Page - 11 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

Kranebitter 11 department (because of its top personnel) are highly authoritarian as well as very moral- istic and conventionalistic’ (Levinson and Morrow, 1946: 7). If these differentiations are not to be found in the publication, it is due to a joint decision by the co-authors. The lack of contextualisation of the interviews is therefore not to be attributed to Morrow (alone). Additions are no less relevant than deletions. In contrast to the draft, in the study the high scorers’ psychological dispositions are declared to be the aetiology of the prisoners’ crimes: ‘It seems as if these men’s uninternalised conscience combines with especially intense disturbance about weakness to produce delinquency, as an extreme type of anti- weakness defense’ (Adorno et al., 1950: 860). Ultimately, the chapter concludes, all crimes are nothing but veils over oedipal conflicts. Even criminal low scorers like ‘Art’ only seemed to have committed their crimes in order to be punished, ‘using the prison as “mother”’ (Adorno et al., 1950: 863). These spectacular and speculative interpretations were not based on observations but on a superficial reception of contemporary criminological and psychoanalytic literature. Here, Morrow provides two major references (cf. Adorno et al., 1950: 817): the works of the Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck and Robert Lindner’s Rebel Without A Cause (Lindner, 1944). Lindner’s book was a mixture of an abridged psychoanalytic technique known as ‘hypnoanalysis’ on the one hand and orthodox Freudianism with its emphasis on the Oedipus complex on the other (Moser, 1970: 400f.; Moser, 1974: 19; Marasco, 2018: 792). Besides Morrow, Adorno was the only co-author to refer to Lindner (Adorno et al., 1950: 762–765). Yet Lindner’s theory of the pseudo rebellion, an authoritarian rebellion against paternal authority, is a key issue in The Authoritarian Personality. As the follow- ing discussion will show, superficial similarities notwithstanding there are important dif- ferences between the earlier versions of this theory by Erich Fromm (Fromm, 1936) and the one by Robert Lindner that was eventually adopted by the TAP authors. The conflicts with and eventual departure of Fromm from the Institute for Social Research (cf. Wiggershaus, 1988: 298–305; Funk, 1989: XXI–XXIV; Wheatland, 2009: 81–87) meant that paradoxically, Fromm’s work still occupied a central position while being neglected at the same time (see Fahrenberg and Steiner, 2004). His theory of (pseudo) rebellion underwent significant shifts. Criminal ‘pseudo rebellions’ Rebels without a cause? Given the great popularity of Robert Lindner’s Rebel Without A Cause, not least due to the eponymous film of 1955 starring James Dean, it is surprising that Lindner fell into oblivion soon after his early death (cf. Waage, 1999: 31). The book documented the transcript of ‘hypnoanalysis’ sessions with ‘Harold’, a delinquent in a prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Lindner had developed a keen interest in psychoanalysis and had been analysed by Theodor Reik.7 As a psychiatrist in Lewisburg, he had been prac- ticing his technique of ‘hypnoanalysis’ since 1939, describing it as a shortened form of psychoanalysis. Dysfunctions exhibited by the delinquent offered him a ‘gain [. . .] that bids him to cling to his symptoms or ways of behavior. [. . .] With hypnoanalysis it is as if surgical removal of such barriers and hazards has been accomplished’ (Lindner,