“As Adorno wrote of Anna Freud’s book, it evinces “the reduction of psychoanalysis to a conformist interpretation of the reality principle.””

—  Russell Jacoby

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 41

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Russell Jacoby50
American historian 1945

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“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 (1945) American historian

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

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“Psychoanalysis justifies its importance by asserting that it forces you to look to and accept reality. But what sort of reality? A reality conditioned by the materialistic and scientific ideology of psychoanalysis, that is, a historical product…”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

Journal entry (7 October 1965) as published in No Souvenirs (1977) later retitled Journal II, 1957-1969 (1989), p. 269.

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“The interpretations of Freud are more and more successful because they are among the myths accessible to modern man.”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

No Souvenirs (1977) later retitled Journal II, 1957-1969 (1989), p. 117.
Context: The interpretations of Freud are more and more successful because they are among the myths accessible to modern man. The myth of the murdered father, among others, reconstituted and interpreted in Totem and Taboo. It would be impossible to ferret out a single example of slaying the father in primitive religions or mythologies. This myth was created by Freud. And what is more interesting: the intellectual élite accept it (is it because they understand it? Or because it is "true" for modern man?)

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“They don't change the analytic, reductive methodology, just the interpretations and conclusions. There seems little to lose, and much to gain.”

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994) American neuroscientist

New Mindset on Consciousness (1987)
Context: I think time will show that the new approach, emphasizing emergent "macro" control, is equally valid in all the physical sciences, and that the behavioral and cognitive disciplines are leading the way to a more valid framework for all science. Although the theoretic changes make little difference in physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and so on, they are crucial for the behavioral, social, and human sciences. They don't change the analytic, reductive methodology, just the interpretations and conclusions. There seems little to lose, and much to gain.

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“The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Quoted in an interview from Hollywood Voices, ed. Andrew Sarris (1971).

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“Psychoanalysis is essentially a theory of unconscious strivings, of resistance, of falsification of reality according to one's subjective needs and expectations.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), p. 109

“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 (1945) American historian

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

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“Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work.”

Letty Cottin Pogrebin (1939) American author, journalist, lecturer, and social justice activist

Source: Family and Politics (1983), Ch. 6

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“Vampires. They wrote the book on possessive.”

Charlaine Harris book Dead to the World

Source: Dead to the World

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“It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 13
Essais (1595), Book III

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