Matt ffytche, 'The Eclipse of the Father: The Frankfurt School on the Superego in the Age of Totalitarianism'

The superego, coming late to Freud, was doubly suited to its time. It foreshadowed the concerns of a more openly political generation of analysts, keen to draw out the social connotations of psychoanalytic theory. But the political shifts of the 1930s in turn threw a spotlight on factors that Freud had emphasised in the 1920s: the relation of groups to leaders, the potential for authority to be internalised in tyrannical ways, the weakness of the ego. The relations between the superego and totalitarianism were persistently explored in the sociology of the Frankfurt school - in work on the family; in studies on the authoritarian personality; and then in their critique of cold war democracy. One familiar narrative of the Frankfurt school's relationship to psychoanalysis is that the totalitarian tendencies of modernity made psychoanalysis obsolete. With the loss of the bourgeois family went the loss of the Oedipus complex and the inner life it represented. This paper opens some alternative perspectives. Firstly, the world of Freud is in no way abandoned by these social theorists: its loss is mourned, but this mourning also animates their critical resistance to 1950s modernity. Secondly, this reading of Freud resonates with one put forward by certain American conservative liberals in the 50s, such as Lionel Trilling, who is equally drawn to psychoanalysis - and the superego - as a tool with which to ground the ethos of a threatened liberal order. Finally, the theorisation of the superego as a historical crisis, in which a certain kind of fatherhood is lost, resonates in complex ways with Freud's original elaboration of the concept: an agency formed through the loss and internalisation of the father.