Conclusion

In view of the limited and highly specific nature of the material scrutinized, no »generalization« in the strict sense seems to be possible. However, the material suggests certain perspectives of a somewhat broader nature. While largely having been drawn as inferences from the specific interpretations attempted, they should also provide a background for the whole study and particularly make it understandable why it was carried through.

Though we are not primarily interested in astrology per se, as was pointed out before, it may be well to remember that the astrological fad, and analogous ones, are widespread enough and exercise sufficient influence as to warrant an investigation of their own. Though an increase of the astrological fashion cannot be »proved« for obvious reasons, since no comparative figures from the past are available, it seems quite likely. Thus, in German newspapers, the signs of the zodiac under which a person was born have come to be frequently mentioned in lonely-hearts advertisements. If one attributes such an increase to the mounting exploitation of superstitious leanings alone, a higher distribution of astrological material, this seems hardly to suffice as an explanation since this increase of material would scarcely work unless there were some susceptibility for it among the people. It is this susceptibility much more than astrology as such which deserves attention; we want to utilize our studies of astrology as a kind of key to more widespread social and psychological potentialities. In other words, we want to analyze astrology in order to find out what it indicates as a »symptom« of some tendencies of our society as well as of typical psychological trends among those this society embraces.

Obviously, the first concept that comes to mind in this connection is that of social and psychological dependence. Our analysis of the Los Angeles Times column has pointed out in detail how dependency needs of the audience are presupposed, fostered and exploited continuously. However, in terms of the specificity of contemporary astrology, the concept of dependence as such seems to be somewhat too abstract as to lead us very far. Throughout history in organized society, the majority of people were somehow dependent and in some phases probably more so than today. This, however, has to be somewhat qualified. No matter whether the individual is »freer« today in many respects than he used formerly to be, the socialization of life, the »seizure« of the individual by innumerable channels of organization has certainly increased. Suffice it to state as an illustration that the traditional dichotomy between work and leisure tends to become more and more reduced and that socially controlled »leisure activities« take over more and more of the individual's spare time. While the basic dependence of the individual on the social body, and in a highly irrational form, has always prevailed, this dependence was at least »veiled« to many people during the classical era of liberalism where people had come to think of themselves as self-sustaining monads. This veil has now been drawn apart and people begin to face their own dependence much more than they used to 80 years ago; largely because the processes of social control are no longer those of an anonymous market which decides the economic fate of the individual in terms of supply and demand. The intermediary processes between social control and the individual tend to vanish and the individual has once again to obey the direct verdict of the groups at the helm of society. It may be this mounting obviousness of dependence rather than an increase of dependence per se which makes itself felt today and prepares the minds of the people for astrology as well as for totalitarian creeds. Paradoxically, a higher amount of insight might result in a reversion to attitudes that prevailed long before the rise of modern capitalism. For, while people recognize their dependence and often enough venture the opinion that they are mere pawns, it is extremely difficult for them to face this dependence unmitigated. Society is made of those whom it comprises. If the latter would fully admit their dependence on man-made conditions, they would somehow have to blame themselves, would have to recognize not only their impotence but also that they are the cause of this impotence and would have to take responsibilities which today are extremely hard to take. This may be one of the reasons why they like so much to project their dependence upon something else, be it a conspiracy of Wall Street bankers or the constellation of the stars. What drives people into the arms of the various kinds of »prophets of deceit« is not only their sense of dependence and their wish to attribute this dependence to some »higher« and ultimately more justifiable sources, but it is also their wish to reinforce their own dependence, not to have to take matters into their own hands – a wish, true, which is ultimately engendered by the pressure under which they live. One may say that the adepts of astrology frequently play and overplay their dependence; a hypothesis which would fit well with the observation that so many followers of astrology do not seem quite to believe but rather take an indulgent, semi-ironical attitude towards their own conviction. In other words, astrology cannot be simply interpreted as an expression of dependence but must be also considered as an ideology for dependence, as an attempt to strengthen and somehow justify painful conditions which seem to be more tolerable if an affirmative attitude is taken towards them. Anyhow, the world appears to most people today more as a »system« than ever before, covered by an all-comprising net of organization with no loopholes where the individual could »hide« in face of the ever-present demands and tests of a society ruled by a hierarchical business setup and coming pretty close to what we call »verwaltete Welt,« a world caught by administration.

It is this reality situation which has so many and obvious similitaries with paranoid systems of thinking that it seems to invite such patterns of intellectual behavior, as well as compulsive attitudes. The similarity between the social and the paranoid system consists not only of the closedness and centralized structure as such but also of the fact that the »system« under which most people feel they work has to them an irrational aspect itself. That is to say, they feel that everything is linked up with everything else and that they have no way out, but at the same time the whole mechanism is so complicated that they fail to understand its raison d'être and even more, they suspect that this closed and systematic organization of society does not really serve their wants and needs, but has a fetishistic, self-perpetuating »irrational« quality, strangely alienated from the life that is thus being structured. Thus people even of supposedly »normal« mind are prepared to accept systems of delusions for the simple reason that it is too difficult indeed to distinguish such systems from the equally inexorable and equally opaque one under which they actually have to live out their lives. This is pretty well reflected by astrology as well as by the two brands of totalitarian states which also claim to have a key for everything, know all the answers, and reduce the complex to simple and mechanical inferences, doing away with anything that is strange and unknown and at the same time fail to explain anything.

The system thus characterized, the »verwaltete Welt,« has a threatening aspect per se. In order to do full justice to such needs as the one satisfied by astrology, one has to be aware of the ever-threatening impact of society. The feeling of being »caught,« the impossibility for most people to regard themselves by any stretch of imagination as the masters of their own fate, is only one of the elements of this threat. Another one, more deep-lying both psychologically and sociologically, is that our social system, in spite of its closedness and the ingenuity of its technological functioning, seems actually to move towards self-destruction. The sense of an underlying crisis has never disappeared since the first World War and most people realize, at least dimly, that the continuity of the social process and somehow of their own capacity of reproducing their life, is no longer due to supposedly »normal« economic processes but to factors such as universal rearmament, which by themselves breed destruction while they are apparently the only means of self-perpetuation. This sense of threat is real enough and some of its expressions such as the A- and H-bombs are about to outrun the wildest neurotic fears and destructive fantasies. The more people profess official optimism, the more profoundly they are probably affected by this mood of doom, the idea, correct or erroneous, that the present state of affairs somehow must lead towards a total explosion and that the individual can do very little about it. The sense of doom may today obtain a peculiarly sinister coloring by the fact that the present form of social existence seems to go down whereas no new and higher form of social organization appears on the horizon. The »wave of the future« seems to consummate the very fears that are produced by the conditions of the present. Astrology takes care of this mood by translating it into a pseudorational form, thus somehow localizing free-floating anxieties in some definite symbolism, but it also gives some vague and diffused comfort by making the senseless appear as though it had some hidden and grandiose sense while at the same time corroborating that this sense can neither be sought in the realm of the human nor can properly be grasped by humans. The combination of the realistic and the irrational in astrology may ultimately be accounted for by the fact it represents a threat and a remedy in one, just as certain psychotics may start a fire and at the same time prepare its extinction.

In spite of this comfort, astrology mirrors exactly the opaqueness of the empirical world and implies so little transcendent faith, is so opaque itself that it can be easily accepted by supposedly sceptical, disillusioned people. The intellectual attitude it is expressive of is one of disoriented agnosticism. The cult of God has been replaced by the cult of facts, just as the fatal entities of astrology, the stars, are themselves viewed as facts, things, ruled by mechanical laws. One could not grasp the specificity of astrology and of the whole frame of mind it stands for if one would simply call it a reversion to older states of metaphysics: what it is characteristic of is the transfiguration of a world of things into quasi-metaphysical powers. Auguste Comte's postulate that positivism should become a kind of religion is fulfilled ironically – science is hypostatized as an ultimate, absolute truth. The astrologist, as was pointed out in our brief survey of magazines, is very anxious to present it as a science. It may be mentioned in passing that just adherents of philosophical empiricism seem to be more susceptible for organized secondary superstition than speculative thinkers: extreme empiricism, teaching absolute obedience of the mind to given data, »facts,« has no principle such as the idea of reason, by which to distinguish the possible from the impossible, and thus the development of enlightenment overreaches itself and produces a mentality often no longer able to resist mythological temptations. It may also be mentioned that the modern science, which has replaced more and more categories which once interpreted events as though they were meaningful tends to promote a kind of opaqueness which at least for the uninitiated is hard to distinguish from an equally opaque and non-transparent thesis such as the dependence of the individual human fate on stellar constellations. While the astrological way of thinking is indicative of a »disillusioned« world, it enhances disillusion by surrendering the idea of the human even more completely to blind nature than it actually is.

Yet astrology is not merely an enlarged duplicate of an opaque and reified world. While people have come to be conditioned in such a way as to be unable to think or conceive of anything that is not like the existent, they want at the same time desperately to get away from the existent. The drabness of a commodity society which does not allow any quality to exist for its own sake, but levels down everything to a function of universal exchange seems to be unbearable, and any panacea is embraced that promises to gild it. Instead of the complicated, strenuous, and difficult intellectual processes which might overcome the feeling of drabness by understanding what really makes the world so drab, a desperate short cut is sought which offers both spurious understanding and flight into a supposedly higher realm. More than in any other respect, astrology resembles in this dimension other mass media such as the movies: its message appears as something metaphysically meaningful, something where the spontaneity of life is being restored while actually reflecting the very same reified conditions which seem to be dispensed with through an appeal to the »absolute.« The comparison of astrology with religious mysticism, dubious in more than one respect, is invalid particularly inasmuch as the mystery celebrated by astrology is empty – the movements of the stars, supposedly explaining everything, explain nothing, and even if the whole hypothesis were true it would have to be explained why and how the stars come to determine human life, an explanation that hasn't even been attempted by astrology. A veneer of scientific rationality has been fused with blind acceptance of undemonstrable contentions and the spurious exaltation of the factual.

This strange structure of astrology is significant, however, because it can itself be reduced to an all-important mundane structure: the division of labor which is basic to the whole life process of society. One may well concede that the isolated elements of astrology are rational. On the one hand, there are stars and their laws as explored by the science of astronomy, and the astrologists seem to take care to keep their statements, as far as they are concerned with celestial events, strictly in line with those movements which actually take place according to astronomy. On the other hand, there is the empirical life of man, particularly with regard to typical social situations and psychological conflicts, and our analysis has shown that the astrologists display quite a keen and sensible insight into life; that they speak out of experience, without any traces of delusion. The »mystery« of astrology, in other words, the element of irrationality and, incidentally the sole element that accounts for its mass appeal, is the way these two »unrelated« realms are related to each other. There is nothing irrational about astrology except its decisive contention that these two spheres of rational knowledge are interconnected, whereas not the slightest evidence of such an interconnection can be offered. This mystery, however, is not merely »superstition.« It is the negative expression of the organization of work, and, more specifically of the organization of science. There is but one world and its division into disconnected spheres is not due to being as such, but to the organization of human knowledge of being. It is in a way »arbitrary,« though unavoidable in terms of historical development, to keep, say, the science of astronomy and the science of psychology completely apart. This arbitrariness leaves its scars in knowledge itself; there is a break between the two sciences, continuity ends for all practical purposes, and the systematic attempts at a unification of the sciences remain extraneous and formalistic. The awareness of the gap is reflected by astrology. On the one hand, it is an attempt, once again in short-cut fashion, to bridge the gap and to relate, with a stroke, what is unrelated and what, one ultimately feels, must somehow be linked together. On the other hand, the very fact that the two realms are unrelated, that there is a void between them, a kind of no-man's-land, affords an ideal opportunity to settle there and to come forward with unsubstantiated claims. It is in fact this very unrelatedness, the irrationality in the relations between astronomy and psychology, for which there is no common denominator, no »rationale,« which affords astrology with the semblance of justification in its pretense to be mysterious, irrational knowledge itself. The opaqueness of astrology is nothing but the opaqueness prevailing between various scientific areas which could not be meaningfully brought together. Thus one might say that irrationality is in itself the outgrowth of the principle of rationalization which was evolved for the sake of higher efficiency, the division of labor. What Spengler called the modern caveman, dwells in the cavity, as it were, between organized sciences which do not cover the universality of existence.

Of course, the basic deception, the arbitrary connection of the disconnected, could easily be grasped in terms of present scientific knowledge. But it is significant of the situation that this knowledge is actually »esoteric« inasmuch as few people seem to be capable of drawing such consequences, whereas self-styled esoteric knowledge such as astrology has come to be extremely popular. It was pointed out before that astrology, just like racism and other intellectual sects, presupposes a state of semi-erudition. When evaluating astrology as a symptom of the decline of erudition, however, one has to be cautious not to indulge in superficial statements of official cultural pessimism. It would be irresponsible to allege such a decline in general and quantitative terms, not only because no valid comparison with former periods seems to be possible, but also because in many respects erudition is likely to be more widespread today than it used to be, i.e., layers of the population which formerly had no access to culture and knowledge are now brought into contact with the arts and sciences through the modern means of mass communications. The state of mind that can properly be called semi-erudite seems to be indicative of a structural change rather than of the distribution of cultural facilities. What is really happening is that, concomitantly with the ever-increasing belief in »facts,« information has a tendency to replace intellectual penetration and reflection. The element of »synthesis« in the classical philosophical sense seems to be more and more lacking; there is, on the one hand, a wealth of material and knowledge, but the relationship is more one of formal order and classification than one which would open up the supposedly stubborn facts by interpretation and understanding. The rigid dichotomy maintained in very influential philosophical schools today between logical formalism and a kind of empiricism that regards every theory only as the expression of expectations to be fulfilled by data later to be found is symptomatic of this intellectual situation. It is, in a way, mirrored by astrology too, and it may well be said that astrology presents the bill for the neglect of interpretative thinking for the sake of fact-gathering. There are, on the one hand, the »facts« both of stellar movements and well-known psychological reactions, but there is no real synthesis even attempted, no relationship that makes sense is established – and probably cannot be established between two spheres so widely divergent. Instead an entirely extraneous subsumption of human events under astronomical laws is attempted, externalization, as will be remembered, being an essential facet of astrology in all respects. The element of semi-erudition shows itself in the failure of the mind to recognize the fallacy not of the material thus interconnected, but of the spuriousness of the link. Lack of »understanding,« disorientation in a complex and at the same time fatal social setup and also, possibly, confusion created through misunderstandings of the recent developments of natural sciences (particularly of the replacement of the concept of matter by that of energy which seems to invite wild constructs) contribute to the readiness to relate the unrelated – a pattern of thinking which, by the way, is well-known to psychiatry. Under this viewpoint, astrology may well be defined as an organized system of »ideas of reference.« While the naive persons who take more or less for granted what happens hardly ask the questions astrology pretends to answer and while really educated and intellectually fully developed persons would look through the fallacy of astrology, it is an ideal stimulus for those who have started to reflect, who are dissatisfied with the veneer of mere existence and who are looking for a »key,« but who are at the same time incapable of the sustained intellectual effort required by theoretical insight and also lack the critical training without which it would be utterly futile to attempt to understand what is happening. Precisely this type, both sceptical and insufficiently equipped intellectually, a type hardly capable of integrating the various intellectual functions torn apart by the division of labor, seems to be on the upsurge today. Thus astrology is an expression of the impasse reached by the division of intellectual labor not only in objective terms, according to its intrinsic structure, but also subjectively, being directed at those whose minds have been conditioned and warped by that division of labor. The astrological fad can mainly be explained as the commercial exploitation of this frame of mind, both presupposing and corroborating retrogressive tendencies. In as far it is part and parcel of the all-comprising pattern of the culture industry; in fact, the specific ideology promoted by a publication such as the Los Angeles Times column is pretty much the same as that emerging from the movies and television although the type of people at which it aims is probably somewhat different – there is some »division of labor« also among the various mass media, mainly with regard to the various kinds of customers which each medium attempts to ensnare. Primarily, astrological publications »sell« due to the objective and subjective characteristics so far outlined. In view of this commercial success, astrology is taken up by more powerful economic agencies which take it away from the crystal-gazer atmosphere, as it were (just as the big studios took away the movies from the amusement park booths), purge it of its manifestly crazy traits, make it »respectable« and thus utilize it commercially on a large scale. This, of course, is only possible inasmuch as the inherent ideology of astrology harmonizes with what the interests vested in this area want to promote. It is of little importance whether, as it seems likely, conformity and obedience are a priori inherent in astrology or whether the ideology spotted by our analysis of the Los Angeles Times column is due to astrology's integration into a larger ideological framework.

Speaking in general terms, the astrological ideology resembles, in all its major characteristics, the mentality of the »high scorers« of The Authoritarian Personality. It was, in fact, this similarity which induced us to undertake the present study. Apart from the features brought out in our analysis, some more traits of the high scorer cropping up in the column may be mentioned. Here goes the over-all externalization promoted by astrology, the idea that everything negative is due only to external, mostly physical circumstances, but that otherwise »everything is fine,« the continuous stress on conventional wholesomeness. All this is indicative of rigid psychological defenses against instinctual urges. The psychological syndrome, however, expressed by astrology and propagandized by its advice is only the means to an end, the promotion of a social ideology. It offers the advantage of veiling all deeper-lying causes of distress and thus promoting acceptance of the given. Moreover, by strengthening the sense of fatality, dependence, and obedience, it paralyses the will to change objective conditions in any respect and relegates all worries to a private plane promising a cure-all by the very same compliance which prevents a change of conditions. It can easily be seen how well this suits the over-all purpose of the prevailing ideology of today's culture industry; to reproduce the status quo within the mind of the people.

It should not be overlooked that within the total setup of the ideology of mass culture, astrology represents a »speciality.« The nucleus of its doctrine as well as of its adherents shows many characteristics of a sect. But just this sect-like character, the claim of something particular and apocryphal to be all-comprehensive and exclusive, is indicative of a most sinister social potential: the transition of an emasculated liberal ideology to a totalitarian one. Just as those who can read the phony signs of the stars believe that they are in the know, the followers of totalitarian parties believe that their special panaceas are universally valid and feel justified in imposing them as a general rule. The paradoxical idea of a one-party state – while the idea of »party,« being derived from »part« is itself indicative of a plurality – is the consummation of a trend feebly presaged by the opinionated, inaccessible attitude of the astrological adept who defends his creed by hook or crook without ever entering into a real argument, who has auxiliary hypotheses in order to defend himself even where his statements are blatantly erroneous and who ultimately cannot be spoken to, can probably not be reached at all, and lives on a kind of narcissistic island.

It is this aspect which ultimately justifies the psychiatric emphasis given to our study, the interest psychiatry has to take in astrology and the psychiatric nature of many of our interpretations. Again, great care has to be taken not to over-simplify the relationship between astrology and psychosis. Some of the complexities of this relationship have been stated in the text itself (see above, pp. [33 ff]). It should be emphasized that there is neither justification for primitively calling adepts of astrology psychotics, while, as has been shown, it also serves the function of a defense against psychosis, nor to postulate that astrology as such is indicative of people becoming crazier and crazier, or that paranoia as such is on the increase. However, the hypothesis may be ventured that various historical situations and social settings favor various psychological syndromes and »bring out« and accentuate distinct types of possibilities ever-present in human beings. Thus nineteenth century liberalism with the idea of the small independent entrepreneur who accumulates wealth by saving has probably elicited character formations of the anal type more than, say, the eighteenth century, where the ego ideal was more largely determined by the feudal characterological imagery which would be called in Freudian terms »genital«³⁸ – although closer scrutiny would probably show that this aristocratic ego-ideal hardly had so much basis in fact as romantic desires would have it. Anyway, it seems that in eras of decline of social systems, with the insecurity and anxiety widespread in such eras, paranoid tendencies in people are evinced and often channelized by institutions wishing to distract such tendencies from their objective reasons. Thus organized flagellantism and apocalyptic fantasies among the masses were characteristic of the first phase of the decay of the feudal system, and witch-hunting of the period of Counter-Reformation when an attempt was being made to artificially reconstruct a social order that by that time had become obsolete. Similarly, today's world, which offers such a strong reality basis for everybody's sense of being persecuted, calls for paranoic characters. Hitler was certainly psychologically abnormal, but it was just this abnormality which created the spell that allowed his success with the German masses. It may well be said that it is precisely the element of madness that paralyses and attracts followers of mass movements of all kinds; a structure to which it is a corollary that people never quite fully believe what they pretend to believe and therefore overdo their own beliefs, are prone to translate them into violent action at short notice. The movement »moral rearmament« would never have gained its momentum by its general humanitarian aims alone, but its exhibitionist rite of public confession and its hostile attitude against sex, so strongly reminiscent of the strengthening of defenses throughout other mass media, seem to act as a real stimulus. One may well compare the function of these confessions to the forced confessions of the supposed traitors in Russia and the satellite states behind the iron curtain, which far from disillusioning Communist followers in the free world often seem to cast a kind of magic spell and to be swallowed hook, line and sinker. Astrology has to be regarded as a little model of much greater social feeding on paranoid dispositions. Insofar it is a symptom of retrogression of society as a whole which allows some insight into the illness itself. It denotes a recurrence of the unconscious, steered for purposes of social control which is finally irrational itself.

Perhaps it may be regarded as symbolic that, at the beginning of the era that seems to come to its end, the philosopher Leibniz who was the first to introduce the concept of the unconscious, was also the one who stated that, notwithstanding his tolerant and peaceable mind – he sometimes signed himself Pacidius – he felt profound contempt only for those activities of the mind which aimed at deception and named as the main example for such activities astrology.

Fußnoten

[1 Richard Max Brickner, Is Germany Incurable? introd. Margaret Mead and Edward A. Strecker (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1943).]

2 Sigmund Freud, »The ›Uncanny‹« (1919) Collected Papers, trans. Joan Riviere, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1925), pp. 368–407.

[3 George Devereux, ed., Psychoanalysis and the Occult (New York: International Universities Press, 1953).]

4 Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), Chapter III; Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, Introduction to the Science of Sociology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1921), pp. 50, 56–57, 282–287.

5 It should be noted that the oafish attitude taken by the magazines against what it regards as inferior remnants of outdated superstition does not prevent it from at least a kind of official solidarity with competing rackets of a pseudoscientific tinge of our own time. Good fellowship among all those occupied with esoteric knowledge is promoted. One serious reference is made to »our numerological friends.«

6 The uniformity of the material, though it has certainly its psychological aspects or those of psychological calculation, is probably explained primarily by the fact that the magazines are published by a very few centralized agencies.

[7 »Cultural industry« appears in the original. This translation of Kulturindustrie has been replaced by the nearer equivalent, »the culture industry,« which has become standard in recent English translations of Adorno's works.]

8 In some respect he is in a position similar to that of the political demagogue who has to make some promises to everybody and has to figure out what is likely to worry most the majority of his audience.

9 »By pseudo-individualization we mean endowing cultural mass production with a halo of free choice or open market on the basis of standardization itself.« T.W. Adorno, »On Popular Music,« Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, 9 (1941), p. 25.

10 Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear: The Inner Experience of a Psychoanalyst (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1948), pp. 458–463. Reik applies the term to the jargon of semiprofessionals. This jargon has, in the meantime, become socialized.

11 Herta Herzog, »On Borrowed Experience: An Analysis of Listening to Daytime Sketches,« Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941), pp. 65–91.

12 Observations of a closely related nature were presented in the paper »Psychiatric Theory and Institutional Context,« read by Dr. Alfred H. Stanton at the 109th Annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (Los Angeles, May 7, 1953).

13 Sigmund Freud, »Einige psychische Folgen des anatomischen Geschlechtsunterschieds«, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14: Werke aus den Jahren 1925–1931 (London: Imago Publishing Co., 1948), pp. 24ff.; Idem, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15: Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (London: Imago Publishing Co., 1940), pp. 134ff.

14 Sigmund Freud, »Zwangshandlungen und Religionsübungen«, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7: Werke aus den Jahren 1906–1909 (London: Imago Publishing Co., 1941), pp. 129–139. Idem, »Ueber libidinöse Typen,« Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14, p. 511.

15 Erich Fromm, »Zum Gefühl der Ohnmacht,« Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 6 (1937) pp. 95–118; T.W. Adorno, »On Popular Music,« Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941), pp. 17–48.

16 Cf. Sigmund Freud, »Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse: Angst und Triebleben«, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15, pp. 105–106.

17 Cf. Ibid., p. 108; Idem, »Charakter und Analerotik,« Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7, pp. 203–209.

18 Cf. Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11: Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (London: Imago Publishing Co., 1940), pp. 369ff.; Idem, »Jenseits des Lustprinzips,« Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13: Jenseits des Lustprinzips; Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse; Das Ich und das Es (London: Imago Publishing Co., 1940), pp. 3ff.

19 Erich Fromm, »Zum Gefühl der Ohnmacht,« pp. 103–104.

20 Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1945), pp. 153–154.

21 Ibid., p. 270.

22 Ibid., p. 291.

23 Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1950), p. 21.

24 Cf. Hermann Nunberg, »Ichstärke und Ichschwäche«, Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und Imago 24 (1939), pp. 49–61.

25 This dichotomy goes back to the characterological typology developed by C.G. Jungs Psychologische Typen (Zürich, 1921), pp. 473ff. It should be emphasized that just a psychologist who claimed to give metaphysical depth to supposedly shallow psychoanalytic concepts, is particularly prone to be taken up by commercial popularization.

26 Cf. Sigmund Freud, »Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse: die Libidotheorie und der Narzißmus«, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11, pp. 427–446.

27 Cf. Karen Horney, New Ways in Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1939); Idem, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle toward Self-Realization (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1950); Idem, The Neurotic Personality of our Time (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1937).

28 It may be mentioned in passing that the historical origins of the concept of intuition coincide with the extreme great rationalistic systems of seventeenth century philosophy. Thus to Spinoza, intuition is the highest type of knowledge, though the term is used by him in a sense somewhat different from the current one. In Leibniz, the concept of the unconscious is introduced by ways of mathematical reflections on subliminal knowledge under the title of »petites perceptions.« The history of intuitionism is the night side of accidental rationalism.

29 Cf. T.W. Adorno, et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).

30 A study on science fiction would be worthwhile. This wide-spread fad may owe its tremendous popularity to its ingenious solution of the conflict between irrationality and common sense. The science fiction reader need no longer feel ashamed of being a superstitious and gullible person. The fantasies of his own making, no matter how irrational they are, and how much projective content of either individual or collective nature may be implied, appear no longer as irreconcilable to reality. Thus, the term »another world« which once had a metaphysical meaning, is here brought down to the level of astronomy and obtains an empirical ring. Ghosts and horrible threats often reviving repulsive freakish entitites of olden times, are treated as natural and scientific objects coming out of space from another star and preferably from another galaxy although to the best of today's biological knowledge, the »law of convergence,« would probably lead even on distant stars to developments much more similar to those on earth than it appears in the secularizations of demonology enjoyed by the science fiction reader. Man's own reification and mechanization is projected back upon reality in the very widespread robot literature. Incidentally, science fiction consummates a long tradition of American literature dealing with the irrational while at the same time denying its irrationality. Edgar Allan Poe is in various respects the inventor of science fiction, no less than of the detective story.

31 Cf. Sigmund Freud, »Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse«, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11, pp. 211ff.; 341 ff.

32 Cf. Ibid., pp. 383–384; Idem, »Hemmung, Symptom und Angst«, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14, pp. 136–137; Idem, »Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse«, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15, pp. 93–94.

33 Cf. T.W. Adorno, »How to Look at Television,« The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television 8 (spring, 1954) pp. 213–235.

34 Cf. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, trans. Cecil Baines (New York: International Universities Press, 1946), pp. 117–131.

35 Cf. Max Horkheimer, »Authoritarianism and the Family Today,« The Family: Its Function and Destiny, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1949), pp. 359–374.

36 Attention should be drawn to the analogy with the well-known anti-Semitic division into »good« and »bad« Jews. Cf. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, pp. 622ff.

37 It may be mentioned in passing that the language of the column on the whole is euphemistic and that all negative aspects of life are expressed by neutral or even pleasant terms which one has to analyze pretty carefully in order to get at the reality basis. Most of the examples so far offered are at the same time examples of euphemism. The superstitious element in this device, the fear of summoning some demon by mentioning his name is well-known and probably utilized. On an overt level, the fear of offending anybody plays a large role. Neither does the column want to offend the addressee by designating his weakness with its right name nor does the addressee want to offend the higher-up even in his thoughts.

38 Sigmund Freud, »Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse«, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 15, p. 105.