Seite - 17 - in Rebels without a cause? - ‘Criminals’ and fascism in The Authoritarian Personality

Kranebitter 17 in Fromm’s thinking. Fromm described two types of rebellion, both distinguished from a ‘revolutionary’ way of dealing with authority – rebels would either simply replace one god with another, or rebel for no reason. In the first case, the lustful submission to a concrete authority could turn into hatred against it and transform into the lustful submis- sion to a new authority. For Fromm, the empirical background for this was Martin Luther (Fromm, 1936: 132) and, implicitly, probably the Stalinist deformation of the Russian revolution. In the second case, people react ‘automatically as rebellious [. . .] as the authoritarian type acts submissive and adoring’ (Fromm, 1936: 131). Both reactions are irrational, the desire for love and recognition remains, the solution is a pseudo-solution. Here, Fromm’s models (1936: 131) were ‘anarchist types’ who would (according to Fromm) easily transform into worshipers of power. For Fromm, both types of rebels do not over-personalise but depersonalise. Apart from hating the old and weak authority, the rebel hates nobody, his hatred is free-floating and objectless. There is a difference in focus: Fromm had emphasised the positive satisfaction of needs, a desire to submit to authority. The focus on this ‘positive’ side of the matter blocked his view of the (pathic) projection, which is emphasised in The Authoritarian Personality. In the case of San Quentin, the ‘pseudo rebellion’ against authorities, however, was not observed empiri- cally at all. The prisoners’ anti-Semitism was not particularly high, as noted above, because Jews were seen as a dominant father substitute, a group prisoners rather wanted to belong to and did not dare to hate. The results did not match the interpretation and Fromm as the source of the psychoanalytic theory. The second difference between Fromm and Lindner was in the theory of narcissistic identification with the father. Fromm had explicitly refused to call this submission to authority, which he understood as a desire to be part of something bigger, ‘identification’ since the distance to the leader remains crucial and does not allow for identification (Fromm, 1936: 124f.). Morrow, however, identifies submission with identification with- out further ado. In the high scorer’s suppressed hatred of the father, a hatred projected onto dominant social groups and institutions, he was said to unconsciously identify with these groups, which is why his hatred of authority remains authoritarian, his rebellion pseudo rebellion. This theory does not stem from Fromm, but from Anna Freud (1966: 109–121) and Bettelheim (1943). The powerless subject imitates the dreaded external object physi- cally and thereby identifies with it, and that imitation consequently internalises the fear and transforms the powerless into the powerful (Freud, 1966: 113). For Anna Freud, this identification was still a ‘normal’ phase in the development of the superego. Bettelheim claimed to have observed this mechanism in long-term, that is, ‘old’ prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, who allegedly identified themselves with the aggressor (the SS) after a certain period of detention and thus totally submitted to them. Bettelheim, who was released from Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1939, emigrated to the US and was entrusted with another volume of the Studies in Prejudice series (Bettelheim and Janowitz, 1964). He was therefore well known to the authors of The Authoritarian Personality. However, Bettelheim’s observations were empirically flawed (Fleck and Müller, 2006) and his thesis has been criticised by various sociologists (see Kranebitter, 2017; Kranebitter and Fleck, 2018, for details). In short, identification was not, in fact, found to be empirically true, either in the concentration camps or in San Quentin. This rather peripheral reference to the different variations of the psychoanalytical the- ory of identification is found not only in Morrow’s part of the study, but also in Adorno’s