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Quotes from Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing — Russell Jacoby

born 1945 United States

← All quotes by Russell Jacoby

33 quotes

Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

Dialectical logic is loyal to the contradictions, not by the reasoning of “on the one hand and the other” but by tracing the contradictions to their fractured source.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

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)

The sundering of a scientific from a poetic truth is the primal mark of the administrative mind.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

The child ego, once nurtured and scarred by the family is no longer nurtured but simply integrated.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

In accepting the bourgeois form of reason as Reason itself, Roszak does his bit to perpetuate its reign.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged; to be transcended it must first be remembered.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

The professional philosopher in keen competition with the natural scientist resolves to be more certain about less.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

The story of the rise, fall, and forgetting of the individual is the tale of the rise, fall, and repression of psychoanalysis.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

Civilization is a scar tissue from a past of violence and destruction.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

Existentialism is bourgeois ideology in the hour of its defeat.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

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

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

Society has lost its memory, and with it, its mind. The inability or refusal to think back takes its toll in the inability to think.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

The original Marxist notion of ideology was conveniently forgotten because it inconveniently did not exempt common sense and empiricism from the charge of ideology.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

The post-Freudians … have fallen victim to the ravages of the intellectual division of labor.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

The individual, before it can determine itself, is determined by the relations in which it is enmeshed. “It is a fellow-being before it is a being.”

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

In the name of a new theory past theory is declared honorable but feeble; one can lay aside Freud and Marx—or appreciate their limitations—and pick up the latest at the drive-in window of thought.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

What must be acknowledged, for example the prevalence of anxiety, is grafted onto man’s essence as if it grew there. Such is the tried and tested method of the apologist: what is social in origin is presented as natural.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

Those seeking to work out the relationship between Marxism and psychoanalysis have not been immune to the intellectual division of labor that severs the life nerve of dialectical thought.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

“Rebelling acts as a substitute for the more difficult process of struggling through to one’s own autonomy, to new beliefs,” writes Rollo May, as if one could struggle through to one’s own identity without rebelling.

Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Russell Jacoby (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.