“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

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Russell Jacoby 50
American historian 1945

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“[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.”

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

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