ABSTRACT
The timing of the advent of Critical Theory in Germany and America, and of structuralism, though part of intellectual history, while their French counterparts, the “new Hegelians,” joined the Communist Party or went underground—in either case they were silenced. Intellectual interest in psychoanalysis had been stymied by the predominantly dialectical-materialist, that is the more Stalinist, tendencies of the Left. And because the French Left had a strong trade union base which, in turn, was controlled or at least strongly influenced by the French Communist Party, discussions of psychoanalysis were ruled out as “bourgeois” and counterrevolutionary. The promises of Critical Theory had never reached more than small and select groups of scholars, not even during their most fruitful years in America. By 1969, shortly before he died, T. W. Adorno had even been attacked as conservative by some of his German students—particularly for his “elitist” ideas of art and his negative views about the influence of mass culture.
