"Thanks to the diminished responsibility that lies in its severance from reflection, from rational control, speculation is itself handed over as an object to science, whose subjectivity is extinguished with it. Thought, in allowing itself to be reminded of its unconscious origins by the administrative structure of analysis, forgets to be thought. From true judgment it becomes neutral stuff. Instead of mastering itself by performing the task of conceptualisation, it entrusts itself impotently to processing by the doctor, who in any case knows everything beforehand. Thus speculation is defensively crushed, becoming itself a fact to be included in one of the departments of classification as proof that nothing changes."Although written just after the second world war, It's an argument that could be extended to psychological practice today.
Adorno, for instance, would most likely be classified by a psychologist as someone with anxiety, depression, anger issues perhaps - regardless of the truths of his ruthless, agitated arguments. Working through these "disorders" would involve nullifying his capacity for critical thought - it would be a process of thorough objectification - and would result in his full and willing submission to the system.
But the argument can easily be reversed. Adorno himself sets up some categories, the main ones being objectifying/non-objectifying practice. Critical thought (and implicitly, revolutionary struggle) fall into the latter, while pretty much all other manifestations of modern society are subsumed under the former. These categories also nullify the subjectivity embodied in such practices - for example, escaping reality through watching movies may be a way of removing any last thought of resisting that reality (paraphrased from Dialectic of Enlightenment), but there is still a conscious choice involved in doing this. There is still an "I" who enjoys the movie.
In fact, Adorno objectifies the entire practice of psychology by describing it as merely a reproductive instrument of the system.
More than anything else, this seems to point to the fact that any kind of broad theoretical framework (medicine, physics, chemistry, critical theory, etc...) is able to collect all phenomena in a broad sweeping gesture. It is voracious - it consumes everything. But the important point about psychoanalysis in particular, and instrumental reason is general, is that such a theoretical framework has been actualised in "bad reality", whereas critical theory has not.
It must be remembered that the world had seen the murder of six million Jews and large parts of Europe reduced to rubble only a few years previous to when Adorno put Minima Moralia to paper - this is part of the reason why he uses such strong terms as "bad reality" to describe modern life. However, before we dismiss his arguments by contextualising them ("they were just a product of the times, like grandma's racism etc..."), two things must be said:
- It's debatable whether "bad reality" has improved since then. In the last 60 years, there have been multiple genocides, horrific wars, and other inhuman atrocities perpetrated. Large-scale economic oppression continues to this day. If anything, this is proof of Adorno and Horkheimer's thesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment that these phenomena are not aberrations of the project of modernity, but that they are endemic to it. That they necessarily arise from it. That "reason is its own sickness".
- To make a very Adornoesque point, if we relativise all arguments in the history if mankind on the basis of their historical context, all we are left with is a blind, objective and, most importantly, unalterable, reality.
Instead, we must locate the "kernel of truth" (as Zizek would say) in each one that helps us progress towards a better reality.
