S. D. V. Stephens

notes / Critical Theory / week 7: Fascism and Authoritarianism

14 Psychoanalysis and Mass Society

Recapitulation: fascism in the liberal-democratic West

By “fascism” the Frankfurt School came to mean something more general than Mussolini’s or Hitler’s regimes: a right-wing authoritarian takeover from within a liberal-democratic system. They understood it as a pathology arising from the populace itself, which “hijacks” democracy. The Institute’s postwar projects in empirical sociology tried to understand it, and psychoanalysis gave them a way to connect mass politics with the individual psyche.

Notice the shape of the question. The Institute did not ask what causes fascism; all sorts of possibilities can arise, and the causes are many. It asked why so many people are drawn to it. What causes what? Fascism has its causes; the attraction to it is a separate thing, and it is the attraction that the idea of the authoritarian personality explains. Psychoanalytic techniques are the approach to that pathology.

The Institute in the immediate postwar years

Those who stayed

Many members of the Frankfurt School left Europe for good. Herbert Marcuse (mar-KOO-zeh; /maʁˈkuːzə/) worked for the Office of Strategic Services (later the CIA) on German fascism, then taught at Columbia, Harvard (1952–54), Brandeis (1954–65) and the University of California, San Diego (1965–70), becoming the “guru” of the New Left; he died in July 1979. (He turns up, to comic effect, in the Coen brothers’ film Hail, Caesar!, which is worth watching.) Leo Löwenthal (LUR-ven-tahl; /ˈløːvn̩taːl/) worked for the Voice of America and then taught at Berkeley (1965–74); he died in January 1993.

Those who returned

Adorno, Horkheimer (HORK-hy-mer; /ˈhɔʁkhaɪ̯mɐ/) and Friedrich Pollock returned to Frankfurt in October 1949. In 1950 the Institute for Social Research reopened, in a new building, in association once more with the Goethe (GUR-teh; /ˈɡøːtə/) University. That same year The Authoritarian Personality was published in New York by Harper & Brothers. In Germany the Institute ran a similar sociological project, the Gruppenexperiment (GROO-pen-ex-peh-ree-ment; /ˈɡʁʊpn̩ʔɛkspeʁiˌmɛnt/) (Group Experiment), published in 1955.

Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” (1951)

Adorno wrote this essay in English, for the volume Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences edited by Géza Róheim (ROH-hame; /ˈroːhɛjm/) (New York, 1951).

Earlier studies of crowd psychology

Its subject is a new phenomenon: mass politics. Think of social media today. A great deal of what we now take as typical of liberal-democratic systems began in the late nineteenth century: mass newspapers, charismatic leaders, conspiracy theories. Three earlier studies stand behind Adorno.

  • Gustave Le Bon (luh BOHN; /lə bɔ̃/), Psychologie des foules (psee-koh-loh-ZHEE day FOOL; /psikɔlɔʒi de ful/) (The Psychology of Crowds, 1895). For Le Bon, the crowd was a new, irrational entity that had made its way into mass politics within liberal democracy: politics driven by unreason and myth. Marxism, he thought, could not explain the masses, because it spoke of interests, while the masses move by concepts of their interests: by symbols. (Around the same time Georges Sorel wrote of the “myth” of the general strike, a mobilizing image rather than a plan; Mussolini, inspired by it, went from revolutionary syndicalism to fascism.)
  • Sigmund Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (MAH-sen-psew-khoh-loh-GEE oont IKH-ah-nah-LEW-zeh; /ˌmasn̩psyçoloˈɡiː ʊnt ˈɪçʔanaˌlyːzə/) (Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921).
  • Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (1949), in the Studies in Prejudice series. Their agitators worked on the radio, a medium the right wing was good at using; the Nazis had put a cheap set, the Volksempfänger (FOLKS-emp-feng-er; /ˈfɔlksʔɛmˌpfɛŋɐ/) (“people’s receiver”), into millions of homes.

And a crucial proviso, from the conclusion of The Authoritarian Personality: the potentially fascist structure cannot be changed by psychological means alone; it is a product of the total organization of society. (Quotation 1.) Psychology explains susceptibility, not causation. The analysis does not tell you how to get rid of fascism, and it cannot itself be the base: fascism is multi-causal.

Adorno’s intervention

Freud saw it coming. Freud, Adorno says, though hardly interested in politics, clearly foresaw the rise and nature of fascist mass movements in purely psychological categories, long before the danger was acute. (Quotation 2.) What Freud saw was that the mass has its own political, irrational motivation, over and above individual motives: affect, symbols, myth. (Think MAGA, and its promised “return.”)

The bond is libidinal. For Freud, the bond that integrates individuals into a mass is libidinal. (Quotation 3.) The bonds that bring people together in mass movements are emotional, and their energy is erotic in the broad sense: libido is the drive that binds us to others, whether the bond is sexual or not. (Freud’s word for the non-sexual kind is “aim-inhibited” libido, zielgehemmt (TSEEL-geh-hemt; /ˈtsiːlɡəˌhɛmt/): friendship, for instance.) Fascism captures group solidarity and strength in its very symbol, the fasces, a bundle of rods bound together; Hannah Arendt wrote of totalitarian terror pressing people together in an “iron band.” That binding is Freudian libido.

Not regression, but its simulation. Crowd behavior is not trans-historical, however. Fascism simulates regression: it is a modern, artificial staging of a return to the archaic. As a rebellion against civilization, it is “not simply the reoccurrence of the archaic but its reproduction in and by civilization itself.” (Quotation 4.) It lets people fantasize about their release from society and morality, reducing themselves to instinct. Fully embracing power, without apology, by breaking through morality: that is the fantasy fascism offers. Nietzsche (NEE-cheh; /ˈniːtsʃə/) had urged us to embrace the archaic, the inner animal; fascism simulates the unapologetic bravery of the animal self. Dialectic of Enlightenment calls it “the mimesis of mimesis”: a replica, a simulacrum. Fascism is simulation.

Idealization and identification. The leader works a “miracle.” Through idealization the follower makes the leader into his ego ideal, as the child once identified with the parent: an impossibly high figure to whom one must subordinate oneself. Yet the leader must also seem just like the follower. He is at once superman and average man; Hitler posed, Adorno says, as a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber. (Quotation 5.) Hence the “great little man” of fascist propaganda, omnipotent and yet just one of the folks; he is “just a little guy.” The leader image gratifies the follower’s twofold wish: to submit to authority, and to be the authority himself. (Quotation 6.)

Lack of restraint. Where does the fascist leader’s famous command of mass psychology come from? From his basic identity with his followers, Adorno says; learning has little to do with it. He can guess their wants because he resembles them, and is distinguished from them only by his capacity to express without inhibition what is latent in them. Leaders are generally oral characters, compelled to speak incessantly, for the pleasure of it; language, emptied of its rational meaning, works magically, and the uninhibited, associative speech that casts the spell indicates a lack of ego control: weakness rather than strength. (Quotation 7.) Adorno sees the fascism of the future here. Because society is so controlled, the leader performs a loss of control; the followers see him losing control and feel as if they were releasing their own inner beast. Trump is the obvious case. He isn’t actually “losing control”; he is simulating it, whatever his demeanor, and that is why the base sticks with him.

Repetition. Fascist propaganda takes people for what they already are, “the true children of today’s standardized mass culture,” robbed of autonomy and spontaneity. It needs only to reproduce the existing mentality, and its compulsive repetition fits that need. (Quotation 8.) Fascism is mythic repetition.

Questions and problems

  • The authority of the world as it is “given.”
  • Is fascism a “psychological problem”? Adorno: psychological dispositions do not actually cause fascism; fascism defines a psychological area that can be exploited by forces that promote it for entirely nonpsychological reasons of self-interest. (Quotation 9.) The psychological is not strictly psychological. It echoes the conclusion of The Authoritarian Personality.
  • Can we sustain the distinction between leadership and mass following?
  • Is it cynical manipulation, or belief? Does the fascist leader believe his own manipulative ideology?
  • Adorno’s most provocative claim: the modern bourgeois individual, as a locus of “belief,” is disappearing. His unpublished “Remarks” on The Authoritarian Personality make the point: the “typified” individual is the effect of a “typed” society.
  • But if the bourgeois individual is disappearing, with its tripartite structure of id, ego and super-ego, what happens to psychoanalysis, which was the psychology of that individual?

Concluding remarks

Fascism is a pathology of modernity itself. Is it a perennial concern of modern democratic political culture? (And a note to self: stop confusing liberal with neoliberal.) Next: the standardization of consciousness in modern culture, the culture industry, and the problem of commodified aesthetics.

Handout outline (Professor Gordon)

I. Recapitulation

  • fascism in the liberal-democratic West
  • the Institute’s post-war projects in empirical sociology
  • psychoanalysis and mass-politics

II. The Institute in the immediate postwar years

  • A. The decision to remain in America
    • Marcuse’s work for the OSS (later the CIA) on German fascism; then at Columbia University (1934–1942); Harvard (1952–54); Brandeis (1954–65); UC San Diego (1965–70); dies July 1979
    • Leo Löwenthal (Voice of America; then UC Berkeley (1965–1974); dies January 1993)
  • B. Adorno, Horkheimer, and Pollock return to Frankfurt
    • October 1949: they return to Frankfurt
    • 1950: Institute for Social Research re-opens in new building
    • 1950: The Authoritarian Personality published by Harper & Brothers
    • 1956: Gruppenexperiment (“Group-Experiment”): a similar sociological research project

III. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences, vol. 3, ed. G. Róheim (New York, 1951)

  • A. Antecedent studies of crowd psychology
    • Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules (1895)
    • Sigmund Freud, Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921)
    • Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman, Prophets of Deceit: A Study of the Techniques of the American Agitator (Studies in Prejudice series, 1949)
    • a crucial proviso: susceptibility not causation [quote 1]
  • B. Adorno’s critical intervention
    • Freud’s insight into mass psychology anticipated its political and fascist implications [quote 2]
    • the power of libido in the formation of mass political movements [quote 3]
    • fascism not a regression to the “archaic” but a modern and artificial simulation of regression [quote 4]
    • idealization and identification: the fascist leader performs a “miracle” [quote 5]
    • submission to authority and wish-fulfillment of being that authority [quote 6]
    • lack of “ego control” and freedom from inhibition facilitates identification [quote 7]
    • fascist propaganda permits masses to be what mass culture has already made them [quote 8]
  • C. Questions and problems
    • the authority of the world as it is “given”
    • is fascism a “psychological problem”? [quote 9]
    • an echo of the claim from The Authoritarian Personality
    • but can we sustain the distinction between leadership and mass-following?
    • cynical manipulation as against belief?
    • does the fascist leader “believe” their own manipulative ideology?
    • Adorno’s provocative claim: the modern bourgeois individual as a locus of “belief” is disappearing
    • Adorno’s unpublished “Remarks” on The Authoritarian Personality
    • the “typified” individual as an effect of “typed” society
    • but if the bourgeois individual is disappearing then what happens to psychoanalysis?

IV. Concluding remarks

  • fascism not anti-modernism but a pathology of modernity itself
  • a perennial concern in modern democratic political culture?
  • further reflections on modern culture and standardization of consciousness
  • the culture industry and the problem of commodified aesthetics [next lectures]

On the back: (1) the conclusion of Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (1950); (2)–(9) Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda” (1951).