Page - 19 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

Kranebitter 19 This conservative criticism of the rebel ‘from above’ fell far short of Fromm’s inten- tion. Adorno had unconsciously adopted Lindner’s ‘psychoanalytic’ position. In fact, his co-authors had already been surprised by his stance towards psychoanalysis at this time. In an interview in 1992, Daniel Levinson, who generally emphasised the good coopera- tion with Adorno and the high degree of shared self-reflectivity, emphasised: ‘Adorno was primarily a sociologist, his use of psychoanalytic ideas sometimes seemed naïve to us, [. . .] just as our sociological ideas must have often seemed naive to him’ (Levinson, 1992: 11). Despite all its methodological openness, a version of psychoanalysis was retained in TAP ‘in its rather orthodox Freudian variant’ (Adorno, 2019: 34). In contrast to Fromm, who was accused of ‘revisionism’ (see Dahmer, 2019: 115), TAP’s co-authors did not want to ‘sociologise’ psychoanalysis supposedly because they took it too seri- ously (Adorno, 2019: 34). Yet this becomes a constraint as it leads to individualisation: because of his character deficits, the pseudo-rebel is a ready-made fascist, waiting only for the ‘social milieu which acts to awaken latent psychopathy’ (Lindner, 1944: 14). By adhering to the orthodox variant of psychoanalysis – with its emphasis on the Oedipus complex – the result was ironically a strange idolisation of the most cultural-industrial of all psychoanalytic products, Lindner’s Rebel Without a Cause, and the adoption of its conservative criticism of rebels, accompanied by their de-socialisation, individualisation and pathologisation. Conclusion This historical-sociological analysis of the empirical flaws in the San Quentin interviews and its interpretation has shown a major shift in the theory of pseudo rebellion from Fromm’s original theory towards a more superficial and technical use of psychoanalytic terms. Following Marie Jahoda, one might conclude that in the Institute’s earlier study Autorität und Familie (Horkheimer, 1936), psychoanalysis was more thoroughly incor- porated while social research techniques remained rather naïve (Jahoda, 1954: 14), whereas in The Authoritarian Personality the opposite could be observed. However, the general relationship between psychoanalysis and critical theory is too complex for gen- eralisations from specific observations like this (see, to name but two major contribu- tions, Whitebook, 1996, and Bock, 2018), and beyond the scope of this article, as are the reasons for the differences between Horkheimer and Adorno on the one side and Fromm on the other. As far as Fromm’s departure from the Institute is concerned, it seems safe to state that it was caused to a large extent by personal alienations following Horkheimer’s decision to cut back Fromm’s salary (Wheatland, 2009: 83f.). On a more theoretical level, there were differences on the role and possibilities of psychoanalytical therapy, and on the question of the ‘revision’ of Freud’s drive theory. Two points are relevant here. Firstly, these controversies contained opposing views on the psychoanalysis of crime. Lindner, following Theodor Reik (cf. Lindner, 1953), believed in principal in the possibility of a ‘cure’ for the delinquent, determined as such by his unconscious drives, through psychoanalysis, as has been shown. In contrast, from the beginning of his career Fromm had stressed the economic and social determinants of crime and considered any kind of specific deterrence (‘Spezialprävention’), deterrence being the