Reason and Reparation: A Kleinian Account of the Critique of Instrumental Reason

Author(s): Fred Alford

Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Feb., 1990), pp. 37-61
Published by: Springer
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Reason and reparation

A Kleinian account of the critique of instrumental reason

FRED ALFORD
Department of Government and Politics, The University of Maryland

Central to the program of the Frankfurt School is its critique of the

dialectic of Enlightenment. In Lukics's augmentation of Marx's con-
cept of alienation, the concept refers to man's alienation from himself
as producer. People become like the things they produce; they also
become like the production process itself. The Frankfurt School radi-
calized this critique, extending it to include not merely exchange rela-
tionships under capitalism but the history of Western reason since (and
even before) Socrates. For the critique of instrumental reason, it is not
merely productive relationships under capitalism that promote reifica-
tion. Reason itself becomes reified, in the sense that it comes to mimic
the most rigid, aggressive, fragmented aspects of nature itself in order
to control it. The unique and particular - in nature, and in those men
and women who employ instrumental reason - is broken up into
uniform, meaningless parts in order to control it. The capitalistic pro-
duction process, as well as the rationality that it exemplifies (instru-
mental reason), is but a reflection of this larger, world-historical devel-
opment, the dialectic of Enlightenment. In this dialectic, the potential
of reason to be more than an instrument is split off as idealism, where it
remains impotently confined to higher realms.

One of the key aspects of instrumental reason, according to Hork-

heimer and Adorno, is the way in which it forces reality into categories,
categories that define objects in terms of how they may best be manip-
ulated or controlled. They call this type of thinking "identity thinking,"
the assumption that the concept is adequate to the object - i.e., it tells
us all there is to know about the object - if the concept allows us to
predict or control its behavior. Dialectical thought is the opposite.

The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not
go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contra-

Theory and Society 19: 37-61, 1990.

? 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
38

dict the traditional norm of adequacy.... It indicates the untruth of identity,

the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.'

Dialectical thought is reconciling, because it seeks to come to terms

with the object, to let it be, to let it reveal itself. The cognitive utopia,
says Adorno, "would be to use concepts to unseal the non-conceptual
with concepts, without making it their equal."2 What precisely this
might mean is, to be sure, quite unclear, as countless critics have
pointed out.

For the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein to be relevant to the

concerns of the Frankfurt School, it must be shown that it can illumi-
nate Adorno's critique of identity thinking. For the Kleinian account to
constitute an improvement, it must also suggest a solution to the dialec-
tic of Enlightenment. For in posing the problem of instrumental reason
in such radical terms, the Frankfurt School rendered its solution vir-
tually unimaginable. I shall argue that the Kleinian categories of love,
hate, and reparation can better explain the dialectic of Enlightenment.
Instrumental reason can fruitfully be interpreted as an expression of
primitive anxiety, the result of which is rigid, constrained, one-dimen-
sional symbolization. The alternative is what shall be called reparative
reason. While reparative reason is based on love, the way in which it
seeks to repair and make amends will not be stressed. Stressed instead
is the way in which reparative reason is sensitive to the complexities
and nuances of objects, not forcing them into rigid, prefabricated cate-
gories. It is this attribute that makes reparative reason so relevant to the
critique of instrumental reason.

As Horkheimer and Adorno's choice of Homer's Odyssey as motto of

the dialectic of Enlightenment reveals, instrumental reason is not mere-
ly a phenomenon of modern political economy.3 Though it does not
stand outside of history, instrumental reason is at base an expression of
humanity's anger and fear at the conditions of life on this all too sparse
planet. Instrumental reason is a psychological phenomenon before it is
a historical and political one ... or rather, before it is a phenomenon of
self-conscious human history (that is, theories of history). Nevertheless,
instrumental reason does not exist in a vacuum. Capitalism, for exam-
ple, by extending the struggle between humanity and nature to almost
every aspect of life, intensifies the effects of instrumental reason, turn-
ing even the most intimate relationships into an arena of nature-like
(naturwuechsig) competition, as Friedrich Engels among others has
shown.4 The situation with reparation is similar. A psychological force,
 39

it too is constrained - and sometimes distorted - by history. Klein, for

example, writes of how European colonizers might make reparation to
native populations who have been ruthlessly exploited, by "repopulat-
ing the country with people of their own nationality."5Such a statement
reflects not merely moral obtuseness on Klein's part (the essay was
originally published in 1937). It reflects the morally inchoate character
of the reparative impulse itself.

The reparative impulse is a desire to make amends, ultimately for the

harm done by our own aggression, either in phantasy or reality. It is
morally naive, unfocused. It is given focus by society, culture, and -
ideally - critical social philosophy. Reparative reason, as I shall call it,
is an alternative to the identity thinking associated with instrumental
reason, in which objects are approached in a spirit of freedom, open-
ness, and play. Much of my argument will concern how reparative
reason is an expression of the reparative impulse. Neither the repara-
tive impulse nor reparative reason is an alternative to critical social
philosophy. Like eros, but better suited to its task, reparation - as
impulse or reason - is a source of energy, an orientation or attitude,
maybe even a Weltanschaung, that critical social theory may draw on.
Why critical theory has not done so, and why it should, is the topic of
this essay. The conclusion considers how critical social theory might be
different if it did.

Kleinian theory and the Frankfurt School

Historically there was no contact at all between Klein and the Frank-
furt School, even as their dates overlap. In 1925 Klein was invited by
Ernest Jones to give a series of lectures on child analysis in England.
Two years later she emigrated there from Germany, where she re-
mained for the rest of her life. For a number of years during and im-
mediately after the Second World War, Klein was the leading intellec-
tual force in the British Psycho-Analytical Society.6 Her seminal paper,
"A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,"
appeared in 1935, twenty years prior to Marcuse's publication of Eros
and Civilization.7 Yet, the Frankfurt School shows no awareness of her
work. The reasons are complex, but the most important is surely that in
America, where most of the members of the Frankfurt School found
haven, psychoanalysis took a different turn than in England. In Amer-
ica, psychoanalysts such as Karen Homey and H. S. Sullivan aban-
doned much of Freudian instinct theory, particularly the Todestrieb
40

("death instinct"). At the same time in England, however, Klein and her
followers, such as Joan Riviere and Susan Isaacs, were applying devel-
opments in Freud's late metapsychology (precisely those developments
that Marcuse turns to in Eros and Civilization, such as Freud's specula-
tions about life and death "beyond the pleasure principle") in a clinical
setting, using this clinical experience to develop Freud's theory further.

What is it that makes Klein's thought so relevant to the concerns of the

Frankfurt School? In a word, the utterly uncompromising character of
her thought, the way in which she, like Freud, sees man as torn by his
desires. The greatness of Freud, stated Adorno in "Die revidierte
Psychoanalyse," consisted in his letting such contradictions as that
between human nature and society's needs remain unresolved. He re-
fused "to pretend a systematic harmony when the subject itself is rent."8
By Adorno's standard, Klein's account is also great, her thought un-
likely to be coopted by social integrationists. Though reparation is a
key category of hers, the destructive power of the Todestrieb is never
far from her concerns. Indeed, no other psychoanalyst took the Todes-
trieb as seriously as Klein, who regarded it not merely as metaphysical
speculation, but as a clinical hypothesis, an attitude that generated
much criticism. Whatever hope for a peaceful and decent society that
Klein discovers is not purchased cheaply.

Some regard Klein's psychoanalytic theory as bizarre, primarily be-

cause of her elaborate, architectonic account of the phantasy life of
very young children. Also objectionable to many is the way in which
she telescopes emotional development, so that in her account an infant
of six months is seen as already enmeshed in the Oedipal conflict. In
light of these concerns it is helpful to recall Adorno's famous remark
that "in psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations."9
Klein's exaggerations are found neither in her detailed account of the
infant's phantasy life, nor in her objectification of such phantastic
entities (internal objects, as Klein calls them) as the good and bad
breast. These are just details. Her exaggeration is her claim that even in
a world dominated by greed, envy, hatred, and aggression, care and
concern with others remains a powerful, though generally repressed
and distorted, force. I will note other virtues of Klein's account, partic-
ularly as compared to psychoanalytic alternatives more frequently
drawn on by critics sympathetic to the Frankfurt School, along the way.

Unlike Freud, who sees the Oedipus conflict as the crucible of psycho-
logical development, Klein focuses upon the infant's earliest emotions,
 41

particularly rage and hatred, which she regards as an innate expression

of the Todestrieb.1l Because the child's nascent ego is weak and un-
developed, it experiences its aggression and greed as uncontrollable
forces, threatening its own annihilation. To defend against this threat
the child splits its aggression off from its good feelings about mother
and others, and projects it outwards, where it is experienced in a
paranoid fashion: as an attack on the infant from outside. Klein calls
this earliest organization of defenses the paranoid-schizoid position, in
order to stress the way in which the splitting of good and bad aspects of
experience interact with persecutory anxiety."1 Such anxiety, argues
Klein, is actually a primitive expression of guilt (that is, lex talionis),
which stems both from the aggressive desire to annihilate mother, as
well as the greedy desire to possess her utterly, to wring her out and
squeeze her dry, regardless of her welfare.

Beginning as early as six months, says Klein, the young child comes to
recognize that the bad mother who frustrates him, and whom he has
destroyed in phantasy a thousand times, is also the good mother who
tenderly meets his needs. It is this recognition that good and bad object
are one (the term "object,"a legacy of Freudian drive theory, in which
drives have objects, rather than relationships, is used to connote that
the young child at first relates to aspects of people, rather than whole
persons) that is the foundation of what Klein calls the depressive
position. Klein calls it the depressive position because attempts to
restore the damaged object to wholeness, in order to make reparation
for the harm caused it in phantasy, are coupled with depression and
despair, as the young child doubts that it is powerful enough to make
whole all that it has destroyed. Though Klein's emphasis on interpreting
aggression is generally stressed (she has been called an id psychologist),
the central role of love and reparation in her thinking should not be
overlooked. Joan Riviere, one of Klein's earliest and most well-known
associates, argues that her studies on reparation are "perhaps the most
essential aspect of Melanie Klein's work."12Just as much as hatred and
aggression, love and concern for others - particularly as this is ex-
pressed as wanting to mitigate their pain and suffering - is an inherent
feature of the child's earliest relationships, as well as those of adults.

Jiirgen Habermas has characterized the project of the Frankfurt School

as an attempt to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves:
victims of injustice and oppression who have suffered and died.'3 It is
to this theme, not eros, that Marcuse turns at the conclusion of Eros
and Civilization, arguing that suffering, premature death, "the unre-
42

deemable guilt of mankind" who could have so often caused it to be

otherwise, the remembrance of those who suffered, even their redemp-
tion, are the fundamental concerns of critical social theory. Eros and
Civilization concludes with these lines:

But even the ultimate advent of freedom cannot redeem those who died in
pain. It is the remembrance of them, and the accumulated guilt of mankind
against its victims, that darken the prospect of a civilization without re-
pression.14

It is these themes - greed, hatred, aggression, the guilt these ugly

passions evoke, and the attempt to make reparation for the damage
they cause - that guide Klein's work. These are the same themes that
come up again and again in the Frankfurt School's attempt to refor-
mulate humanity's relationship to nature, and the concept of reason on
which this relationship is based. Klein and the Frankfurt School speak
the same language, even if they did not speak it to each other.

Eros or love ?

Why does Marcuse not just come out and say it: that the goal is a soci-
ety in which love triumphs over hate, and that for love to do so it must
gain pleasure from the welfare of others, sometimes even sacrifice for
them? Instead, Marcuse tries to derive these ideals from eros. In part
the answer has to do with the role of eros in founding a biological basis
for socialism, as Marcuse calls it. In part too the answer has to do with
a reductive tradition within psychoanalysis, in which eros comes to
include every relationship of care, concern, esteem, and affection.
There are not qualitatively different types of love, only degrees of in-
hibition of original aim. Freud, and presumably Marcuse, sees such a
comprehensive view of love as an advantage.

As for the "stretching"of the concept of sexuality ... anyone who looks down
with contempt upon psychoanalysis from a superior vantage point should
remember how closely the enlarged sexuality of psychoanalysis coincides
with the Eros of the divine Plato.'5

But this is precisely the problem. Plato addressed in a systematic and

literary manner an insight that most Greeks were quite at home with
(Hesiod, Theogony, lines 115-125; Euripides, Hippolytos, lines 1-64;
Sophocles, Antigone, lines 782-797): that eros is single minded and
often greedy in its pursuit of pleasure. Even in praising eros, Plato has
 43

Socrates stress the way in which eros wants not merely to experience
beauty, but to own, possess, and control it, now and forever (Sym-
posium, 203b-e). Socrates goes on to employ an interesting personifi-
cation. The parents of Eros, he says are Contrivance and Poverty. For
this reason, Eros is always poor, and far from being sensitive and
beautiful, is hard, weather-beaten, shoeless, and homeless, taking after
his mother. However, as his father's son he schemes to get what is
beautiful. He is bold, always devising tricks, a lover of wisdom, a
magician, a true sophist (203b-e). Eros, it appears, is so intensely
needy that it can never be satisfied, and so desperate that it will scheme
and deceive to get all it can, and more. Too much is never enough. Eros,
it appears, is not truly concerned with the object - the person - in
itself, but with the object only as it is, or may become, a source of satis-
faction to human needs and desires (Phaedrus, 252d-e). If this is so,
how in the world can the project of the Frankfurt School, a project
based upon concern for those who cannot meet or defend their own
legitimate needs, be successfully grounded in eros? The psychoanalyst
Donald Meltzer compares the Freudian view of love with a capital
investment aimed at making a profit. You do not invest your libido
unless you hope to get back more than you give. "You cannot exactly
think of yourself as a benefactor of mankind when, by loving you set up
a factory, as it were, rather than endowing a charity."'6 Because it is
often the case that those who suffer cannot give back anything (and
those who have died never will), why bother investing in them? To feel
better about oneself, it could be argued in reply. But there are so many
more pleasant ways of doing so than confronting suffering and guilt,
and Eros is an expert in finding every one of them.

Because Kleinian love, understood as caritas, rather than eros, stems

not from Freud's hydraulic libidinal system, but from a passionate
concern with others, it need not suffer "dilution" when applied to an
extended world.'7 Quite the contrary. Defined as affection, love, or
esteem, caritas connotes the value of the object loved, rather than the
intensity of desire (thus, a Latin dictionary will usually give the first
definition of caritas as dearness, or high price). At its best, caritas
esteems what is truly good, avoiding dilution because it is well aimed.
But, if caritas does not suffer from dilution, it may suffer from mis-
direction, as Klein's comments on native peoples reveal. What is re-
quired is instruction in those objects most worthy of our love, and a
culture able to support this instruction. That critical social theory has a
job to do here is apparent, to say the least. And although it is regretta-
ble that caritas may be misdirected, its counterpart, eros, suffers from a
44

similar limitation, as Marcuse's concept of repressive desublimation

reveals. In fact, caritas may have an advantage over eros in this regard.
While subject to misdirection, caritas does not exploit the individual's
selfish desire for satisfaction in order to bind him even more closely to
society in the same way that eros may. Care and concern, even when
misdirected (for example, lavished on the family pet while people
starve), remain a positive force, a force that must be rechanneled, but
not redefined, in order to be truly emancipatory and good.

Posing the problem confronted by the Frankfurt School in terms of the

selfishness of eros is not the imposition of an alien perspective, one that
creates a problem only by drawing upon a different theoretical per-
spective. Quite the contrary, the Frankfurt School was very aware of the
limits of Freudian libidinal hydraulics.'8 It simply did not have an alter-
native, because any alternative seemed to require the abandonment of
what they found so fruitful in Freud: the depth psychology, by which
the School meant the drive theory. In two seminal essays, Jessica Ben-
jamin has explored the contradictions that the Frankfurt School's
reliance on Freud led them into. In particular, it came to see the
Oedipus conflict, in which the son internalizes the father's values, as
progressive, even as Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse recognized
that Oedipal internalization reproduced instrumental reason.19 They
were caught in this dilemma because any alternative seemed worse,
even more likely to lead to the "end of the individual." In a similar
fashion, Nancy Chodorow argues that the Frankfurt School's reliance
on drive theory, particularly in Marcuse's case, led it to see others
primarily as objects by which one's own drives may be satisfied - the
needs of others always being secondary.2' Or, as Jane Flax puts it in
"Critical Theory as a Vocation," the Frankfurt School repeatedly re-
turned to the "id's demand for self-gratification" as the basis of
liberation.2'

To solve this problem - the same problem I am addressing - Benjamin

and Chodorow turn to object relations theory. And while Klein is often
seen as the founder of object relations theory, these authors turn not to
Klein, but to several analysts influenced by her, such as W. R. D.
Fairbairn, Harry Guntrip, and Michael Balint. These analysts, argue
Benjamin and Chodorow, support a vision of human nature in which
individuals, when properly nurtured, naturally seek both autonomy
and community. Individuals need not be driven by eros to be free, nor
forced by father to individuate. These things stem spontaneously from
good quality interpersonal relationships.22As Chodorow puts it,
 45

Object-relationstheorydevelopsits accountof primarysocialityby describ-

ing the relationalconstructionof the self, both developmentallyand in daily
life. Because it is clinicallyrooted, it need not appeal to a vaguelydefined,
extra-individualistic, unsubstantiableEros as a force for unity.23

Given that such a psychoanalytic alternative exists, why turn to Klein, it

might be asked. The answer is not because she is the founder of object
relations theory. Quite the contrary, in many respects Klein's work
stands closer to Freud's late metapsychology, with its concern for the
play of love and death, than it does to the object relations theorists
drawn upon by Benjamin and Chodorow. Rather, the Kleinian per-
spective better addresses the fear and aggression that the Frankfurt
School sees at the root of instrumental reason. Benjamin and Chodo-
row analyze how patriarchy, even without the father (Mitscherlich's
vaterlose Gesellschaft), reproduces instrumental reason. The psycho-
analytic theory they employ lends itself to this social-psychological
task. My concern is with the roots of instrumental reason in the primi-
tive emotions of fear and rage. It is because Klein is concerned with
precisely these emotions, as well as how they may be transformed
under the influence of love, that her account more brilliantly illumi-
nates the philosophical concerns of the Frankfurt School. Her account
also better fits the Frankfurt School's understanding of the proper role
of psychoanalysis in social theory - that it is a source of opposition, not
just connection. Finally, Klein's account does all this without valorizing
selfishness.

Dialectic of enlightenment from a Kleinian perspective

In her early writings, Klein links the desire for knowledge, the clumsily
termed "epistemophilic impulse," with the desire to appropriate the
mother's body, and its imagined contents, such as babies. In fact, it
could be argued that Klein's work began with the study of the "epis-
temophilic impulse." As Meltzer points out, so much of what is revolu-
tionary in Klein's work stems from her taking seriously, often literally,
young childrens' phantasies about the inside of their own and their
mothers' bodies.24 From the Kleinian perspective, the desire to know
and the desire to own and control the contents of the mother's body are
virtually identical. "So the epistemophilic instinct and the desire to take
possession come quite early to be most intimately connected with one
another...," she states.25 For Freud, the desire to know and childhood
curiosity about sex, particularly parental intercourse, are linked. Intel-
46

lectual activity is a form of libidinal sublimation, which can be inhibited

by castration anxiety, for example. It might seem that Klein's view is an
elaboration of Freud's, but it is not. In Klein's early work, particularly,
the desire to know is not an expression of libido, but sadism. It is
sadism, directed against the mother's body, that drives the desire to
know. "The early connection between the epistemophilic impulse and
sadism is very important for the whole mental development," states
Klein.26 By sadism Klein means not so much willful wounding, as an
utterly selfish desire to own, control, and possess the mother's body
and its contents, without regard for the mother's welfare.

This origin of the desire to know in an aggressive, appropriating, even

sadistic orientation toward mother's body connects emotional and
intellectual development. Most importantly, it makes intellectual devel-
opment dependent upon the integration of aggression. All knowledge
of the outside world (including childish theories about the inside of
mother's body) stems from the symbolic equation of a phantasied
internal object with an external one. It is this aspect of Klein's thought
that Meltzer calls Platonic, referring apparently to the doctrine of
innate ideas (Meno, 81a-86d). The symbolic equation originally takes
the form of A (an object in the internal world ) = B (an aspect of
mother's body). The problem is that too much aggression, coupled with
too much anxiety about this aggression, can inhibit the desire to know,
out of fear that so doing will destroy mother. In repressing its sadism,
the young child also represses its desire to know.

The ego's excessive and premature defence against sadism checks the estab-
lishing of a relation to reality and development of phantasy-life. The further
sadistic appropriation and exploration of the mother's body and of the
outside world (the mother's body in an extended sense) are brought to a
standstill, and this causes the more or less complete suspension of the
symbolic relation to things and objects representing the contents of the
mother's body and hence of the relation to the subject's environment and to
reality.27

Less this all seem particularly unlikely, Klein notes that no less a
Freudian than James Strachey has shown that reading has the uncon-
scious significance of taking knowledge from mother's body. Converse-
ly, anxiety and guilt about robbing her is a significant factor in inhibi-
tions in reading.28

One of Klein's most famous patients, a four-year-old boy named Dick,

could barely speak or play, so inhibited was his use of symbolism. One
 47

day, while looking at some pencil shavings, Dick said of them "Poor
Mrs. Klein."29 For Dick the wood shavings did not represent Mrs.
Klein. They were Mrs. Klein, after Dick had expressed his aggression,
so that she was reduced from a whole object to pieces and fragments.
Yet, even this symbolic equation represented progress for Dick. Earlier
he had been unable to make even this terribly rigid and concrete equa-
tion, so anxious was he about his aggression. Of course, most intellec-
tual inhibitions are not this severe. Nevertheless, what the Frankfurt
School calls instrumental reason is characterized by a comparable,
albeit less extreme, symbolic rigidity. Like Dick, what Adorno calls
identity thinking virtually equates the object with the particular symbol
chosen to express it. I shall call this the rigid symbolic equation, in
order to suggests its linkage to intellectual inhibition associated with
paranoid-schizoid anxiety.

Identity thinking and the symbolic equation

Normally, as internal phantasies come into contact with reality they are
modified by it. This is the way we make contact with reality. It is the way
we learn all we will ever know about reality. Freud made a similar point,
arguing that everything conscious has a preliminary unconscious stage.
For Kleinians, this unconscious stage is unconscious phantasy, and the
link to the external world is established through symbolism. In finding a
symbolic expression for his unconscious phantasy, the child - and the
adult too - learns to explore and relate to the world. Originally the
symbolic connection between internal object and external reality is
terribly concrete: "inner A = outer B." Gradually, as phantasy is modi-
fied by contact with external reality, the symbolism is loosened, be-
coming more abstract. Not only an outer B (mother's body), but an
outer C, D, and so on (i.e., other aspects of the world) can represent an
inner A, and vice versa. Furthermore, the symbolic equation itself
becomes looser. Rather than "inner A = outer B, C, and D," one might
write the equation as "inner A outer B, C, and D," in which =, the
mathematical symbol for congruence, is interpreted to mean that while
the elements of the equation are not identical, they stand in har-
monious agreement. One element represents another, because the
elements resemble each other in significant ways, without being iden-
tical. Otherwise expressed, an internal object may come to stand for a
number of external objects, and vice-versa, in a shifting pattern that
changes as we learn more about the world, and ourselves. I shall refer
to this as the loose symbolic equation. It represents thought becoming
48

less identical with its objects. It does not represent the end of intellec-
tual aggression, a point that I expand below.

As William Leiss has emphasized in his classic study, The Domination

of Nature, the Frankfurt School was always convinced that the domina-
tion of nature and the domination of man hung together, and that the
connection was instrumental reason.3" A Kleinian perspective shows
why this is so. The domination of nature and the domination of man
are part of the same intellectual process, splitting and paranoid projec-
tion, that we use to defend against anxiety and aggression, by projecting
it outwards, and fighting it there. Historically, as Horkheimer and
Adorno point out, this has often been accomplished by rigidly equating
the human objects of our aggression, such as native peoples, with a
piece of unconquered nature, which is then opposed to reason, a prin-
ciple presumably the antithesis of nature.31In fact, reason is no more
the antithesis of nature (that is, human nature, understood in Kleinian
terms as the locus of the world-making passions of love and hate) than
is art, war, or love-making. Quite the contrary, reason shares with
almost every aspect of human life a common origin in the play of love,
hate, and reparation. As such, reason too may be characterized by such
psychological defenses as splitting and paranoid projection.

This is, of course, a controversial statement. In the tradition of Piaget,

cognitive development, culminating in formal operations during ado-
lescence (in "formal operations," logic is distinguished from context,
allowing hypothetical thought based on various transformations of
propositions), occurs independently of emotional development.32
However, even within this tradition, this distinction is being challenged.
Howard Gruber, in a "cognitive case study of young Darwin," argues
that Darwin's cognitive development cannot be analyzed in cognitive
terms alone, but requires in addition an analysis of Darwin's "organi-
zation of affect,"in which

there is ... a repeated pattern of affective change. An idea expressed first in a

positive problem-solving spirit is reiterated with a note of chastening and
sadness added. I have come to think that it would be hard for someone to
develop mature, disciplined thought without contending at some point with
the finitude of life.33

Thus, Darwin begins his "Transmutation Notebooks," which heralded

his mature theory, with the question "Why is life short, why such high
object generation?"34 Expressed in Kleinian terms, it is only when we
 49

have come to terms with death and separation that we are cognitively
able to see discoveries made under the influence of instrumental reason
("a positive problem-solving spirit") as part of a larger depressive
(referring to the emotional integration of good and bad that occurs in
the depressive position) whole.

According to a certain idealized picture of science, science makes pro-

gress in learning about the world because science formulates its theories
in such a way that one little fact may falsify them.35Yet, if this is so, then
surely science is not an instance of identity thinking, but an exception
to it, a decisive one, as science is usually conceived as the epitome of
instrumental reason. In fact, this observation about the ideals of science
is quite compatible with my account, for the same reason that science
does not escape the Frankfurt School's critique of instrumental reason.
Paranoid-schizoid epistemology, or instrumental reason, does not
exclude all learning (i.e., feedback) from nature, but only learning that
does not fit its categories, categories oriented toward prediction,
manipulation, and control. Within these categories, falsifiability reigns;
we learn about the world by allowing it to correct our theories. Dif-
ferent experiences of nature, experiences not fitting into these cate-
gories in the first place, may be excluded. The loosening of the sym-
bolic equation, an achievement of the depressive position, means two
things. It refers to the multiplicity of external things, processes, and
events that can represent internal reality. It also refers to the way in
which this multiplicity is more abstractly linked to the internal world in
the first place, so that the external world may show itself more freely,
less constrained by the symbolic equation. It is in this second respect
that science is not symbolically loose, for its categories, open to falsifi-
cation in some respect, exclude those experiences of the world incom-
patible with its categories of prediction, causal explanation (or asso-
ciation), and control. The experience of nature as beautiful is an
obvious example.

In Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman seeks to define art. After

rejecting various possibilities, such as art is representation, or art is
beauty, he concludes that the work of art is best distinguished from
other activities by its "semantic density." In art the relationship among
symbols is more important than their denotative function. This, in turn
has to do with the world-making function of art, the way in which it
creates another reality.36Such a perspective allows us to understand
symbolic "looseness" in a slightly different way. In a loose symbolic
equation, the relationship among symbols is more important than the
50

denotative relationship between symbol and external reality. In all but

the simplest symbolic equation (inner A = external B), both internal
and denotative relationships exist. Symbols refer to each other; they
also refer to the external world. Decisive in defining looseness is the
balance between these two modes of reference. From this perspective,
art is especially loose, normal science less so, accounting still less. In
the accountant's balance sheet, for example, each number denotes
something external, even though the internal relationships among the
numbers are also important. Conversely, very few of the elements of a
modern painting may denote anything external at all; symbolic juxta-
position is everything.

That signs ever refer to the external world has, of course, become a
controversial proposition in recent years. "There is nothing outside the
text," argues Culler in his book on Roland Barthes, echoing a position
held by Jacques Derrida and other deconstructionist critics.37Texts are
always and only about other texts, the doctrine of intertextuality as it is
called. Otherwise expressed, all our knowledge is like the abstract
painting to which Goodman refers, in which symbolic juxtaposition -
difference - is everything. Obviously this raises a number of difficult
issues that cannot be addressed here. I can only clarify the position
taken in this paper, which is essentially that of Raymond Tallis in Not
Saussure, who argues that it is the impossible demand for perfect,
unmediated access to reality (presence) that creates the counter reac-
tion: all is language. It is not, continues Tallis, accidental that Husserl is
a major target of Derrida, for Husserl is the theorist par excellence of
unmediated presence. Because this is impossible, Derrida - in a giant
synecdoche - concludes that presence itself is impossible, confusing the
impossibility of absolute, unmediated presence with all presence - that
is, all contact with reality.38 Seen in this light, the early Frankfurt
Theorists look pretty good. For while holding to the ideal of unmedi-
ated presence, they recognize that it can never be achieved - this is
what the critique of identity thinking is about. Yet, this did not lead
them either to equate the world with the text, or to see the text as a
prison. The real world remains a presence in their work. While seeking
to reformulate their approach to this presence, the approach taken here
shares their concern with it.

Enlightenment or intellectual inhibition ?

Horkheimer and Adorno's account of the Dialectic of Enlightenment

 51

may be interpreted, from a Kleinian perspective, as a phenomenon of

intellectual inhibition, born of aggression. Nature's scarcity, coupled
with anxiety about survival in a hostile and unresponsive world, leads
to an aggressive, appropriating attitude toward nature, in which knowl-
edge, possession, and control are, as with the very young child, virtually
one. To be sure, the history of instrumental reason is not a case study
comparable to that of "Dick."However, it appears that anxiety regard-
ing intellectual aggression may lead to intellectual rigidity, in which the
symbolic equation becomes particularly inflexible. An entire world is
seen only in terms of how it fits into categories associated with owner-
ship, possession, appropriation, manipulation, and control. In these
circumstances, says Klein, stimuli from the external world may be
virtually equated with internal stimuli. A realistic perception of the
external world as harsh, unremitting, and unresponsive may simply
reinforce a perception that one's internal world shares similar charac-
teristics. Otherwise expressed, the defenses associated with splitting
and projection become less effective, as what is projected into the
external world is, due to the inflexible symbolic equation, equated with
the internal world from which these projections have been banned.
Human nature becomes a second nature, a virtual copy of what we
have projected onto nature. Rather than reinforcing paranoid-schizoid
defenses, instrumental reason in the end undermines them.

It is for this reason that the ego frequently resorts to other defenses.
The ego, says Klein, sometimes "tries (by means of projection on to the
outer world) to demonstrate its independence from ... [itsl imagoes by
rebelling against all influences emanating from real objects.'39 If it is the
interaction of inner world with outer that modifies internal phantasy,
leading to knowledge of reality, then this rebellion against the influence
of reality must also impinge on intellectual development. Expressed in
philosophical terms, this rebellion is tantamount to idealism. Nietzsche
argues that "to imagine another, more valuable world is an expression
of hatred for a world that makes one suffer: the ressentiment of meta-
physicians is here creative."And Adorno, one of the few who could put
it more trenchantly than Nietzsche, writes of "idealism as rage" at a
world too sparse to be dominated.4" A Kleinian perspective requires
only a slight modification of this insight. Idealism is a defense against
rage, in which one's dependence upon the external world is denied, as
though the world of phantasy were self-sufficient.

The dialectic of Enlightenment is the division of reason into a crass

materialism that views the world strictly in terms of instrumental
52

reason, and an irrelevant, impotent idealism. This is, of course, the

process just addressed in Kleinian terms. It is clear how a crass mate-
rialism remains intellectually inhibited, due to the rigidity of the sym-
bolic equation involved. Indeed, this is the real meaning of the mimetic
character of instrumental reason. What may be surprising is how ideal-
ism does not really escape this inhibition either. Or rather, it escapes it
only by denying the symbolic equation altogether. Not a looser equa-
tion, but no equation at all, is the result. Otherwise expressed, the sym-
bolic equation becomes purely self-referential, having no denotative
function at all, as in the most abstract art. Neither materialism nor ide-
alism escapes identity thinking. Materialism identifies inner world with
outer; idealism is merely identical with itself. Needed is a more respon-
sive orientation toward the external world, in which the external world
is given a greater opportunity to modify our preconceptions (internal
phantasies) about it.

Reparative reason, science, and love

The connection between reparative reason, understood in terms of the

loose sympolic equation, and love is apparent. It is concern for the
object qua object that allows us to know it better, by not forcing it into
categories determined by our primitive anxieties, but instead letting the
object in some measure contribute to our categories. Love lets its love
be. In so doing the lover may learn to know other aspects of his or her
beloved, aspects that become apparent only when the beloved is valued
in his or her own right, not just as a satisfier of needs. The preceding
considerations suggest that this is as true of epistemological relations as
it is personal ones. Whereas paranoid-schizoid (instrumental) reason
sees its objects in terms of the categories of prediction, manipulation,
and control, reparative reason experiences its objects as they are
mediated by a richer, more creative set of phantasies, phantasies con-
cerned with precisely what Adorno wished art to concern itself with:
assisting the object to become itself.41This, ultimately, is what repara-
tion is about.

It could be argued that defining epistemological love in terms of letting

the object be itself (if this is to be anything more than an inchoate
romantic impulse) is tantamount to naive realism. This would not,
however, be correct. Like Thomas Kuhn in his well-known Structure of
Scientific Revolutions, Paul Feyerabend argues that theories are never
falsified by facts, because theories constitute a conceptual world - thus,
 53

they have an opportunity to determine what facts shall count against

them. Indeed, says Feyerabend, the better a theory seems to fit the
facts, the more suspicious we should be. The fit of theory and facts is
likely an indication "thatwe have failed to transcend an accidental stage
of research" - i.e., the theory has blinded us to alternative interpreta-
tions of the facts, or to new facts.42What is needed is new theories and
new concepts, which may help us discover new facts, facts that have
been overlooked by the prevailing theory. Feyerabend calls his
approach "counterinduction," arguing that it is compatible with the
"pluralistic realism," of J. S. Mill, which employs the proliferation of
theories and concepts to know the real structure of the world better.
That is, even if one assumes that the world itself is not loosely struc-
tured, but is only one way, the method of theoretical pluralism (which I
use here as a synonym for counterinduction, although they are not truly
identical) is the best way to learn about it.43Interpreted thus, it is ap-
parent that "letting the object reveal itself" is not just metaphor, though
it is that too. Conceptualizing the world via a multitude of fluid catego-
ries, including those that do not even seem to fit very well (counter-
induction), is the best way to grasp the way the world really is. In this
sense, the loose symbolic equation may indeed be said to assist the
object to become itself, as Adorno puts it - that is, to be known by us
as it truly is.

In Reflections on Gender and Science, Evelyn Fox Keller, a feminist

philosopher of science, draws on the psychoanalytic accounts of Ben-
jamin and Chodorow, arguing that because women generally experien-
ce themselves as more connected to the world than men (the result, in
part, of boys' greater need to reject mother, and all that she stands for,
in order to establish their own sexual identity), women also tend to see
the world differently, even in science. Keller characterizes this dif-
ference in terms of "dynamic objectivity," an orientation that is, of
course, shared by many men.

Dynamic objectivity aims at a form of knowledge that grants to the world

around us its independent integrity but does so in a way that remains cogni-
zant of, indeed relies on, our connectivity with that world.44

Most fascinating are Keller's case studies, such as "The Force of the
Pacemaker Concept in Theories of Aggregation in Cellular Slime
Mold," revealing the empirical as well as theoretical advantages of
"dynamic objectivity." Relevant here, however, is only the relationship
between dynamic objectivity and reparative reason.
54

They are similar but not identical, for the same reason that Klein's per-
spective is not identical with that of Benjamin and Chodorow. The
latter pair see psychoanalysis almost exclusively in terms of the issues
of separation and connection. Psychoanalysis becomes the study of the
way in which individuals are unconsciously part of each other. Cer-
tainly this is a central issue in Klein's account as well, and it would be
mistaken to overemphasize the difference. What Klein adds is a greater
appreciation of the problem of aggression. For Klein, hatred and
aggression are not only reactions to threatening connections with
others, as Keller, following Benjamin and Chodorow, would have it.45
Rather, hatred and aggression are primary, passions so powerful that
they threaten to overwhelm the subject and all he cares about, unless he
projects them outwards into the world - into the project that the
Frankfurt School called the domination of nature. Klein is not guaran-
teed correct, of course, though she does seem to take the intensity of
our passions more seriously. What Klein's perspective does do is pro-
vide better access to the problem of instrumental reason as it was for-
mulated by the Frankfurt School. For it is ultimately over the problem
of aggression that their account stumbled.

Reparative reason does not deny aggression

Not only is reparative reason not an expression of naive realism, but it

is also not an expression of a passive, waiting-for-being-to-disclose-
itself point of view. Quite the contrary, reparative reason recognizes the
need to integrate intellectual aggression, whereas the Frankfurt School,
above all Adorno, was so overcome by the catastrophe released by
human aggression that its integration was impossible. Not its integra-
tion, but the transcendence of aggression became the strategy of the
Frankfurt School. It is a strategy as characteristic of Eros and Civiliza-
tion (in which the defeat of scarcity would eroticize aspects of life pre-
viously dominated by aggression) as it is Adorno's negative dialectics,
which would approach the world "without velleity (Willkuer) or vio-
lence, entirely from felt contact with its objects - this alone is the task
of thought." Velleity, it will be recalled, is the weakest kind of desire, a
thought that does not lead to the slightest action.46 It is as though
Adorno would deny all desire, all willfulness, all self-assertion, in order
to protect the world from human aggression. In the long run, however,
such an approach cannot work, as it is based on the chimera that at
least one aspect of life, philosophy, might be purified of the aggression
that is the inseparable companion of every other aspect of life. Indeed,
 55

if Klein is correct, Adorno's approach must lead to a certain lack of re-

sponsibility, as we deny what we must do to survive and prosper: cate-
gorize the world.

An interesting case study of intellectual inhibition by the Kleinian ana-

lyst Hanna Segal sheds light on this claim. A woman writer came to
Segal, complaining that she had been unable to write for a number of
years. Her associations led her to remember an early dislike of using
words, a dislike that was still present. Using words, said the writer,
made her break "'an endless unity into bits.' It was like 'chopping up',
like 'cutting things."'To this woman, writing was an aggressive, rending
act, in which she tore an endless unity into bits. She felt, says Segal,

that using words made her lose the illusion of possessing and being at one
with an endless, undivided world: 'when you name a thing you really lose
it."47

In using words - symbols for things - the woman had to recognize her
own separateness from these things, and at the same time confront her
own aggressiveness. Because she could do neither, the woman could
not write.

The case study illustrates an important point. Words and concepts do

involve a certain aggressiveness toward the external world. They do
break an endless unity into bits, and at the same time force us to recog-
nize our own separateness. In her later work, Klein came to recognize
that the quest for knowledge stems not merely from sadism and greed,
but from a desire to know the object in order to repair it. Often this
reparative orientation toward knowledge takes the form of discovering,
creating, or making something new, in order to replace what we have
greedily taken with something better.48However, it is important not to
let ourselves off the hook too readily with insights such as this.
Although the motivation or goal may be reparative, the acquisition of
knowledge never entirely loses its origins in a certain appropriative
acquisitiveness that divides up reality in order to master it intellectually.

The reason is apparent: whether motivated by greed or love, the intel-

lectual operations are similar, because (pace the Frankfurt School's
most utopian dreams) the natural world does not change its nature
when approached with love. The killer and the surgeon both use a
knife, and while the killer is motivated by hate, the surgeon (ideally) by
love, can it be argued that the surgeon's actions contain not a trace of
56

the killer's aggression? The surgeon must be aggressive, because nature

generally neither knows nor cares about our motives. It is the original
other, in the sense that the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan characterizes
(m)other as the original other.49 Not because humans and nature are
ontologically distinct entities, but because we often experience nature
as the child sometimes fears its mother to be: utterly autonomous, self-
contained, unresponsive, needing us far less than we need her. That
"scandalous suture" is how Derrida refers to the relationship of nature
and culture.5"It is an apt phrase, for a suture is both a division between
separate parts, and that which joins sundered parts of a wounded
whole together. We experience nature as other so intensely, in part,
because we are joined to it as a condition of life itself.

The Frankfurt School, especially Adorno, thus fails to integrate aggres-

sion. Its alternative to instrumental reason is so incomprehensible pri-
marily because it has no place for aggression. There is a parallel
between Segal's patient, who would not name reality lest it be chopped
into bits, and Adorno's desire not to force nature into human cate-
gories, lest we destroy its wholeness and unity. Similarly, the alternative
to instrumental reason that one finds in Marcuse, with its idealization
of deindividuation, recalls Segal's patient's desire not to recognize her
separateness, lest she be (in my interpretation) confronted with her
own aggression, including her rage at her own mortality.5' Reparative
reason, understood in terms of the loose symbolic equation, is the
alternative to instrumental reason. Rather than avoiding the categoriza-
tion of the external world, it seeks to keep these categories flexible,
open to revision, not just by the facts that falsify theories, but by new
reparative phantasies as well. We must forever chop reality into bits.
The trick is to be able to put the bits back together, and chop them up
in a new way the next day. This is the point of what I called loose sym-
bolism. Against the tendency of quantitative thought to categorize real-
ity according to the needs of prediction and control, Adorno invokes
"qualitativerationality."Qualitative reason was introduced by Plato, he
says

as a corrective for the violence of unleashed quantification. A parable from

Phaedrus leaves no doubt of it; there, organizing thought and nonviolence
strike a balance. The principle, reversing the conceptual motion of synthesis,
is that of "division into species according to the natural formation, where the
joints are, not breaking any part as a bad carver might.""2

But, this is not reparative reason either. Sometimes we must break the
bones to find out where the joints are (what Feyerabend calls
 57

"counterinduction"), and sometimes where the joints are for us may not
be where they are for the object, if in fact there are any objective joints
at all. Once again, the trick is not to become so fixated on a particular
symbolic equation, a particular model of the joints, as to fail to experi-
ment and play with others. In fact, Adorno's use of this "parable"(when
seen in the context of his work as a whole) is itself a rather rigid sym-
bolic equation. To suggest that most intellectual activity is like bone-
crunching, rending everything it thinks about as though it were a dead
body, recalls the sources of intellectual inhibition in the desire to pro-
tect the good object from one's own aggression. In reality, thought
always leaves its objects untouched. Incomplete in itself, this insight is
as true as its bone-crunching opposite. Critical theory has always
understood itself as carving out a midpoint between idealism and mate-
rialism, rejecting dualistic epistemologies of all stripes. Conversely, the
dialectic of Enlightenment is the inability to sustain a viable midpoint.
Adorno's position, though, reflects not so much a midpoint but a col-
lapsing of any distinction between thought and action, as though enter-
taining an aggressive thought for even a moment must lead to destruc-
tion. I address another way to think about the midpoint that the Frank-
furt School valued, but found so difficult to characterize, in the conclu-
sion.

Conclusion

Critical theory is critical because it reflects on the circumstances of its

own existence. It is critical too because it takes utopia seriously, which
means, in part, never short-circuiting the distance between reality and
utopia. Reparative reason, it has been argued, is no substitute for this
philosophical project, but a source of support for it, one better suited
to the concerns of the Frankfurt School than eros. What both repara-
tive reason and the reparative impulse require is guidance as to the
most deserving objects of our care and concern. Critical theory can
provide this guidance.

At least two objections to this reformulation of critical theory in light of

Klein's insights into love, hate, and reparation are possible. The first
would argue that reparation remains insufficiently relational, still self-
ish, more concerned with the satisfaction of the one who makes repara-
tion than its object. The second objection is almost the opposite of the
first, that reparation lacks what makes eros such a powerful opposi-
tional force: not merely its selfish, demanding character, but its teleo-
58

logical orientation. Freed of the distorting effects of social domination,

eros requires no guidance. By its very nature it seeks out the truly beau-
tiful and good, much as Plato argued in the Symposium and Phaedrus.
Such objections are, I believe, quite mistaken. They do not, however,
lack insight into the issues involved.

Regarding the first objection, Klein argues that we seek to make repa-
ration out of genuine concern for the object. Reparation is truly an
object-related passion, motivated by our relationship to the object, our
love for it. Reparation may reduce guilt and anxiety, but this is an effect,
not a cause.53 But, if reparation puts the object first, there is nonethe-
less an individualistic cast to the Kleinian account missing in Benjamin
and Chodorow. For Klein, we care for others not because they are part
of us, but because they are different, and we are concerned about them.
In a certain limited sense the other remains an object, not in Freud's
sense of an object of our drives, whose humanity is unimportant, but as
a person who is distinct and separate from ourselves. This does not
make reparation selfish. It does make it an expression of individuality,
not its denial or transcendence.

Regarding the second objection, it is true that reparation is not as

autonomous as eros, and perhaps not as inherently oppositional either.
But, neither is it as subject to corruption as eros (repressive desublima-
tion), for reparation harnesses not the desire for pleasure, but guilt over
the harm we have done to others. But, perhaps it was a mistake all
along to try to found critical theory in eros, as though biology (Marcuse
calls eros a biological basis for socialism) could take the place of criti-
cal consciousness, social opposition, or a revolutionary class. Insofar as
it finds a material basis for hope for a better world in apparently trans-
historical human attributes (albeit attributes that exist only within par-
ticular histories), reparation supports the utopian project of the Frank-
furt School. Reparation is, however, no deus ex machina. Historically
situated human beings will have to confront the tragedy of human his-
tory on their own, a tragedy that stems, ultimately, from the way in,
which our fear and aggression constitute a world that requires so much
reparation. It is, of course, this insight that keeps reparation from short-
circuiting the path to utopia. For not only does reparation not exist
apart from particular histories, but it does not exist independently of
the hatred and aggression that bring it into being.
 59

Acknowledgments

The comments of three Theory and Society reviewers helped me better

locate my argument in terms of the larger concerns of the Frankfurt
School and its critics.

Notes

1. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (N.Y.: Seabury Press,

1973), 5.
2. Ibid., 10.
3. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (New
York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
4. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin Books, 1985).
5. Melanie Klein, "Love, Guilt and Reparation," in Love, Hate and Reparation, by
Klein and J. Riviere (N.Y.: W. W. Norton, 1964), 105.
6. Phyllis Grosskurth, Melanie Klein: Her Worldand Her Work (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1987), 153-211.
7. Klein, "A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States," in The
Writingsof Melanie Klein, 4 vols., ed. R. E. Money-Kyrle (New York: Free Press,
1964-1975), vol. 1, 262-289.
8. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 23 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp, 1970-), vol. 8, 40, my trans.
9. Minima Moralia (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1951), 78. Quoted and translated by
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973),
105.
10. In Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1983), J. Greenberg and S. Mitchell argue that "libido and aggression for
Klein are not groups of component instincts but personal directional emo-
tions... Drives for Klein are relationships." (139-146, their emphasis) The Todes-
trieb for Klein is thus not identical with the death drive that Freud writes of in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Rather, it is innate aggression and hatred, so
powerful and so threatening that we project it into others, and fight it there. Never
independent of our relationships with others, Kleinian aggression is more than a
reaction to these relationships; it constitutes them in the paranoid-schizoid posi-
tion.
11. Klein, "Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms," Writings, vol. 3, 1-24.
12. Joan Riviere, "On the Genesis of Psychical Conflict in Early Infancy," in Develop-
ments in Psycho-Analysis, by Klein et al. (London: Hogarth, 1952), 50.
13. Habermas, "Theodor W. Adorno: Urgeschichte der Subjektivitaet und verwilderte
Selbstbehauptung," in Philosophisch-politische Profile (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp,
1971), 192-196.
14 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 237.
15. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. J. Strachey (N.Y.: Basic
Books, 1962), Preface to 4th edition, xviii.
16. Meltzer, The Kleinian Development, 3 parts in I volume (Perthshire, Scottland:
Clunie Press, 1978), part 1, 84.
60

17. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 1961), 54-55.
18. Martin Jay addresses some of the Frankfurt School's concerns regarding the limits
of eros, and instinct theory generally, in The Dialectical Imagination (Boston:
Little, Brown and Co., 1973), chapter 3, 103-110. Marcuse was, of course, the
Frankfurt School member least troubled by the limits of eros, in part because he
"historicized" the concept.
19. Jessica Benjamin, "Authority and the Family Revisited: or, A World Without
Fathers?", New German Critique 13 (Winter, 1978): 35-57. "The End of Internali-
zation: Adorno's Social Psychology," Telos 32 (Summer, 1977): 42-64. Benjamin's
more recent The Bonds of Love (New York: Pantheon, 1988), addresses many of
these issues more fully, but in a different context, less related to the concerns of the
Frankfurt School.
20. Chodorow, "Beyond Drive Theory," Theory and Society 14, no. 3 (1985): 271-
319.
21. Flax, "Critical Theory as a Vocation," Politics and Society 8, no. 2 (1978): 201-
223, 217, her emphasis.
22. Benjamin, "Authority and the Family Revisited," 50-51.
23. Chodorow, "Beyond Drive Theory," 307.
24. Klein, Writings, vol. 1, 188, 222. Meltzer, "The Kleinian Expansion of Freud's
Metapsychology," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 62 (1981): 177-184,
178.
25. Klein, Writings,vol. 1, 188.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 232.
28. Ibid., 241. James Strachey, "Some Unconscious Factors in Reading," International
Jr. of Psycho-Analysis 11 (1930): 322-331.
29. Klein, Writings,vol. 1, 137.
30. Leiss, The Domination of Nature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), xiii-xiv.
31. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3-42.
32. Beyond Formal Operations: Late Adolescent and Adult Cognitive Development, ed.
M. Commons, F. A. Richards, and C. Armon (New York: Praeger, 1984), xiii-xiv.
33. "The Emergence of a Sense of Purpose: A Cognitive Case Study of Young
Darwin," in Beyond Formal Operations, 15.
34. Ibid.
35. The fallibilism of Karl Popper best exemplifies this ideal, The Logic of Scientific
Discovery (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).
36. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis and N.Y.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967),
226-230,252-255.
37. Jonathan Culler, Barthes (London: Fontana, 1983), 81. Quoted in Raymond Tallis,
Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory (London: Macmillan,
1988), 17.
38. Tallis, Not Saussure, 202-205, 229-231. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's
attempt, in Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), to
carve out an experientialist midpoint between "The Myths of Objectivism and Sub-
jectivism" is similar to Tallis's approach, and delightfully jargon-free (185-194).
39. Klein, Writings,vol. 1,245.
40. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New
York, 1967), 519. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 22-24.
 61

41. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London and New York: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1984), 6.
42. Feyerabend, "Two Models of Epistemic Change: Mill and Hegel," in his Philo-
sophical Papers, 2 vols. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), vol. 2, 73.
43. Feyerabend, Against Method (London: NLB, 1975), 30. Science in a Free Society
(London: NLB, 1978), 169.
44. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1985), 117.
45. Ibid., 124.
46. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: NLB, 1974), 247.
Willkuer covers an enormous range of possibilities, from free will to arbitrary
action. With such a wide range of dictionary meanings available, the translator must
obviously choose according to the context.
47. Segal, "A Psycho-Analytical Approach to Aesthetics," in New Directions in Psycho-
Analysis, ed. M. Klein et al. (London: Tavistock, 1955), 395.
48. Klein, "Love, Guilt and Reparation," in Love, Hate and Reparation, 102-110.
49. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 192-
199.
50. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1976), 105-106.
51. In two books and one article I have argued at length that Marcuse idealizes deindi-
viduation, so I shall not repeat that argument here. See Alford, Science and the
Revenge of Nature: Marcuse and Habermas (Gainesville: University Presses of
Florida, 1985), chapter 3. Narcissism: Socrates, the Frankfurt School and Psycho-
analytic Theory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 138-143.
"Eros and Civilization After Thirty Years: A Reconsideration in Light of Recent
Theories of Narcissism," Theory and Society 16 (1987): 869-890.
52. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 43. The pagination from the Phaedrus is 265e.
53. Klein, "Love, Guilt and Reparation," in Love, Hate and Reparation, 101-110.