Page - 20 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

20 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0) alleged goal of all criminal law, an outright illusion (cf. Fromm, 1931). The epistemic position taken by these two views resulted in diametrically opposed theories. Secondly, Fromm’s psychoanalytic ‘revisionism’ confronted several of Freud’s blind spots rele- vant here as well, especially in regard to the Oedipus complex. Re-reading Freud’s case study of ‘The Case of Little Hans’, Fromm pointed to the fact that Hans’ castra- tion anxiety was (very much like Harold’s in Lindner’s book) not an irrational fear given that his mother had openly threatened to cut off the little boy’s penis (cf. Fromm, 1966: 179). According to Fromm, Freud had not seen this due to his patriarchal views (Fromm, 1966: 181). Going even further, Fromm challenged Freud’s reading of the Oedipus myth itself: it should be read as a story of rebellion against patriarchy, not incest (Fromm, 1979: 27–38). More recently, Robyn Marasco has shown that the fixation of orthodox psychoanaly- sis on the Oedipus complex is itself patriarchal and can also be found in The Authoritarian Personality. Fascism becomes a matter of weak egos and unresolved Oedipal issues as opposed to social, economic, or political forces, geography, social class, ideology, militarization, or national culture. Fighting fascism becomes a question of collective therapy – as if this were possible – as opposed to political struggle. (Marasco, 2018: 792) Although, as in its previous study, psychological problems were politicised by making the family the subject of investigation as a social entity, Horkheimer and Adorno were caught in a patriarchal pattern of thought. The breakdown of hegemony, the real author- ity of the father in the family, and the pseudo-answer of authoritarianism are regarded as a problem, and the implosion of patriarchy is mourned (cf. Marasco, 2018: 795). Following Marasco, one could say that it was not the San Quentin prisoners but the researchers whose ‘defensive attachment to strong fathers and patriarchal authority is odd’ (Marasco, 2018: 795). The selective perception of a particular strand of psychoa- nalysis had thus not only left the patriarchal role of the father intact but had even uncon- sciously encouraged the individualised reading of the study strongly criticised by Adorno (Adorno, 2019). In a widely read essay of 2016, Peter Gordon focused on the two hearts beating within The Authoritarian Personality as a dialectical space between sociology and psychoa- nalysis (Gordon, 2018). The AP study [. . .] contained two distinct lines of argument. The first of these arguments [. . .] claimed to have identified a new ‘psychological type.’ The second argument was rather more sobering and radical in its implications: it suggested that the authoritarian personality signified not merely a type but rather an emergent and generalized feature of modern society as such. (Gordon, 2018: 47) The division, however, is not personified in tensions between Adorno and the American social researchers, tensions which would ‘absolve Adorno for bad arguments because his