ABSTRACT
Adorno concentrated much of his work on the concepts of emancipation (within modern capitalist societies), pleasure and the dichotomy between instinct and reason. In fact, for Adorno, emancipation meant reaching a state of happiness, which he saw as a forbidden state due to the oppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie. As one of the few psychoanalysts to have worked on the concept of liberation, Watkins is undoubtedly useful to this research and her work is fundamental (when considering psychoanalysis as a political tool and when looking at emancipation) to examining current society and the social. Watkins claims that liberation opens one ‘to the polyphony of thought, comprised of multiple voices and perspectives, best mediated by dialogue’. To this, Adorno thinks that: if sociologism betrays, betrays the unconscious and its claims of happiness, in the name of existing society and instrumental rationality, therapeutic psychology eludes – by contrast – the objective dimension of autonomous social irrationality.
