Adorno’s Reception and Application of Psychoanalysis
Benjamin Y. FongAbstract
This chapter reviews Theodor W. Adorno’s engagement with and deployment of psychoanalysis. Adorno was a perceptive reader of Freud and uniquely articulated psychoanalysis’s value within a historical perspective in such a way as to provide the theoretical framework for a novel research program. The chapter begins with an outline of the basic form of Adorno’s engagement with psychoanalysis, first articulated in his failed Habilitationsschrift, honed in his critique of the revisionist psychoanalysts, and laid out in mature form in “Sociology and Psychology.” Then, it fills in the basic content of Adorno’s deployment of psychoanalysis, the nucleus of which was the hypothesis of the new anthropological type. For Adorno, this type bore two essential psychological features: regression and instrumentality, or what the author has elsewhere called “losing oneself” and “living straight ahead.” Finally, the chapter concludes with a description of the research program that emerged out of this understanding of the new anthropological type and of what a renewed research agenda based on this theory might look like today.