ABSTRACT
Joseph Gabel has studied intensively the relationship between ideology and psychopathology in the 1940s and 1950s in genre which recalls the work of the Frankfurt School in the comparable period. His 1975 magnum opus, False Consciousness: An Essay in Reification, claims to create an anti-fanatical hermeneutic critique of the totalitarian mentality in which the false consciousness of the individual and the apologetic ideologies of collectivities are bound together inextricably by a ‘mad’ Dasein subverted by capitalist rationality. False Consciousness is a work of political psychology, somewhat akin to the study by Adorno and his associates, The Authoritarian Personality. The concept of ‘morbid rationalism’ is central to Gabel’s thesis: he sees it as essential to the general theory of alienation. In Gabel’s reinterpretation it is extended to characterize collective form of false consciousness as a kind of rationality sui generis, with its own reified and reificational epistemology, rather than as an epiphenomenon of ‘class interests’, ‘techniques of persuasion’, or ‘crowd psychology’.
