From Barthes’s perspective, it is thus easy to see why the exhibition might warrant dismissal as ideological—as indeed it also might, as noted, from that adopted in many of Horkheimer’s other writings. But before we then conclude that this dismissal is the last word and reject the recent attempts at rebuttal, we need to put a little pressure on the vexed concept of ideology itself. When casually used, “ideology” is a term of opprobrium, suggesting false consciousness and mystification, either deliberate or not, and is implicitly opposed to the nobler ideals of truth, scientific knowledge or at least critique. It is understood to reflect either the interests of a group that employs it for its own partial ends, masking and/or justifying its power, or the unconscious reaction to collective psychological stress that generates ideology as a dubious way of relieving that stress (for example, through scapegoating). As such, it acts as a distorting mirror or refracting filter through which reality is prevented from revealing itself in its unmediated and naked form.
But in addition to the explicitly negative connotation of the word that draws on a positive alternative more often implied than forcefully defended, there is a more complex, dialectical alternative that acknowledges the latent critical function of ideology as well. Take, for example, the classic example of Marx’s characterization of religion as the opiate of the masses. The paragraph in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: An Introduction,” where this famous formulation appears, begins with the acknowledgment that “religious suffering is at the same time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” Marx then says that critique, which was the methodological basis of historical materialism, “has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that man shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation but so that he shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower.”52
It is worth recalling these familiar lines to remind us that critiques of ideology may well depend on acknowledging the discontent, albeit in mediated and distorted form, generated by intolerable and unjust conditions, and the desire to relieve those conditions, that is harbored in even the most insidiously consolatory ideological formations. Returning to our main concern, it lets us recognize that we need not reduce our response to a culturally complex phenomenon like The Family of Man to either a simple-minded dismissal or a defensive celebration. In other words, even if its detractors had a point in decrying its inadvertent ideological function, the exhibition can also be credited with possessing a critical potential—the “protest against real suffering” that Marx saw in religion—that also demands recognition.
Thus, even if Barthes is right to see a religious source of the humanist faith in a shared human essence, it is possible to acknowledge that origin not merely to unmask and debunk it, but rather to recognize that critical protest against an unjust status quo often appears, as Marx himself conceded, in the garb of religion.53 If we take Horkheimer’s interpretation of the exhibition as less a celebration of the present than a challenge to make a different and better future, his endorsement of an essential human condition as normative rather than descriptive, and his adoption of perpetual peace as the telos of history in a Kantian counter-factual, regulative ideal with practical intent, we can discern the utopian impulse lurking beneath the surface of what may appear as unabashed Cold War ideology. Even if Horkheimer’s introduction should be situated in the larger context of his work, which provides ample ammunition for those who lament The Family of Man’s complicity with a problematic status quo, we can still honor his intention to read the exhibition against that grain and inspire a still volatile post–Nazi Germany to work through the unresolved issues of its recent past. Insofar as many of these issues still, alas, remain exigent in the twenty-first century, new sets of eyes can still profit from the experience of viewing Steichen’s “blockbuster exhibition of postwar photographic ideology.”
“In Psychoanalysis Nothing Is True but the Exaggerations”: Freud and the Frankfurt School
In his classic essay “The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood,” émigré psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson stressed the role played by psychological projection in the anti-Semitic denigration of Jews. He then added, “While projections are hostile and fearful distortions, however, they are commonly not without a kernel of profound meaning. True, the projector who sees a mote in his brother’s eye overlooks the beam in his own, and the degree of distortion and the frightfulness of his reaction remains his responsibility. Yet there usually is something in the neighbor’s eye which lends itself to specific magnification.”1 Having already published his essay in 1950, a year before Adorno’s Minima Moralia, Erikson could not have known of his fellow émigré’s evocation of the same biblical passage for somewhat different purposes. But it is striking that both would be drawn to it as a way to stress the importance of projection, at once cognitive and psychological, as a source of both the distortion and illumination—or, more precisely, magnification—of reality. Both were also convinced that familial dynamics and childhood development were crucial in the formation of adult political inclinations, although Erikson was somewhat less pessimistic about the crisis of the traditional bourgeois family. Unlike other émigré analysts of totalitarianism in general and fascism in particular—Hannah Arendt and Carl Joachim Friedrich come immediately to mind—Erikson and members of the Frankfurt School understood the necessity of applying psychoanalytic insights to make some sense of the seemingly inexplicable appeal of nightmare politics in the twentieth century.
Erikson, to be sure, is normally grouped with either the ego psychologists or neo-Freudian revisionists who were disdained as social conformists by the Frankfurt School. Despite his having been born in 1902 in Frankfurt, only a year before Adorno, and emigrating from Nazi Germany in 1933, first to Denmark and then America, Erikson seems to have had little sustained contact with members of the Frankfurt School. An essay he wrote in 1942 entitled “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth” was, to be sure, cited approvingly several times in The Authoritarian Personality,2 and he was included in the celebrated lecture series in 1956 at the reconstituted Institute in Frankfurt, which brought Freud back to Germany after the war. But rather than discern ominous signs in America of the continuation of fascism by other means, he celebrated its culture during the Cold War (despite ultimately criticizing the war in Vietnam) and had little interest in the marriage of Marx and Freud. He was, moreover, a practicing clinician who had been trained by Anna Freud and worked throughout much of his career with children.
It was precisely a disdain for the therapeutic function of Freud’s theories that distinguished Marcuse and Adorno from Erikson and most other émigré psychoanalysts. Nor did Marcuse and Adorno champion the smooth integration of the psychological level of analysis with the social, which set them apart not only from Erikson but also from their erstwhile colleague Erich Fromm. But what perhaps most of all distinguished Critical Theory’s use of Freud from that of Erikson,