Dangerous Amnesia: Restoration and Renewal of the Connections between Psychoanalysis and Critical Social Theory

Some of the leading 20th-century philosophical inheritors of Enlightenment thought turned to psychoanalysis as a crucial part of their analysis of the social and individual dynamics of domination and submission. In explaining the ways in which individual pathologies intersect with authoritarian political ideologies and social hatreds, the “Frankfurt School” theorists developed a psychoanalytically informed social theory. They understood that strivings for freedom could not be accomplished only by political revolution. They also had to be accompanied by a transformed internal psychic life that could embrace freedom as essential to psychic and social health. These thinkers held that psychoanalysis was necessary to actualize freedom based on critical subjective agency as concrete realities of daily life. Otherwise, social theory remains detached from individual human experience. This article argues for the relevance and necessity of psychoanalysis for social change. It includes a clinical vignette that illustrates the ways in which individual pathologies intersect with, sustain, and reproduce social intolerance and prejudice.