It's all a façade/it's what's inside that counts
reckoning with the meaning and status of culture, conflict, and instinct, in relation to drive theory
This is one of those posts where I’ve tried to be semi-automatic about the writing. I didn’t really know the post was going to swerve in these directions, but just let it keep building and bifurcating, and am now going to just try to hit ‘post’ before I feel like it’s time to start moving commas around. This is definitely ‘groundwork’, these are unfinished thoughts and fragments; please read and discard accordingly.
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At the core of Civilisation and Its Discontents (C&ID) is an account of kultur and civilisation as epiphenomena, derivations whose geneses lie in our driven nature. Sex and death are the motor of history and the deeper motivations driving all individual behaviour we see. Everything we see around us is a façade[1]; everything is sex-and-death driven, in the final instance[2].
Aside for its implications about how we read ‘what’s going on’ in the world around and inside us, the coiled springs that makes us-all-and-it-all all tick and hustle (tic and tickle), drive theory is the fundamental point of bifurcation between Freudianism and its dissenters (analysts within, critics outside). In the schema of ‘the history of systems of thought’ that deeply interests me here, Freudianism[3] matters because of its outsize, diffuse cultural influence. As I’ve gestured sketchily, there’s something in what the postwar US elite made of Freud that has not yet been properly excavated and still has a hold over some strands of Anglophone thinking; the tropes to hand used by some prominent names[4] to understand Trumpism give one set of examples showing where this was the case.
So: between Freud and his dissenters, a clefting road and a fucking fork in it.
I set this bifurcation up by contrasting Zweig’s 1940 smooth summa of the late Freudian position with Horney’s roughly contemporary dissent from it. That Zweig wrote his defence of late Freud as a cri du coeur from Brazil in 1940, and Horney from the US in the 1930s, shows where all had fled. The stake had become mighty real for every European by the late 40s.
&: that Zweig used current events as “confirming” drive theory “in the most dreadful way” shows how C&ID has tended to be used since it was published, especially within Freudianism.
But:
does drive theory explain the rise of National Socialism and the resonance of Hitler?
Is the death drive confirmed by WWII and the Holocaust?
Do the entailments of death drive actually present a correct and deep ‘anatomy of human destructiveness’[5]?
These are big claims, and they have been made, and continue to be made. Drive theory offers a powerful story with a final, deeper meaning of human suffering. But is it true, is it just truthy, or is it a façade, a mask of explanation with nothing behind it?
Freud might have claimed: it feels unacceptable, so we reject it – but it is true, yet we only have to have the courage to face and say it.
But is it; do we lack courage? Or is this a bad story that appeals to us because it allows us not to think, replacing thinking with orthodoxy and leading clinical work and social theory into a blind alley manifesting itself “in a rank growth of abstruse theories and the use of a shadowy terminology[6]” (Horney, Neurotic Personality of Our Time, 19-20)?
When we look, wither the façade, what of its significance? What of culture? Does it cause and explain; is it epiphenomena and effect? As a reader who writes, these questions implicate you: why do you read, why do you write, why make art?
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On the one hand, we have what Freud’s drive theory calls his ‘genetic derivations’ of feelings and of social phenomena. Everything, individual behaviour, group behaviour, institutions, technology, architecture, art &c&c, is downstream of drives and the ensuing formative infantile-familial[7] sexual frustration-experience[8]. Everything is downstream of drives. As Freud says: genetic derivations, instinctual sources.
It’s a fascinating and astonishingly bold thesis: everything around us, the entirety of the built environment and our doubly domestic home life (the inside (inside)), these are all excrescences of frustrated drives seeking unifying connection of erotic release and/or repressive structures and creative sublimations guarding against dissipative destructiveness.
For Freud, it would have been all-the-more easy to experience the world like this around Ringstrasse Vienna in the first few decades of the twentieth century, especially after the very deep hypocrisies of Victorianism Freud had lived through, that his analysands were still living in the cold condensation panes of their marriages and the steamed windows of their affairs.
How are we to think about architecture as built fact and as sketched practice; how are we to think about artworks about architecture when it was Hitler drawing and painting them; how are we to think about Hitler and his motivations; how are we to think about what people were doing inside, and what’s inside people?
At the individual-and-social level though, remember that what it means, in sum, is that, in a sense, everything we observe is a façade[9]. Face value cannot be taken at face value. Be suspicious of surfaces; surface explanations must be defenestrated. It’s what’s inside and behind that counts: the driven-repressed past that overdetermines the present, the animal nudge snouting forth who we are from within, manifesting in how we behave, and leading (consequently, very consequently) to what we can expect from one another and society. Thus to the two pictures ‘in the background’ of this post: wow should we think about Viennese characters of the 1900s like Adolf Hitler and Gustav Klimt; how should we think about how they rendered Viennese society, what these representations meant to them and conveyed to us; what does it mean that Klimt’s world was destroyed, and that the entirety of Hitler’s formative experiences were taken from ‘the same’ Vienna, which overlapped around Roller and Mahler’s productions of Wagner at the Staatsoper?
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On the other hand, we have prominent dissenters, among whom are those who developed theories of neurosis around environmental factors[10], tending to give primacy to culture and (thus) some autonomous agency to the contingencies of politics, ethics, values.
Many of these critiques emanated from the clinic by the late 20s, because analysands weren’t getting better[11]. This speaks back to why I think only ‘thesis two’ can be upheld. The stories people were pulling from their disquiet about their suffering on the couch stubbornly didn’t make sense using drive theory. As Horney writes in New Ways…, the origin of her critical theory of psychoanalysis was her “dissatisfaction with therapeutic results. I found that almost every patient offered problems for which our accepted psychoanalytical knowledge offered no means of solution, and which therefore remained unsolved”(7).
Horney offers, in contrast, the following account of how things tend to go with us once we let go of drives, and where (therefore) we need to place our social theory, once we see what’s in us as being about conflicts, not instincts. It’s what’s between us, not what’s within us, that shows us to what’s troubling us; and what’s between us has to be thought through as (eg) modern women living in an intricately patterned patriarchal culture which is constraining and formative. She writes:
“As to the instinctivistic orientation of psychoanalysis: when character trends are no longer explained as the ultimate outcome of instinctual drives, modified only by the environment, the entire emphasis falls on the life conditions molding the character and we have to search anew for the environmental factors responsible for creating neurotic conflicts; thus disturbances in human relationships become the crucial factor in the genesis of neuroses. A prevailingly sociological orientation then takes the place of a prevailingly anatomical- physiological one. When the one-sided consideration of the pleasure principle, implicit in the libido theory, is relinquished the striving for safety assumes more weight and the role of anxiety in engendering strivings toward safety appears in a new light. The relevant factor in the genesis of neuroses is then neither the Oedipus complex nor any kind of infantile pleasure strivings but all those adverse influences which make a child feel helpless and defenseless and which make him conceive the world as potentially menacing. Because of his dread of potential dangers the child must develop certain ‘neurotic trends’ permitting him to cope with the world with some measure of safety. Narcissistic, masochistic, perfectionistic trends seen in this light are not derivatives of instinctual forces, but represent primarily an individual’s attempt to find paths through a wilderness full of unknown dangers. The manifest anxiety in neuroses is then not the expression of the ‘ego’s’ fear of being overwhelmed by the onslaught of instinctual drives or of being punished by a hypothetical ‘super-ego’, but is the result of the specific safety devices’ failure to operate” (9-10, emphases mine).
I want theoretically-interested readers to notice: is this not a much more congenial fit for Marxian social theory than drive theory? I personally think so; it’s also a critical theory of psychoanalysis, where Freudianism tends to be uncritical, an orthodoxy demanding adherence and belief, even in the face of counterfactual evidence.
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The curious question, then (and the swerve concluding this post), is why Horkheimer (who Horney thanks in the preface to New Ways… ), Adorno and Marcuse did not or could not entertain this possibility, and, instead, went back to – and stuck to and stuck with – drive theory? Was it the war; was it the Holocaust that gave them ‘confirmation’; was it that the core trio clocked that the Freudians had the prestige in 40s and 50s America? But if so, then what can we make of their analyses of culture, and their supposed Marxism? What can the cultural, the economic and the political even actually mean, once you allow drive theory?
I’m not yet sure – and this sets up a whole series I’d like to do on Eros and Civilisation – but my sketchy intuitive summa (the sofa so far) is that:
Horkheimer remained romantically in love with the idea of Marxism (the Marxist imaginary), but knew in his heart that it could not work because he became deeply Freudian by the postwar period, and this contributed to his weltschmertz, which tended toward nihilistic pessimism toward the end – and an actual belief in conspiracy theories. Why? Pollock’s ‘monopoly capitalism’ was a damp squib after a long wait, and he was persuaded by Adorno and Marcuse, which he wanted to be. Moreover, it seems like the people who managed to stick with (and not split with) Horkheimer tended to be those who told him what he wanted to hear. The privilege of the purse strings: taking care of Felix’ money also kept the dependent loyal; and Adorno was the most loyal (and wanted the love most to be loved most).
Adorno was never quite a Marxist (in the way that Bloch, Lukacs, Hobsbawm or really were) so we should not be surprised by his analysis of Hitler and the patterns of propaganda, his reaction to the 60s student movement, or his always ‘bit disappointing’ Ivory Tower quietism. Although at his best he was far more than a ‘puffed up phrasemaker with nothing to say and no conviction’ (Fromm’s smackdown), he was always an elitist modernist uncomfortably distrustful of youth, popular culture, and deeply alienated by the postwar US (though he loved his car and driving). After the war, he became a West German Hegelian Freudian who tended to explain things by Hegel and/or drive theory (read this), didn’t really have a cogent theory of society (read this), and would Hegel his way out of any contradictions raised by his assertions by claiming them as ‘precisely’ enfolded in his always-already his ‘two steps ahead’ logic (read his radio interview with Elias Canetti).
Marcuse was and remained a Marxist, and was even a kind of Leninist, yet: he also came to doubt the revolutionary potential of the industrial proletariat; he believed that politics was downstream of culture; he believed in the deep and also semi-autonomous power of eros, creativity and art, and; he was also deeply Freudian and an adherent of drive theory. None of these positions match or add up, the incongruity is deep. No wonder he was obsessed with the improbable incarnation of the hippopotamus. Marcuse was a polyphony of contradictions; the fact that it was he who resonated with the US counterculture only serves the point. Escape velocity via this link.
[1] Broch felt the signature of the age could be read in its façade; ours was an age of kitsch, and kitsch, to him, was evil.
[2] {It’s very interesting to notice that Leninism, and I mean the term very broadly, insists on economic determination ‘in the last instance’. It’s also interesting to notice that Marcuse was a (peculiar kind of) Leninist (and see here as one way in), yet who believed in the revolutionary potential of cultural change (if anyone *was* a cultural Marxist, it might have been Marcuse… ), yet who insisted on drive theory (where culture is an epiphenomena or sublimation of frustrated drives). In Eros… Marcuse Hegeled his way out of the ahistory of drive theory by splitting pleasure and reality. Pleasure is eternal (and should be embraced as our erotic nature); reality is historical (and can and should be changed). Marcuse called drive theory Freud’s ‘dynamite’, and excoriated anyone who forgot it. His polemic against the ‘neo Freudians’ (Horney, Sullivan, Fromm): was more mean paste up than wild smackdown. I will come back to this. Sadly (to me), it stuck, as so many counterculture and New Left readers in the US saw Marcuse as hip and took his attack on Fromm – very uncritically – at face value.
[3] I mean the many influential uses of Freud’s basic assumptions and concepts, usually for cultural critique. But if I say Freudianism here, I include everything from the ‘sex sells’ that drove advertising and publicity post Bernays to the huge esteem Freud and his assumptions were held in by postwar American psychiatry (until the early 80s), the intellectual elite, and sections of the New Left, many of whom read Freud, Adorno and Marcuse and accepted their account of psychosocial reality.
[4] Cf. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo34094320.html
[5] The phrasing is Fromm’s and gestures to how this was still unfinished business for him in the final decade of his life in the 1970s. Anatomy of Human Destructiveness is baggy monster and a good effort/nice try. As often with Fromm, it has its heart in the right place and has some brilliant syntheses, really daggy moments, and ‘why’d you do that for seventy pages?’ bits; it fades in and fades out, like Sane Society. It’s dated, it’s uneven, and it’s the untimely work of the person who lost the debate (to Marcuse) although he might have had the better arguments and evidence. It’s an unpersuasive putting forth of the more convincing argument, in sum.
[6] It’s amazing to me that Horney phrased it like this a few decades before she would even have been able to read Bion (’84-mid 60s) or Lacan (Ecrits came out in ’66).
[7] And this matters for clinical work, too, because, as Horney notes, “Freud tends to regard later peculiarities as almost direct repetitions of infantile drives or reactions; hence he expects later disturbances to vanish if the under-lying infantile experiences are elucidated” (New Ways… 9)… once we get past the repression and re-cognise the primal scene (dad taking mum from behind as per the Wolf Man and Deleuze and Guattari’s takedown), we can work it through. If one stays with the Viennese milieu of Freud’s analysands and looks closely at the upbringing of, say, Robert Musil (there was an *ahem* ‘uncle’ who lived with them who was basically his mum’s piece) or Wilhelm Reich (young Wilhelm caught his mum fucking a tutor and dobbed on her and Wilhelm watched helplessly as his father beat his mother half to death… his mother later committed suicide… Reich blamed himself for this… ), it’s no wonder, is it? One might consider Josef Fritzl, the death of Jörg Haider, or watch Michael Haneke’s films and surmise ‘maybe there’s something about Austria…’ but I digress…
[8] Marcuse places the individual and group side by side, calling them ontogenetic (individual-formative) and phylogenetic (societal, group-historical), working them up into a complicated, creaky argument across Eros and Civilisation. There are pages and pages of hard work, and flashes of insight. Sometimes he just totally crushes that watermelon.
[9] Broch makes a lot of this in a different direction, and in fact derives the zeitgeist *from* the façade. He is also obsessed with uniforms, furniture and living rooms, and his descriptions of both are incredibly precise and detailed in The Sleepwalkers.
[10] Horney interests me most because she is the best writer with the most penetrating critique, and is not another famous armchair Freudian (like Adorno, Marcuse, Hofstadter, and Lasch [the worst!]). She was an actual analyst who spent fifteen years as a clinician working full-time with analysands using a fundamentally Freudian model, before breaking with Freud and Karl Abraham over penis envy. She was also a highly intelligent, ambitious, erotically charged woman who was also given to obsessive analytic rumination, neurotic behaviour and cyclical depressions: she knew what she was talking about, and she wrote about her experience beautifully. The only reason she is not yet as famous as the above dead white guys is because she’s a woman who disagreed with Freud (in the context of a social movement where one must pick a Daddy): to me this is one of those 1:1 ‘just true’ open-and-shut cases.
[11] The case of 1920s Reich was interesting and adjacent here as he *really* leaned in to the sexual aspects of Freudianism and then intensified them with Marxism… until leaving behind his 20s work for the ‘biological’ explanation of orgone (all gone). Cue the Kate Bush…