Russell Jacoby - Freud Quotes

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Critical theory … values Freud as a non-ideological thinker and theoretician of contradictions—contradictions which his successors sought to escape and mask. … The greatness of Freud, wrote Adorno, consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such contradictions and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the thing itself is contradictory. He revealed the antagonistic character of the social reality. … A parallel can be established between Marx's judgment on Ricardo and the post-Ricardians. To Marx, Ricardo was the classic and best representative of bourgeois economics since he articulated the contradictions of bourgeois society without glossing them over.

Russell Jacoby
In the name of a new theory past theory is declared honorable but feeble; one can lay aside Freud and Marx—or appreciate their limitations—and pick up the latest at the drive-in window of thought.

Russell Jacoby
Freud's link to a Hegelian tradition—with which he otherwise shares little—is in the deliberate renunciation of common sense. A person who professes to believe in commonsense psychology, Freud is reported saying once, and who thinks psychoanalysis is 'far-fetched' can certainly have no understanding of it, for it is common sense which produces all the ills we have to cure.

Russell Jacoby
[Freud's] concepts are radical in their pursuit of society where it allegedly does not exist: in the privacy of the individual. Freud undid the primal bourgeois distinction between private and public, the individual and society. … Freud exposed the lie that subject was inviolate; he showed that at every point is was violated.

Russell Jacoby
As Adorno wrote of Anna Freud's book, it evinces the reduction of psychoanalysis to a conformist interpretation of the reality principle.

Russell Jacoby