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.
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