Adorno's negative psychology

Abstract

AbstractFollowing the Second World War, Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality (1950/2019) became the most influential engagement between Frankfurt School critical theorists and the field of psychology. The recent publication of Adorno's retracted “Remarks on The Authoritarian Personality” (2019) provides a timely impetus to reexamine and challenge certain long‐held ideas about Adorno's contribution to psychology—for instance that The Authoritarian Personality reduces complex social phenomena to individual motivation and personality. Adorno's Remarks provide an alternative approach to the usual reading of The Authoritarian Personality, where the psychology of authoritarianism points to a contradiction at the very core of the concept of psychology, aligning the study with Adorno's more critical and dialectical works. In this article, I challenge how Adorno and The Authoritarian Personality are commonly taken up in critical psychology and introduce “negative psychology” as Adorno's central contribution to the field modeled in his reading of psychoanalysis and his theory of negative dialectics. Reframed in this way, Adorno can continue to serve as a crucial site of critical engagement for psychologists.