Abstract
Critical theory’s effort to restore subjectivity and resist domination rightly leads to the search for and rejection of all tendencies that cause the subject to introject and reproduce his own domination. Because psychoanalysis focuses in large part on the developmental path by which the subject is transformed into a social being accepting of the reality principle, many Freudian categories (and ultimately, psychoanalysis itself) are consequently called into deep question by critical theory. Sublimation and identification, the two mechanisms with which the maturing subject most clearly meets the challenge of the reality principle, are seen as particularly suspect and thus remain undertheorized by critical theorists.
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Notes
Stephen Eric Bronner, Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 34. A further discussion can be found in Bronner’s Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), 11.
Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 1.
Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 84.
Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 32.
Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 55–116.
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia (New York: Verso, 2005), 22–3.
Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Cultural Memory in the Present (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007), 43.
Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 357.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 7.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 73.
Franz Neumann, “Approaches to the Study of Political Power,” Political Science Quarterly 2, no. 65(1950): 163.
Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 40–1.
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 56.
Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 83–4.
See: Paul Roazen, Freud: Political and Social Thought (New York: Knopf, 1968), 156.
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (New York: W. W. Norton, 1959), 47.
Jonathan Lear, Freud (New York: Routledge, 2005), 186.
Donald W. Winnicott, The Family and Individual Development (New York: Routledge Classics, 2006), 233.
Leonard Shengold, The Delusions of Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 108.
See: Peter Gay, Freud: A Life For Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 449.
Sigmund Freud, The Psychology of Love (New York: Penguin, 2007), 212, 170, 175.
Hans Loewald, Sublimation: Inquiries into Theoretical Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 8. 12.
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© 2013 Amy Buzby
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Buzby, A. (2013). Wrong Life Lived Rightly: Sublimation, Identification, and the Restoration of Subjectivity. In: Subterranean Politics and Freud’s Legacy. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349378_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137349378_7
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