Russell Jacoby Quotes

The child ego, once nurtured and scarred by the family is no longer nurtured but simply integrated.

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

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.”

Civilization is a scar tissue from a past of violence and destruction.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.”

In accepting the bourgeois form of reason as Reason itself, Roszak does his bit to perpetuate its reign.

The sundering of a scientific from a poetic truth is the primal mark of the administrative mind.

The original Marxist notion of ideology was conveniently forgotten because it inconveniently did not exempt common sense and empiricism from the charge of ideology.

Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged; to be transcended it must first be remembered.

The general loss of memory is not to be explained solely psychologically; it is not simply childhood amnesia. Rather it is social amnesia—memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamic of this society.