Most of these speculative arguments concerning the threat posed by Communism were based upon myriad social scientific investigations conducted throughout the 1950s into the psychology of party members, research that borrowed heavily from the analytic methods of The Authoritarian Personality.22 Such studies broadened the scope of The Authoritarian Personality by considering the effects of class position, educational level, cultural sophistication, voting behavior, and family background on ideological receptivity and by extending the analytic samples to include not just middle-class Californians but almost every possible racial, ethnic, religious, and class group in the country, an almost absurd extension that led Paul Lazarsfeld to suggest jokingly that only “contributors of money to the Boy Scout movement” had not yet been studied.23 The most notable of these works was a 1954 investigation, The Appeals of Communism, conducted by political scientist Gabriel Almond of the Center of International Studies at Princeton University. After interviewing hundreds of party members, Almond concluded that party recruits exhibited a certain “neurotic susceptibility” to Communist indoctrination, caused by deep psychological feelings of inadequacy that resulted in a willingness to merge with “the corpus mysticum of the party.”24 Irving Howe, in his and Lewis Coser’s history of the Communist Party, pointed to Almond’s findings to demonstrate that most recent party members had weak psychological constitutions. Arguing that “ego strength and weakness are grounded in historical contexts,” Howe noted that the current feelings of alienation had led to “caesaristic identification” with party authorities as compensation for individual lack.25 The Communist Party as such was a haven for neurotics. Indeed, this was the lesson learned, as Howe and Almond argued, from the myriad confessions written by former Communist Party members who tried to explain the appeals of Communism in relationship to their own individual lives. Testimony from ex-Communists and undercover federal agents—Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), Louis Budenz’s This Is My Story (1947), and Elizabeth Bentley’s Out of Bondage (1951)—offered firsthand accounts of the supposedly masochistic strivings of party members. Even more influential was Whittaker Chambers’s Witness (1952), the most famous account of life inside the Communist underground, which received considerable critical attention from the New York intellectuals. Although most commentators, including William Phillips, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Irving Howe, disagreed with his political and religious beliefs, all noted that Chambers had offered a window onto “the appeals of communism,” explaining why a man “with no friends, no social ties, no church, no community” stumbled into fanaticism.26
High Modernism and the Problem of Ego Autonomy
High modernists such as Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, and Theodor Adorno appropriated these social, historical, and autobiographical arguments to show that the main psychological condition of most individuals after World War II was a demonstrable ego weakness. The widespread appearance of the authoritarian personality proved that the ego, resting precariously between the compulsions of the superego and the atavistic impulses of the id, was neither as transparent nor as stable as modern psychology presupposed. As Max Horkheimer explained in Eclipse of Reason, “the individual subject of reason tends to become a shrunken ego, captive of an evanescent present, forgetting the use of the intellectual functions by which he was once able to transcend his actual position in reality.”27 Deafened by the “giant loud-speaker of industrial culture,” the individual was left merely “echoing, repeating, [and] imitating his surroundings” until, in a final abdication of responsibility, he ended “adapting himself to all the powerful groups to which he eventually belongs” (141). In such a world, mimicry had become the only form of survival and the primary form of submission. High modernists followed Freud in viewing man’s ego as nothing more than a “poor creature” subservient to three separate masters—the external world, the impulses of the id, and the disciplinary superego. In The Ego and the Id, Freud had posited the ego as merely a vicissitude of the drives, that is, as the result of the transformation of object-libido into narcissistic-libido. In the name of self-preservation, the original libidinal cathexis with the primary love object was severed and this lost relationship was internalized through the formation of the ego that served as a substitute for the external object. But the ego, whose tasks included the rational ordering of experience, was often overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of modern life. Having no independent source of its own, the ego only too often considered itself “deserted by all protecting forces” and allowed itself to perish.28 Under such conditions, submissiveness became the predominant character trait. High modernists agreed with Freud that the ego was merely a secondary formation, noting, as Lionel Trilling asserted, that “mind came into being when the sensations and emotions were checked by external resistance or by conflict with each other.”29 As such, the ego almost exclusively served defensive functions that were too often abandoned. In his 1951 essay “William Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste,” Trilling argued that the lure of totalitarianism rested in the “irresistible temptation” to yield the self to the forces of grandeur.30 Trilling rooted this problem in the willingness of party members to abandon lived reality with its attendant class dynamics for an imagined Communist society where the “spirit” was capable of “making its own terms” (214). Individual psychology, which had once served the function of reason, had given way to group psychology, making the ego merely a historical relic.
Even worse, the individual was now defenseless against intrapsychic tensions. Freud’s warning in Civilization and Its Discontents had taught high modernists about the psychological significance of the death instinct. In his later works, Freud had postulated that the fundamental drive for pleasure inherent to man’s nature was balanced by a corresponding drive to return to a state of inertia or even nonexistence. But given the vicissitudes of the drives, this death instinct often morphed into an impulse for aggression. In a 1944 conference titled “Psychiatric Symposium on Anti-Semitism,” held at the University of California at Berkeley, Theodor Adorno joined a number of psychologists including Ernst Simmel, Gordon Allport, and R. Nevitt Sanford in an attempt to delineate “the most powerful energy” threatening mankind—“the human instinct of destruction hidden within the unconscious and emanating hatred from there.”31 Other high modernists, including Lionel Trilling, issued similar warnings, arguing that the “impulse toward charismatic power” originated in “not only the threat to being which comes from without but also the seduction to non-being which establishes itself within.”32 With such an understanding came a radical revision of traditional images of human nature. Most famously, Reinhold Niebuhr and Dwight Macdonald urged their fellow New York intellectuals to dispense with seemingly naïve and overly optimistic attitudes about human behavior, arguing that there was “evil as well as good at the base of human nature.”33 In contrast to the images of man’s perfectibility offered by Progressives and radicals, many European and American intellectuals pointed to the bloodshed of the twentieth century in their defense of Freud’s theories.
Although high modernists argued that the ego needed to remain resistant to the excessive demands of the reality principle and to the dark impulses of the id, they also worried about the damaging effects of the ego’s own projective fantasies. Consequently, high modernists originally constructed a notion of ego autonomy only to dismantle it. In The Ego and the Id, Freud had argued that the ego suffered in both its futile attempt to disguise the id’s inherent conflict with reality by transforming itself into the object of choice and its futile attempt to satisfy the overbearing demands of the superego by covering over the gap between itself and its ideal. Consequently, according to Freud, the ego “only too often” became “sycophantic, opportunist and lying” in the midst of this impossible situation.34 Following Freud’s logic, Adorno worried that the narcissistic tendencies of the ego encouraged the individual to apprehend reality in terms of its own projective fantasies. Having no independent source of its own, the ego was inherently fragile, an instability that often resulted in either its negation or its irrational and unyielding rigidity. Because the “id’s libido quantum” was “so much larger than that of the ego” and therefore “always bound