The Superego as Social Critique: Frankfurt School Psychoanalysis and the Fall of the Bourgeois Order

This chapter explores political and social applications of the superego through a focus on the work of the Frankfurt School and its Institute of Social Research, active from 1923 in Germany, relocated to America in 1934, and then reconstituted in Cold War Germany in 1951, and including amongst its members or affiliates, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. ‘The same economic changes which destroy the family bring about the danger of totalitarianism. The family in crisis produces the attitudes which predispose men for blind submission’. The period during and immediately after the Second World War saw a significant expansion of psychoanalytic presence in education, health, criminology and social theory. The superego, then, came with a particular sociological spin which appeared to many as having anticipated the pathologies of authority in wartime, or in totalitarian states.