“Identifying with the Aggressor”:

From the Authoritarian to Neo-liberal

Personality*1
Samir Gandesha

“Identifying with the Aggressor”

Abstract

This chapter seeks to provide a preliminary reconstruction of the concept of the

“Authoritarian Personality”, which Theodor W. Adorno developed in collaboration
with Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford, to try to understand the latent
potential for fascism in the United States in the post-war period culminating in
the eponymously titled volume published in the “Studies in Prejudice” Series. In
contrast with the burgeoning contributions to the direct and largely uncritical
appropriation and application of the concept in connection with the rise of the
far-right, symbolized by Donald J. Trump, the current chapter urges some caution.
More specifically, it argues that some of its key sociological and psychological
assumptions need to be rethought. The concept of state capitalism needs to be
supplanted with an analysis of neoliberalism. Moreover, the oedipal premises of
orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis must be supplanted by a more dialogical and
relational conception of the “identification with the aggressor” drawn from the
work of Sandor Ferenczi.

Keywords

Neo-liberalism, authoritarianism, psychoanalysis, Adorno, Ferenczi

*  First published in Constellations. An International Journal of Critical and Democratic

Theory, 15 January 2018, DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.12338.
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2018 273
R. Dannemann et al. (Hrsg.), Der aufrechte Gang im windschiefen
Kapitalismus, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-20520-1_13
274 Samir Gandesha

The question posed by this volume, namely: the possibility of “der aufrechte Gang im
windschiefen Kapitalismus,” could not be more pressing today. In the epoch of the
Anthropocene, windschiefer Kapitalismus could be said to refer to the transformed
relationship between “history” and “nature” or the intertwinement of “enlighten-
ment” and “myth.” To properly understand such a relation, as Adorno suggests in
his early lecture, “The Idea of Natural-History,” it is important to understand it
dialectically (Adorno 2006, pp. 252-270). This means grasping that, while nature is
typically understood as that which remains constant over time, it must be regarded
as the site of the “new.” By the same token, while history is typically understood
as the locus of the “event,” of the singular eruption of the new – for example, the
Copernican or French Revolutions – it has transmuted into the “always the same”
(das Immergleiche). We see this intertwinement of nature and history in the global
environmental crisis, on the one hand, which has forced dramatic changes in cli-
matic conditions, weather patterns and the availability of natural resources, and,
on the other hand, in the ongoing socioeconomic crisis that lies at the heart of the
neo-liberal global order that has produced levels of inequality that have not been
seen in decades. What mediates nature and history is the production of a form
of subjectivity that partakes of both, namely, what Adorno and his collaborators
called the “authoritarian personality” (See Adorno et al. 1982). It is the changed
subjective conditions of late capitalism that contribute to a locking of the social
order into place in the form of apparent natural inevitability.
My question in this chapter is: To what extent is it possible to revisit the concept
of the “authoritarian personality,” as Alan Wolfe (2005), Douglas Kellner (2016),
Richard Wolin (2016), Jay Bernstein (2017) and Lars Rensmann (2017) have recently
suggested? Adorno and the entire first generation of Critical Theory can be under-
stood as seeking to provide, through an appropriation of psychoanalysis and a more
general cultural critique, an account of a crisis of subjectivity and experience that
would constitute a much needed corrective to materialist theories of the “objective”
crisis of capitalism, theories which pointed towards a radical transformation of
capitalism that never, ultimately, came to pass (See Gandesha 2014a). In the first
sentence of Negative Dialectics, Adorno describes the non-occurrence of this event
in the following way: “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because
the moment to realize it was missed” (Adorno 2004, p. 3).
Today we are experiencing a return to the original iteration of Critical Theory
in the 1920s and 1930s, whereby psychoanalytical drive theory (Trieblehre) and
concepts such as “projective identification” and “repetition compulsion” could be
said to be necessitated by the fact that, in the face of evidence that neoliberal policies
not only do not work, but have effects that can actually be counter-productive and
deeply damaging, which is to say, economically self-undermining, these policies