we call 'making a Dolly'."
"Oh."

I talked for six hours, until I was so hoarse my voice was cracking on
every other word. He took it all in stride, injecting a question here
and there, absorbing it all like an unemotional sponge. But when I
began to talk about war, he became a little upset. I explained how it
had begun as individual struggles for survival or supremacy in the
days of the cavemen, how it had evolved along with society into
struggles between families and tribes, then nations, and now—
between planets.
"But why do they kill each other, Daddy? That doesn't prove
anything."
I laughed. "Son, if I could answer that one, I'd be Daddy Number
One of the whole universe!"

We finally packed Adam off to bed in the spare room, after promising
him we'd talk some more the next night. I'd shown him my library and
told him he could come and read any time he liked, though of course
he mustn't take any books out of the house where the Kids might
see them.