33 quotes
Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
As Comte wrote, the task of positivism was to “imbue the people with the feeling that … no political change is of real importance.” … As Marx wrote, to it “everything that exists is an authority.”
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
The neat division between roles and real selves reduces society to a masquerade party. Yet not even plastic surgery can heal the psychic disfigurements. The social evil reaches into the living fibers; people not only assume roles, they are roles.
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
The laws of social development are not identical with the laws in the natural sciences. The content of the social laws is not nature but second nature: coagulated history. They are manmade, but they also make men; they are dialectical, at once subject and object.
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
The general loss of memory is not to be explained solely psychologically; it is not simply childhood amnesia. Rather it is social amnesia—memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamic of this society.
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
To fasten on the facts while forgetting the social content is to fall prey to a mystifying immediacy. In an antagonistic society, appearance and essence, immediacy and mediacy, diverge; things are not what they seem to be.
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
The free market in ideas has never been free, but always a market. To undo this necessitates not commissars and censors but critical intelligence loyal to an objective notion of truth. If there is a repressive tolerance, then there is also a liberating intolerance.
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
The concept of “human existence” suggests an abstract human condition; “class existence” indicts bad conditions. The former suggests a nonexistent egalitarianism, as if master and slave, owner and worker, bomber and bombed all participate in the same universal abstraction. … The human condition for the rich is the inhuman one for the impoverished.
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
Freud’s link to a Hegelian tradition—with which he otherwise shares little—is in the deliberate renunciation of common sense. “A person who professes to believe in commonsense psychology,” Freud is reported saying once, “and who thinks psychoanalysis is ‘far-fetched’ can certainly have no understanding of it, for it is common sense which produces all the ills we have to cure.”
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
No matter how heretical the neo- and post-Freudians imagined they were in theorizing about the “values,” “insecurities,” “goals” of the individual, they were safely following the official ideology of the private and autonomous individual and consumer.
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
The application of planned obsolescence to thought itself has the same merit as its application to consumer goods; the new is not only shoddier than the old, it fuels an obsolete social system that staves off its replacement by manufacturing the illusion that it is perpetually new.
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
The inner connection between a positivism of numbers and quantities and one of human values and qualities is the excision of a critical distance and theory. Both surrender to different faces of reality—its facts or its ideology—and both stay clear and clean of antagonisms and contradictions.
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
The Adlerians, in the name of “individual psychology,” take the side of society against the individual. … Adler’s later thought succumbs to the worst of his earlier banalization. It is conventional, practical, and moralistic. “Our science … is based on common sense.” Common sense, the half-truths of a deceitful society, is honored as the honest truths of a frank world.
Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)