Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: [When Freud worked for free. The prehistory of the authoritarian personality] Mats Deland’s article is about how the Freudo-Marxist tradition arose when a new, young generation of psychoanalysts, many of them women, many with hard-earned experiences from care work during World War I, encountered the psychological misery among the poor in Berlin and Vienna when working in the free clinics that were opened on Sigmund Freud’s own initiative in the early 1920s. Analysts such as Otto Fenichel, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Ernst Simmel and not least Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm spearheaded a rapid theoretical development of psychoanalysis, often in direct opposition to Freud’s instructions. The group became politically radical and established contacts and collaborations with the organizations of the labour movement. Deland shows how this in turn led to new conflicts when criticism of psychoanalysis increased in the Soviet Union and spread to the broader communist movement. The collaboration with Max Horkheimer’s Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt was, on the other hand, all the more fruitful. The Freudo-Marxists were forced to leave Germany and Austria fleeing Nazism and fascism in the early 1930s, and in exile the tradition developed further in other directions. But the legacy lived on within the framework of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory, as not least the study The Authoritarian Personality testifies to. Publication history: Published original. (Published 23 November 2023) Citation: Deland, Mats (2023) “När Freud jobbade gratis. Den auktoritära personlighetens förhistoria”, in Den auktoritära personligheten. Det vita fältet IV , special issue of Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys , issue 16, pp. 137–221. https://doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.16.5
Author: Mats Deland
Institution: Mid Sweden University
Language: Swedish
Subfield: Cultural Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4388952201