combination of the two traditions.
In what follows, I focus on four motivations that overlapped but emerged to prominence at different moments in the Frankfurt School’s history and which compelled the first generation of members to serve as marriage broker between Marx and Freud. The first incentive for the matchmaking, apparent even before Max Horkheimer took over official directorship of the Institute in 1930, was the hope that psychoanalysis might help answer the exigent question generated by the failure of orthodox Marxist theory to generate revolutionary practice: why did the working class fail to assume the leading role assigned to it by historical materialism in the overthrow of capitalism? The second reason was the complementary insight it might offer into the unexpected success of a political movement, fascism, that traditional Marxism had not foreseen and that stubbornly survived after World War II in what might be called the “fascism with a human face” of an “administered society” comprised of “one-dimensional men.” The third motivation, evident especially in Marcuse’s mature thought, grew less from the dystopian anxiety driving the first two than paradoxically from a stubbornly residual utopianism. It drew on an imaginative reading of Freudian theory to envisage a civilization very different from the one whose discontents Freud himself accepted with resignation as inevitable in any conceivable alternative. And, finally, the Frankfurt School, in particular Horkheimer and Adorno, looked to psychoanalysis as a resource in the philosophical struggle to defend a plausible materialism against idealism or “consciousness philosophy” and its denigration of somatic pleasure and indifference to the sufferings and needs of the creaturely self.
Before, however, exploring each of these motivations and their consequences, we have to clarify one important premise of the Frankfurt School’s approach concerning the relationship between psychoanalytic theory and therapeutic practice. Three of the early members of the Institut für Sozialforschung had in fact themselves undergone psychoanalytic treatment: Erich Fromm, Leo Löwenthal and Max Horkheimer. The first two had been involved in the early 1920s with a therapeutic community that had Jewish religious ties and was organized by Frieda Reichmann, who was for a while Fromm’s wife.17 Fromm went on to become an analyst himself, training with Karl Landauer, a leading figure in the German psychoanalytic movement. In 1927, Horkheimer was analyzed by Landauer, albeit only for a year and apparently with little concrete effect beyond the loss of anxiety about lecturing without notes.18 But, because of his enthusiasm for the intellectual content of Freud’s theories, Horkheimer encouraged the creation of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute in 1929, led by Landauer and Heinrich Meng, even inviting it to take up quarters in the Institute of Social Research’s newly constructed building. Fromm and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann were among its most prominent collaborators, and other members of the Institute of Social Research often joined in their discussions. Löwenthal recalls that “the mere fact that a psychoanalytical institute was allowed to use rooms on a university campus was then almost a sensation,”19 and also proudly recalls his role in helping Freud get the city of Frankfurt’s Goethe Prize in 1930.
Communications with Freud himself followed in which he praised the Institute for bringing his ideas into a university setting for the first time.20 In a letter written by Horkheimer in March 1932 in which he sought Freud’s advice about a substitute for Fromm, who was then temporarily sidelined with tuberculosis, at the Institute’s branch in Geneva, the importance of psychoanalysis to the interdisciplinary project of the Institute was emphasized: “I am convinced that without the use of psychoanalytic knowledge [Kenntnisse] our project will not be fruitfully realized, and I believe and hope I am allowed to say that such a participation in social scientific research will not be without value for the development of psychoanalysis itself.”21
What is perhaps most revealing about this letter is Horkheimer’s stress on the cognitive payoff of psychoanalysis rather than the therapeutic. During his student days in Frankfurt, he cultivated an enthusiasm for Gestalt research into the holistic workings of the mind, which helped him overcome the hostility to psychology typical of most philosophers of the era but did not lead him toward anything like the efforts made by contemporaries like Reich, with his Sex-Pol clinics to alleviate the suffering of sexual alienation.22 Although assuring Freud that he had been personally analyzed by Landauer, he gave no indication that the Institute would emulate the model of Reichmann’s religious/therapeutic community or even Landauer’s Institute, whose leaders were active analysts, but instead would rigorously separate theory from practice. In one of the aphorisms in his pseudonymously published collection Dawn and Decline, Horkheimer had already expressed his distrust for the ideal of “inner health” as an antidote to “objective suffering” and asked scornfully if the revolutionary can “determine at any given moment how healthy, neurotic, at one or at odds with himself he may be? These bourgeois categories reflect their own world and not the struggle which proposes to unhinge it.”23 Although here the distinction was between political activism and therapeutic practice, when the former grew less likely, radical theoretical speculation informing interdisciplinary social science replaced it as therapy’s antonym.24
Significantly, the same attitude came to characterize the Frankfurt School’s approach to two other traditions that had vigorously sought to unite theory and practice: religion and socialism. Despite the frequent introduction of theological ideas into critical theory, they were never tied to the observation of religious practices.25 A similar pattern can be seen in their complicated attitude toward the unity of radical theory and revolutionary political practice, the shibboleth of Marxism ever since the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. Horkheimer himself distinguished a genuinely “critical” theory from a “traditional” one explicitly in terms of the former’s insistence that social emancipation rather than disinterested contemplation was its goal.26 But the failure of the working class to be the vehicle of that transformation meant that the gap between theory and practice yawned wider, and the Frankfurt School increasingly resisted well-intentioned but vain efforts to bridge it.
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