Psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School

In the 1930s, the philosophers and social theorists of the Frankfurt School were the first members of the academy to take the then scandalous discipline of psychoanalysis seriously. Along with Hegel, Marx and Weber, Freud became one of the pillars on which Critical Theory was constructed.  Beginning with the Institute for Social Research’s groundbreaking Studies on Authority, through Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, and Habermas’ Knowledge and Human Interests to Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition, the vicissitudes of the development of Critical Theory can be mapped by tracking each of its member’s relation to psychoanalysis.  And this is the plan that we will follow in this class in an attempt to elucidate one of the most creative syntheses in contemporary social theory.