INTRODUCTION
Freudianism Adorno’s Freudianism is involved in his most penetrating insights but, as has already been seen, it raises considerable difficulties. Freudianism is under sustained assault from many quarters: as modernist meta-narrative, as masculinism and as pseudo-science. Any full assessment would have to begin by placing Adorno’s psychoanalytic account of fascist propaganda and the wider syndrome of dependency in the context of a wider debate which involved his radical Freudian contemporaries. Adorno was far from the only “Freudo-Marxist” intellectual of his generation to attempt critical accounts of fascism and American consumer culture. Without exploring finer points of doctrine, a comparison between Adorno and Reich on the one hand and Marcuse on the other reveals some interesting lacunae.98 The comparison demonstrates, first, the extent to which Adorno was blind to gender issues and to questions of sexuality. For all his insistence on the “libidinal” character of the tie between fascist leader and follower he does not explore the most obvious questions about the implication of gendered forms of eroticism in fascist politics (beyond a few passing references to ties between sado-masochism and male homosexuality). Second, the same comparison reveals the weakness of Adorno’s proposed propaganda response to fascist agitation. Having demonstrated over and again the extraordinary power of fascist manipulation of the unconscious, all Adorno can suggest by way of response is that various contradictions and absurdities should be “pointed out” to the population at risk.99 Reich’s advocacy of frequent and vigorous heterosexual intercourse as a prophylactic against the blandishments of fascism, or Marcuse’s (much later) advocacy of “polymorphous perversity” may have been eccentric, but at least they attempted to match the libidinal effects of authoritarianism and one-dimensional consumerism on their own ground. If Adorno’s particular variant of Freudianism is problematic for some critics, any sort of Freudianism is a problem for mainstream Anglophone social psychology. Despite the interest excited by The Authoritarian Personality, and partly because of that work’s perceived methodological weakness, psychodynamic accounts of fascism quite soon shrank to a small part of multi-dimensional accounts, notably under the influence of Allport.100 Important studies of racist prejudice in Britain have adopted Allport’s pluralism,101 while Altemeyer has more recently re-covered the ground of The Authoritarian Personality from a social learning perspective.102 For many people working in the field, psychoanalytic explanations of fascism are either insufficiently wide-ranging or insufficiently parsimonious to merit very much attention.
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