Russell Jacoby - Individual Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

View all Russell Jacoby Quotes
The individual, before it can determine itself, is determined by the relations in which it is enmeshed. It is a fellow-being before it is a being.

Russell Jacoby
Skinner … decrees … the abolition of freedom by way of behavior modification and a souped-up environment, in the name of a new scientific value—survival. The irony is that freedom and individuality have only existed in their mangled bourgeois form; to propose junking them in the name of survival is to propose the very society we now have, one that subsists exactly by an ethos of survival, paying lip service to freedom and the individual while rewarding the victors and punishing the victims. Freedom and individuality have never been more than adornments for an ugly environment of survival of the fittest.

Russell Jacoby
[Carl] Rogers's Encounter Groups … is copy for the campaign of self-manipulation in an age of mass manipulation. … The notion here is simple: the real person is locked within the artificial, the role, and needs a little encouragement to step out into the fresh air. As with the neo-Freudians, society is conceived as an external factor, an outside force acting on the individual, but not decisively casting the individual from without and from within. The mechanical conception, severing within and without, and presupposing that only the outside is prey to social forces, is assumed or stated throughout the post-Freudian writings.

Russell Jacoby
The story of the rise, fall, and forgetting of the individual is the tale of the rise, fall, and repression of psychoanalysis.

Russell Jacoby
Freudian concepts exposed the fraud of the existence of the individual. To be absolutely clear here: the Freudian concepts expose the fraud, not so as to perpetuate it, but undo it. That is, unlike the mechanical behaviorists, the point was not to prove that the individual was an illusion; rather it was to show to what extent the individual did not yet exist. To critical theory, psychoanalysis demonstrates the degree to which the individual is de-individualized by society.

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
The Adlerians, in the name of individual psychology, take the side of society against the individual. … Adler's later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. Our science … is based on common sense. Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.

Russell Jacoby
No matter how heretical the neo- and post-Freudians imagined they were in theorizing about the values, insecurities, goals of the individual, they were safely following the official ideology of the private and autonomous individual and consumer.

Russell Jacoby