of what may appear as unabashed Cold War ideology. Even if Horkheimer’s introduction should be situated in the larger context of his work, which provides ample ammunition for those who lament The Family of Man’s complicity with a problematic status quo, we can still honor his intention to read the exhibition against that grain and inspire a still volatile post–Nazi Germany to work through the unresolved issues of its recent past. Insofar as many of these issues still, alas, remain exigent in the twenty-first century, new sets of eyes can still profit from the experience of viewing Steichen’s “blockbuster exhibition of postwar photographic ideology.”
“In Psychoanalysis Nothing Is True but the Exaggerations”: Freud and the Frankfurt School
In his classic essay “The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood,” émigré psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson stressed the role played by psychological projection in the anti-Semitic denigration of Jews. He then added, “While projections are hostile and fearful distortions, however, they are commonly not without a kernel of profound meaning. True, the projector who sees a mote in his brother’s eye overlooks the beam in his own, and the degree of distortion and the frightfulness of his reaction remains his responsibility. Yet there usually is something in the neighbor’s eye which lends itself to specific magnification.”1 Having already published his essay in 1950, a year before Adorno’s Minima Moralia, Erikson could not have known of his fellow émigré’s evocation of the same biblical passage for somewhat different purposes. But it is striking that both would be drawn to it as a way to stress the importance of projection, at once cognitive and psychological, as a source of both the distortion and illumination—or, more precisely, magnification—of reality. Both were also convinced that familial dynamics and childhood development were crucial in the formation of adult political inclinations, although Erikson was somewhat less pessimistic about the crisis of the traditional bourgeois family. Unlike other émigré analysts of totalitarianism in general and fascism in particular—Hannah Arendt and Carl Joachim Friedrich come immediately to mind—Erikson and members of the Frankfurt School understood the necessity of applying psychoanalytic insights to make some sense of the seemingly inexplicable appeal of nightmare politics in the twentieth century.
Erikson, to be sure, is normally grouped with either the ego psychologists or neo-Freudian revisionists who were disdained as social conformists by the Frankfurt School. Despite his having been born in 1902 in Frankfurt, only a year before Adorno, and emigrating from Nazi Germany in 1933, first to Denmark and then America, Erikson seems to have had little sustained contact with members of the Frankfurt School. An essay he wrote in 1942 entitled “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth” was, to be sure, cited approvingly several times in The Authoritarian Personality,2 and he was included in the celebrated lecture series in 1956 at the reconstituted Institute in Frankfurt, which brought Freud back to Germany after the war. But rather than discern ominous signs in America of the continuation of fascism by other means, he celebrated its culture during the Cold War (despite ultimately criticizing the war in Vietnam) and had little interest in the marriage of Marx and Freud. He was, moreover, a practicing clinician who had been trained by Anna Freud and worked throughout much of his career with children.
It was precisely a disdain for the therapeutic function of Freud’s theories that distinguished Marcuse and Adorno from Erikson and most other émigré psychoanalysts. Nor did Marcuse and Adorno champion the smooth integration of the psychological level of analysis with the social, which set them apart not only from Erikson but also from their erstwhile colleague Erich Fromm. But what perhaps most of all distinguished Critical Theory’s use of Freud from that of Erikson, Fromm and virtually all other defenders of his legacy was its proponents’ insistence on the biological moment in Freud’s work, including his much maligned instinct theory. Against the grain of those who saw it as a warrant for pessimism about the rigidity of human nature, they argued it could also inspire very different thoughts in a political imaginary that led not to dystopian fascism, but dreamt instead of utopian redemption.
Inherent in psychoanalysis is the protest against reality. Equilibrium on the basis of inner freedom. Non conformism.
Max Horkheimer3
When Herbert Marcuse, one of the leading figures of the Frankfurt School, was asked by a skeptical questioner how Marx and Freud could be unified in one coherent theory, he defiantly replied: “I think they can easily be married, and it may well be a happy marriage. I think these are two interpretations of two different levels of the same whole, of the same totality.”4 Leo Löwenthal, another founding member of the School, would likewise recall that “the systematic interest that must have spawned this fascination with psychoanalysis for me and many of my intellectual fellow travelers was very likely the idea of ‘marrying’ historical materialism with psychoanalysis.”5 The metaphor of marriage was often, in fact, employed to characterize the bold integration of Marx and Freud in the Critical Theory developed at the Institute of Social Research, out of which the Frankfurt School emerged.6 It suggests more than just a conceptual integration, but also one charged with affect, expressing an emotional bond between two loving partners joined together harmoniously and capable of producing heirs inheriting the best traits of each.
But whether it was a true and enduring marriage—let alone a happy, harmonious and productive one—is a question that needs to be reopened. For it is still not clear that two such seemingly different traditions—one stressing socioeconomic relations, confident in scientific rationality and radically political; the other individualist in focus, dwelling on unconscious irrational desires and cautiously therapeutic—can ever find the theoretical and practical equivalent of connubial bliss. Among the Marxist skeptics was Walter Benjamin, himself loosely associated with the Institute of Social Research in the 1930s, who denounced “capitalism as a religion” and argued that psychoanalysis “belongs to the hegemony of the priests of this cult. Its conception is capitalist through and through.”7 Other, later commentators also invested more in Marx than Freud have concluded with Fredric Jameson that “we have all probably overstressed the ‘Freudo-Marxism’ of the Frankfurt School, which is finally realized only in Marcuse.”8 For, if a marriage did take place, he went on, it was profoundly unequal, because the Frankfurt School applied Freud’s categories as “a kind of supplementary social psychology … but never as any centrally organizing concept.”9 Defenders of Erich Fromm, who, ironically, was largely responsible for the Frankfurt School’s initial attempt to combine the two before his break with the Institute in 1939, likewise came to praise him as a champion of Marxist humanism who recognized the ahistorical, biologistic limitations of psychoanalysis.10
Purist exponents of Freud, for their part, stressed Marxism’s fundamental indifference to psychological questions and its radical historicization of human nature (which they trace back to the founder himself), and thus the sterility of the forced marriage.11 In the words of Philip Rieff, “Marx followed Hegel in his anti-psychological orientation. Capitalism elicits personality types; personality types do not first elicit capitalism.”12 Later pro-Freudian skeptics have pointed to theorists like Jacques Lacan, whose “return to Freud,” according to one recent account, “reflected the waning of the New Left and the end of its hopes for a Marx/Freud synthesis.”13
Such a counterintuitive synthesis, call it marriage or not, was, of course, envisaged well before the Frankfurt School emerged as a distinct intellectual formation. Intimations of it can be traced as far back as Leon Trotsky in Soviet Russia, before it was explicitly proscribed when Stalin came to power and Pavlovian behaviorist conditioning became the reigning orthodoxy. One can find even more determined advocates in interwar Central Europe, such as Siegfried Bernfeld and Wilhelm Reich, and among the surrealists in France.14 What came to be called “the Freudian Left” included even non–explicitly political
