Page 93 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

70 Communication and Evolution of Society

I

I would like today to deal with fragments of a thematic that
interests my co-workers and me in connection with an empirical
investigation into the potential for conflict and apathy among
young people.? We suspect that there is a connection between
patterns of socialization, typical developments of adolescence,
corresponding solutions to the adolescent crisis, and the forms
of identity constructed by the young—a connection that can ex-
plain deep-seated, politically relevant attitudes. This problem
leads one to reflect on moral development and ego identity, a
theme that takes us naturally beyond this to a fundamental ques-
tion of critical social theory, viz. to the question of the normative
implications of its fundamental concepts. The concept of ego
identity obviously has more than a descriptive meaning. It de-
scribes a symbolic organization of the ego that lays claim, on the
one hand, to being a universal ideal, since it is found in the
structures of formative processes in general and makes possible
optimal solutions to culturally invariant, recurring problems of
action. On the other hand, an autonomous ego organization is by
no means a regular occurrence, the result, say, of naturelike
processes of maturation; in fact it is usually not attained.
If one considers the normative implications of concepts such as
ego strength, dismantling the ego-distant parts of the superego,
and reducing the domain in which unconscious defense mecha-
nisms function, it becomes clear that psychoanalysis also singles
Out certain personality structures as ideal. When psychoanalysis
is interpreted as a form of language analysis, its normative mean-
ing is exhibited in the fact that the structural model of ego, id,
and superego presupposes unconstrained, pathologically undis-
torted communication.? In psychoanalytic literature these norma-
tive implications are, of course, usually rendered explicit in con-
nection with the therapeutic goals of analytic treatment. In the
social-psychological works of the Institut fur Sozialforschung one
can show that the basic concepts of psychoanalytic theory could
enter integrally into description, hypothesis formation, and mea-
suring instruments precisely because of their normative content.
The early studies by Fromm of the sado-masochistic character