Russell Jacoby: Trending quotes

“Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 23-25
Context: 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.

Truth , World , Sense

“Those seeking to work out the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis have not been immune to the intellectual division of labor that severs the life nerve of dialectical thought.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 74

Life

“Rat and behavioral psychology … mirror the actual inhumanity of reality. Rat psychology is human psychology where a total society has trained human beings to be creatures of stimulus and response, i. e. rats. “Insofar as the hardening of society has reduced men more and more to objects,” wrote Adorno, “methods which convey this are no sacrilege. … The method serves freedom in that it wordlessly testifies to the prevailing unfreedom.” Or, as Adorno and Horkheimer wrote in another context: “The usual objection that empirical social research is too mechanical, too crude, and too unspiritual [ungeistig] shifts the responsibility from that which science is investigating to science itself.” … The idealistic misconception of … behavioral methods … shifts the evil from the social conditions that coerce men and women into standardized roles onto the social science that is merely registering these conditions.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 69

Women , Men , Behavior , Reality

“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.””

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 34, quote is from Institut für Sozialforschung

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

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 39

Family

“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.””

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 19-20

Understanding , Thinking , Sense , Personality

“To fasten on the facts while forgetting the social content is to fall prey to a mystifying immediacy. In an antagonistic society, appearance and essence, immediacy and mediacy, diverge; things are not what they seem to be.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 60

Appearance , Forgetting

“The left once dismissed the market as exploitative; it now honors the market as rational and humane. The left once disdained mass culture as exploitative; now it celebrates it as rebellious. The left once honored independent intellectuals as courageous; now it sneers at them as elitist.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), pp. 10-11

Courage

“Dialectical logic is loyal to the contradictions, not by the reasoning of “on the one hand and the other” but by tracing the contradictions to their fractured source.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 60

“The laws of social development are not identical with the laws in the natural sciences. The content of the social laws is not nature but second nature: coagulated history. They are manmade, but they also make men; they are dialectical, at once subject and object.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 65

Men , Law , History , Nature

“The disdain for culture expressed by Johst and Fanon is not identical, however. Both despise the deceit of culture, but for opposite reasons. For Johst, culture is in itself a fraud, the cheap talk of weaklings; for Fanon, culture deceives by reneging on its promises. Johst and the Nazis hated culture itself; Fanon hated its hypocrisy, a very different notion.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), p. 35

Hate , Fraud

“The post-Freudians … have fallen victim to the ravages of the intellectual division of labor.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 58

“Over the years and against conventional wisdom, utopians sustained a vision of life beyond the market. … Georg Lukács set forth a theory of the “old and new culture” in which he argued that the socialist economy was not the goal; it was simply a precondition for humanity to advance to a new and humane culture. Most radicals do not understand that political power and economic reorganization is not the end-all, stated Lukács. The goal is not a new economic order, but freedom from an obsession with economics.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), p. 27

Life , Wisdom , Understanding , Freedom

“The professional philosopher in keen competition with the natural scientist resolves to be more certain about less.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 59

Nature

“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.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 30

Fraud

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

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 38

Forgetting

“Existentialism is bourgeois ideology in the hour of its defeat.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 63

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

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 31

Past

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

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 6-7

Sense

“Once upon a time leftists and radicals talked of liberation or the abolition of work. Now the talk is about full employment.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), p. 21

Time