Russell Jacoby: Individual

Russell Jacoby is American historian. Explore interesting quotes on individual.

Russell Jacoby: 100 quotes0 likes

“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.””

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

“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.”

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

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

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

““When material needs are largely satisfied,” writes Carl Rogers, “as they tend to be for many people in this affluent society, individuals are turning to the psychological world, groping for a greater degree of authenticity and fulfillment.” The clear distinction between material and psychic needs is already the mystification; it capitulates to the ideology of the affluent society which affirms the material structure is sound, conceding only that some psychic and spiritual values might be lacking. Exactly this distinction sets up “authenticity” and “fulfillment” as so many more commodities for the shopper. Rather it is the fissure itself which is the source of the ills—between work and “free” time, material structure and psychological “world,” producers and consumers.”

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 48-49

“[Carl] Rogers’s Encounter Groups … is copy for the campaign of self-manipulation in an age of mass manipulation. … The notion here is simple: the real person is locked within the artificial, the role, and needs a little encouragement to step out into the fresh air. As with the neo-Freudians, society is conceived as an external factor, an outside force acting on the individual, but not decisively casting the individual from without and from within. The mechanical conception, severing within and without, and presupposing that only the outside is prey to social forces, is assumed or stated throughout the post-Freudian writings.”

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 67-68

“No matter how heretical the neo- and post-Freudians imagined they were in theorizing about the “values,” “insecurities,” “goals” of the individual, they were safely following the official ideology of the private and autonomous individual and consumer.”

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 26

“Skinner … decrees … the abolition of freedom by way of behavior modification and a souped-up environment, in the name of a new “scientific” value—survival. The irony is that freedom and individuality have only existed in their mangled bourgeois form; to propose junking them in the name of survival is to propose the very society we now have, one that subsists exactly by an ethos of survival, paying lip service to freedom and the individual while rewarding the victors and punishing the victims. Freedom and individuality have never been more than adornments for an ugly environment of survival of the fittest.”

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 70-71

“[Freud’s] concepts are radical in their pursuit of society where it allegedly does not exist: in the privacy of the individual. Freud undid the primal bourgeois distinction between private and public, the individual and society. … Freud exposed the lie that subject was inviolate; he showed that at every point is was violated.”

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 26