Page 94 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

71 Moral Development and Ego Identity

and by Horkheimer of authority and the family, Adorno’s in-
vestigation of the mechanisms for the formation of prejudice in
authoritarian personalities, and Marcuse’s theoretical work on
instinct structure and society all follow the same conceptual
strategy: basic psychological and sociological concepts can be
interwoven because the perspectives projected in them of an
autonomous ego and an emancipated society reciprocally require
one another. This link of critical social theory to a concept of
the ego that preserves the heritage of idealist philosophy in the
no-longer idealist concepts of psychoanalysis is retained even
when Adorno and Marcuse proclaim the obsolescence of psycho-
analysis: ‘Society is beyond the stage at which psychoanalytic
theory could illuminate its ingression into the psychic structure
of the individual and could thereby reveal the mechanisms of
social control 7” individuals. The cornerstone of psychoanalysis
is the idea that social controls arise from the struggle between
instinctual and social needs, from a struggle within the indi-
vidual.” * It is precisely this intrapsychic confrontation that is
supposed to have become obsolete in the totally socialized society,
which, so to speak, undercuts the family and directly imprints
collective ego ideals on the child. Adorno had earlier argued in
a similar vein: ‘‘Psychology is not a reservation for the particular
protected from the general. The more social antagonisms in-
crease, the more the thoroughly liberal and individualistic con-
ception of psychology itself evidently loses its meaning. The pre-
bourgeois world does not yet know psychology; the totally
socialized world knows it no longer. To the latter corresponds
analytic revisionism; this is adequate to the shift of power be-
tween society and the individual. Societal power hardly needs the
mediating agencies of ego and individuality any longer. This
then manifests itself as a growth of so-called ego psychology;
while in truth individual psychological dynamics are replaced by
the partly conscious, partly regressive adaptation of the indi-
vidual to society.” * But even this melancholy farewell to psycho-
analysis appeals to the idea of an uncoerced ego that is identical
with itself; how else could the form of total socialization be
recognized, if not in the fact that it neither produces nor toler-
ates upright individuals.