Russell Jacoby: Society

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Critical theory … values Freud as a non-ideological thinker and theoretician of contradictions—contradictions which his successors sought to escape and mask. … “The greatness of Freud,” wrote Adorno, “consists in that, like all great bourgeois thinkers, he left standing undissolved such contradictions and disdained the assertion of pretended harmony where the thing itself is contradictory. He revealed the antagonistic character of the social reality.” … A parallel can be established between Marx’s judgment on Ricardo and the post-Ricardians. To Marx, Ricardo was the classic and best representative of bourgeois economics since he articulated the contradictions of bourgeois society without glossing them over.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 27-28

Reality

“Society has lost its memory, and with it, its mind. The inability or refusal to think back takes its toll in the inability to think.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), pp. 3-4

Thinking , Memory

““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.”

Russell Jacoby

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

People , World , Time

“[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.”

Russell Jacoby

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

Age , Decision , Personality

“What does cultural pluralism signify in the absence of economic pluralism? Perhaps the question seems meaningless. Yet the apparent lack of meaning signals the intellectual retreat. The economic structure of society—call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy—stands as the invariant; few can imagine a different economic project. The silent agreement says much about multiculturalism. No divergent political or economic vision animates cultural diversity. From the most militant Afrocentrism to the most ardent feminists, all quarters subscribe to very similar beliefs about work, equality and success. The secret of cultural diversity is its political and economic uniformity. The future looks like the present with more options. Multiculturalism spells the end of utopia.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), pp. 39-40

Secret , Imagination , Question , Success

“No group is able, and few are willing, to stand up to the potent homogenizing forces of advanced industrial society. All Americans, from African Americans to Greek Americans, buy the same goods, look at the same movies and television, pursue the same activities and have—more or less—the same desires for success.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), p. 48

Success

“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.”

Russell Jacoby

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

Way , Behavior , Freedom

“Endless discussions of multiculturalism proceed from the unsubstantiated assumption that numerous distinct “cultures” constitute American society. Only a few historians or observers even consider the possibility that the opposite may be true: that the world and the United States are relentlessly becoming more culturally uniform, not diverse.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), pp. 47-48

World

“The neat division between roles and real selves reduces society to a masquerade party. Yet not even plastic surgery can heal the psychic disfigurements. The social evil reaches into the living fibers; people not only assume roles, they are roles.”

Russell Jacoby

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

People , Evil

“Though the ancient world understood that work was a curse, modern industrial society spreads its gospel. The working class, Lafargue hopelessly hoped, must reject the work fetish.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: The End of Utopia (1999), p. 26

World , Hope

“[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.”

Russell Jacoby

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

Lie

“The general loss of memory is not to be explained solely psychologically; it is not simply childhood amnesia. Rather it is social amnesia—memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamic of this society.”

Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 4

Memory , Loss , Childhood