Monadi sociali. La critica di Adorno alla 'revidierte Psychoanalyse'

In this article the Author deals with Adorno’s defence of ‘orthodox’ psychoanalysis against the ‘sociological’ tendencies and the Ego-psychology. After a brief survey of Horkheimer’s early interdisciplinary programme and of the role played in it by the notion of authority, the Author shows how Adorno’s criticism of the sociological integration of psychoanalysis depends on both methodological and normative reasons. From a methodological standpoint, the perspective of an interaction between Self and society must be replaced by a subjective structure that draws on the model of Leibniz’s monad. From a normative point of view, revisionist psychoanalysis has an objectively conservative role, in that it fosters the integration and the adaptation of the individual to the existing society, rather than enlightening about the irrationality of the sacrifices society imposes on the subject. In this framework, Freudian psychoanalysis still represents a doorway to the pathologies of the «damaged life».