As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Lillian Hingley looks at Shannon Mariotti’s “Damaged Life as Exuberant Vitality in America: Adorno, Alienation, and the Psychic Economy” from Telos 149 (Winter 2009).
In her article “Damaged Life as Exuberant Vitality in America: Adorno, Alienation, and the Psychic Economy,” from Telos 149 (Winter 2009), Shannon Mariotti claims that Adorno’s Minima Moralia ultimately rejects psychoanalysis for reinforcing the reification that it was supposed to resist. She argues that Adorno is particularly concerned with an American psychodynamic therapy that empties psychoanalysis of its European “pessimism” and that instead seeks “happiness” rather than a mere “cure” (174). While some points in Mariotti’s argument and a more critical psychoanalysis are not incompatible, her cautious application of Adorno’s critique of psychoanalysis to a contemporary context suggests that Minima Moralia might provide a useful framework for interpreting modern American pharmaceutical psychology. In turn, this brief analysis adds context to Mariotti’s grant of practical space to mental illness in therapy rather than seeing it as something to be merely glossed over. Indeed, she gives today’s readers a blueprint for carefully applying Adorno’s thinking to contemporary American therapeutic practices.
While Mariotti convincingly illustrates Adorno’s dissatisfaction with psychoanalysis, a question remains: does Adorno totally reject it? Her article gives that impression by suggesting that negative dialectics supplanted psychoanalysis (177). Critically, Mariotti still casts negative dialectics as a cognitive project. Psychoanalysis by no means has a monopoly over thinking, but this does not mean that there are not traces of it in negative dialectics. Mariotti clearly demonstrates that Adorno has a problem with American psychoanalysis, but where does this leave that allegedly more pessimistic European psychoanalysis? As Idit Dobbs-Weinstein has shown, Adorno contrasts German society’s project of “working through the past” (Aufarbeitung) with his project of “working upon the past” (verarbeiten).[1] Adorno criticizes the former, arguing that it does not directly deal with the past, as his approach does. Similarly, Dobbs-Weinstein argues that both projects echo Freud’s idea of Durcharbeitung,[2] a therapeutic “working through” to uncover one’s trauma. On the one hand, “working through the past” is a failed parody of Freud’s concept, because it takes the task of discharging trauma too literally. On the other, Adorno’s verarbeiten resembles Freud’s concept more closely because it actively confronts a trauma rather than passing over it.[3] The former betrays how some German therapeutic methods were uncritical in their approach to the war, supporting Mariotti’s Jamesonian position that the psychoanalytic grip on Adorno has been overstated.[4] Yet, Adorno’s renewed emphasis on thinking upon trauma after the war hints that he did not fully reject the psychoanalytic tradition in his exile.
One of Mariotti’s most valuable conclusions is this basic idea, namely, that mental illness has a place in therapy that should not be dismissed. She points to Adorno’s adage in Minima Moralia: “In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.”[5] Mariotti interprets this as a critique of psychoanalysis through exaggeration, arguing that the domestication of the therapeutic method rendered it critical only in its extremes (178). What if Adorno, however, actually is arguing that the failure of psychoanalysis is critical itself? Mariotti’s reading of the “wound” as the symbol of negative dialectics reflects its status as a critical Adornian motif. In Fragment 59, Adorno suggests the wound is cognitive precisely because it represents something other than the status quo.[6] Therefore, the places where psychoanalysis does not work dialectically could represent spaces for critical reflection. This makes a persuasive case for a therapy that recognizes the central place of negativity rather than expunging it from one’s analysis.
In this light, Mariotti’s approach becomes compatible with a more critical psychoanalysis. The fact that she associates negative dialectics with the act of writing is significant (177); Adorno became increasingly conscious of the critical potential of the page as a site for personal ruminations after the war, privileging the book as a space for critical reflection.[7] This emphasis on writing also connects Mariotti’s argument to a psychoanalytic tradition of literary criticism that includes Jacques Lacan’s “The Purloined Letter,” Shoshana Felman’s Writing and Difference, and Jean-Michel Rabaté’s A Handbook of Modernism Studies. The application of psychoanalysis to literature has been routinely criticized by the likes of D. H. Lawrence, whose argument seconds Mariotti’s: psychoanalysis reduces literature’s gaps into something to be diagnosed, “cured,” and passed over.[8] At the same time, these psychoanalytic scholars valorize a critical approach to literature that actively embraces the novel’s gaps in its interpretation. Therefore, a more critical psychoanalysis that integrates gaps into its methodology, rather than dismissing them, could complement Mariotti’s position.
This recognition also highlights why Mariotti’s argument is worth revisiting: it carefully applies Adornian methodology to a contemporary American context. In the past year, some commentators have argued that Adorno’s analysis of American reification could be applied to contemporary political events.[9] However, Mariotti is more cautious about transposing Adorno’s epoch onto a contemporary moment (177). Her refusal to focus solely on “the cure” is also a more sensitive approach to mental health. The article highlights an American drive in therapy not simply to be well but to be great that has clearly regained significance in recent years. Mariotti’s approach is more admirable precisely because it does not treat mental illness as a moral aberration that can be cut from society or a condition affecting those on the other side of the political divide.[10] Her dialectical conclusion that the widespread American inclination to strive for greatness may be connected to depression also paints negativity as a semi-systemic feature (183). This argument’s strength lies in its suggestion that negativity is not just something that happens to “other people,” but it is universally relevant. Adorno’s verarbeiten demonstrates a significant recognition: a therapeutic obsession with happiness risks forgetting that sadness can at times be perfectly valid as an emotion, and that it can have a valuable place in therapy and society. Mariotti’s re-reading of Adorno’s critique of psychoanalysis in Minima Moralia helpfully encourages us to fully confront the wound rather than merely working to plaster over it.
Notes
1. Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion and Its Heirs: Marx Benjamin, Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015), p. 236.
2. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12 (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), p. 155.
3. Dobbs-Weinstein, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, p. 236.
4. Fredric Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan,” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 79.
5. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2006), p. 49.
6. Ibid., p. 95.
7. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991), p. 32.
8. D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), p. 8.
9. Jamieson Webster, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” New School for Social Research’s Public Seminar, October 5, 2017. n.p.
10. Allen Frances, “Armchair Misdiagnosis,” New Scientist 233, no. 3144 (2017): 24.
