"Thirst for Obedience": A Freudian Analysis of the Father-Leader in Adorno and Beauvoir - Ostro 0 - OSF
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“Thirst for Obedience”: A Freudian Analysis of the
Father-Leader in Adorno and Beauvoir
By Jules Ostro
Professor Andrew Arato
Contemporary Sociological Theory
Spring 2019
© 2019 Jules OstroOstro 1
I. INTRODUCTION
Theodor W. Adorno’s 1951 essay, “A Freudian analysis of Fascist Propaganda,” is a fertile
ground for comparison with the work of feminist existential philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The
Second Sex, which was published just a couple of years earlier in 1949. The following exposition of
Adorno’s essay and the “Introductory" and “Independent Woman” chapters in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
examines how Adorno’s application of Freudian psychoanalytic theory of mass psychology and the
modern authoritarian state aligns with Beauvoir’s theoretical dialectic of the man as transcendent Subject
versus the woman as immanent Other. The connective thread in both contexts is a hegemonic teleology of
dominance. This hegemony is the apparatus and function of both predominately male fascist dictators and
sexist social actors who pander to collective entities of followers captivated by the ostensible auspices of
the Father-Leader. The following use of the term Father-Leader will be used as a symbolic gesture and
catch-all term to simplify the analogy between Adorno’s fascist dictator and the historically paternalistic
man. The symbolic authority of the Father-Leader lies in his ability to generate an affect-driven, hypnotic
libidinal bond through the mechanisms of identification and idealization with a mass ancillary entity, in
this case either a fascist following of a nation or a large majority of the population, thus maintaining
social and political privilege, influence, and control.
II. ADORNO AND THE PATTERN OF FASCIST PROPAGANDA
Theodor W. Adorno’s theoretical project on fascist propaganda is rooted in Freudian
psychoanalysis, specifically that derived from Sigmund Freud’s 1922 text, Group Psychology and the
hat is compelling to Adorno, and the impetus behind his application of Freud, is
Analysis of the Ego. W
psychoanalysis’s capacity to unearth the psychological mechanisms that underlie social phenomena, in
this case fascist propaganda. Adorno begins his argument by distinguishing between rational political
aims and the intentionally calculative aims of the fascist dictator. The fascist dictator, or “agitator,” uses
© 2019 Jules OstroOstro 2
manipulative, psychological strategies, or “devices” that impart a rhetoric whose basis is simplicity and
repetition (Adorno 119). These psychological devices are implemented mainly because fascism is unable
to propagandize through rational arguments. Because fascist aims often contradict the material interests of
the masses, the fascist leader must tap into the frustration and disillusionment a people have toward the
heteronomy of modern society, thereby mobilizing “irrational, unconscious, regressive processes”
(Adorno 134).
Adorno discloses what he claims to be the secret of fascist propaganda: “[…] it simply takes men
for what they are: the true children of today’s standardized mass culture” (Adorno 134). In addition, the
success of a fascist agitator relies on what tends to be expected and characteristic of a group, namely,
what Freud articulates as simple and exaggerated feelings and excessive extremes, with force and
violence respected and kindness considered weak (Freud 15). Adorno appreciates how Freud presciently
sought to make sense of the crisis of the individual within the construct of mass psychology all before the
rise and mass following of Hitler and Mussolini; specifically, Freud’s foresight for “[…] the profound
crisis and willingness to yield unquestioningly to powerful outside, collective agencies” (Adorno 120).
Freud importunes a precise definition of a group in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
Ego a nd how it comes to have such influence over an individual, pulling from polymath Gustave Le Bon
to define the self-state of the individual when transformed into a group as in possession of a “collective
mind” (Freud 7). Freud writes how group dynamics can change one’s psychosocial disposition: “Isolated,
he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian,” with the group characteristic of that
which is credulous, imperious, and self-denying (Freud 13). What Freud concludes and Adorno assents to,
is that being a part of the group allows certain unconscious and formerly repressed instincts and drives of
the individual to surface due to the effacement of one’s self-responsibility. Clearly, group psychology
under a fascist dictator has the power to evince one’s unconscious psychic history. As Freud maintains,
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“[the] apparently new characteristics which he then displays […] in fact the manifestations of this
unconscious, in which all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition” (Freud 9).
Another formative dimension to group psychology is the idea of a hypnotic contagion, which is
an effect of the suggestibility of a fascist dictator. As Adorno affirms, Freud’s work pulls from the
description Le Bon uses when relaying what occurs when the “mass mind” is pulled under the influence
of suggestion (Adorno 120). As Freud writes, “There is no doubt that something exists in us which, when
we become aware of signs of an emotion in someone else, tends to make us fall into the same emotion;
but how often do we not successfully oppose it, resist the emotion, and react in quite an opposite way?
Why, therefore, do we invariably give way to this contagion when we are in a group?” (Freud 27).
Suggestibility is of huge import in the analysis of authoritarianism because it is one of the psychological
devices that fascist agitators use to compel the masses into a specific emotional state that approximates
fascination (Freud 11), likening suggestibility to the libidinal, or emotional, contagion one feels when
hypnotized.
Freud defines group psychology as addressing the individual as “[…] a member of a race, of a
nation, of a caste, of a profession, of an institution, or as a component part of a crowd of people who have
been organized into a group at some particular time for some definite purpose” (Freud 4). While Adorno
generally agrees with Freud for rejecting surgeon and social psychologist Wilfred Trotter’s notion of the
herd instinct when explaining mass psychology, he believes that Freud considers the social or herd
instinct as indicative of the problem of the masses, not the solution ( Adorno 121). However, when looking
closely at Freud’s text, one finds that Freud neither considers this a solution nor a problem, for he rejects
the notion of the herd instinct in its primitive entirety in lieu of “[…] a narrower circle, such as that of the
family” (Freud 5). Freud again negates the notion of the herd instinct as the problem because it
undermines the role of the leader in the group, and “it is impossible to grasp the nature of a group if the
leader is disregarded. The herd instinct leaves no room at all for the leader” (Freud 65). Nevertheless,
© 2019 Jules OstroOstro 4
Adorno may have construed Freud’s appropriation of Le Bon’s language differently when conveying the
group as an obedient herd with a “thirst for obedience” (Freud 17). Yet, here Freud is not emphasizing the
group-instinct in this respect; instead, he is rather imparting what could be called an obedience-instinct
and how it is initiated under an authority and is thereby a formative part of the problem of the modern
authoritarian state. According to Freud, a group wants to obey: “It wants to be ruled and oppressed and to
fear its masters. Fundamentally it is entirely conservative, and it has a deep aversion to all innovations and
advances, with an unbounded respect for tradition” (Freud 15). This “thirst for obedience” is a fitting
segue into the problem of the fascist leader as articulated vis-à-vis the symbolic authority of the
Father-Leader.
III. ADORNO, FREUD AND THE MAKING OF THE FATHER-LEADER
Which traits facilitate the fascist leader’s ostensibly seamless transcendence into the almighty
Father-Leader figure? One of the most significant aspects of a leader is his ability to control by means of
fascination, by hypnotic contagion and the use of his prestige and “strong and imposing will, which the
group, which has no will of its own, can accept from him” (Freud 17). As mentioned earlier, Freud
suggests it is force and not kindness that allures the group, with Adorno notably adding how any reference
to love is largely excluded from fascist masses; in fact, Adorno astutely assimilates Hitler with the
authoritarian father instead of the loving father, with any notion of love directed toward Germany through
National Socialist aims (Adorno 123). The only love that the leader purposes is his love for himself and
whatever impregnable ideological edifice he believes in and exacts onto his subjects. As Adorno writes,
the image of the fascist leader “[reanimates] the idea of the all-powerful and threatening primal father”
(Adorno 124). This Father-Leader has the aptitude to tap into the capaciousness of one’s “archaic
inheritance,” or what Freud terms the “archaic heritage” (Freud 76) of the unconscious, that is, to
personalize fascist propaganda through a “reawakened irrationality” (Adorno 124). Freud believes that the
© 2019 Jules OstroOstro 5
individual derives pleasure from awakening formerly repressed instincts and inhibitions, for “in obedience
to the new authority he may put his former ‘conscience’ out of action” (Freud 23).
Another dimension of the Father-Leader that encourages obedience is how he befits the portrait of
Superman (Freud 71). However, while the fascist leader may be idealized as Superman, he is also
necessarily just an average person, “[…] a great little man […] just as Hitler posed as a composite of King
ino Germani may not have disagreed here, for what
Kong and the suburban barber” (Adorno 127). G
Adorno is speaking to vis-à-vis Freud is an activating and mobilizing energy fascist dictators instill in
their citizens through their authoritarian political ideology. Germani wrote that the telos of modern
authoritarian regimes is not to diminish its citizens into passive individuals, “[…] but politicization
according to a certain specific ideology” (10). Germani also speaks to the psychosocial affects of fascism
à la psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, maintaining how modern individuals living in a society founded in
individuation and rationalism may come to develop defense mechanisms to safeguard against the isolation
and insecurity of atomized modern life, specifically, psychosocial mechanisms that give rise to “[…]
authoritarianism, destructiveness, and automaton conformity” (Germani 48-49). Germani thereby may
have agreed then that the manipulative force of the Father-Leader inspires subjects to make choices that
adhere to what they believe they wish, yet, with a conferred freedom that is an illusion.
Although the mechanisms undergirding the manipulation of the Father-Leader has been
addressed, the techniques of the fascist leader and mass psychology is a two-way street, with the
techniques of the subject-follower turned what one could call the hypnotized child-follower is attendant to
the techniques of the fascist leader turned Father-Leader. Adorno suggests à la Freud that the answer lies
in the libidinal bond that the demagogue exploits as a means of mass manipulation, causing individuals to
become followers and adherents of his ideology, thereby negating their ego ideal in lieu of a group ideal
through the mechanisms of identification and idealization. The ego ideal is essentially the idealized image
of one’s self, and because the self has been largely subsumed to suffice the group, one’s individual ego
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becomes relegated to a group ego, with the group ideal created in the image of the fascist leader. As Freud
writes, “The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father; the group still wishes to be governed by
unrestricted force; it has an extreme passion for authority; in Le Bon’s phrase, it has a thirst for
obedience” (Freud 76).
Likewise, as Adorno applies Freud’s analysis, he writes how the primal father is the group ideal
that replaces the ego ideal (Adorno 124). This group ideal creates a mental homogeneity (Freud 22), or
group mind in psychologist William McDougall’s terms, which is similar to the idea of mimesis, in that
the interpersonal dynamics of the group or crowd often take on an isomorphic quality that lead to “[…]
the nature of a compulsion to do the same as the others, to remain in harmony with the many” (Freud 22).
The influence in effect that the collective group has over the individual may be from the individual’s drive
toward group harmony over conflict and opposition, therefore pre-empting isolation and anomie. Perhaps
here one finds it best to act in accordance to “ihnen zu Liebe,” a German idiom meaning “for their sake,”
or literally, “for love of them” (Freud 31). This type of liebe is more obedience than love, though, for
while c onsolidating the group harmony and collective ethos into a type of “malicious egalitarianism,” it
both represses and empowers, causing a negative cathexis of hatred, hostility, and rejection of the
out-group (Adorno 130-131), and therefore total integration of the in-group. The symbolic power of the
Father-Leader, that which is a mainstay and catalyst for the symbolic political power of this unconscious
yet committed group ideal, is articulated by Pierre Bourdieu: “[…] that invisible power which can be
exercised only with the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it or even
that they themselves exercise it” (Bourdieu 164).
IV. IDENTIFICATION, IDEALIZATION, AND THE FATHER-LEADER IN ADORNO
A crucial dimension in the pattern of fascist propaganda is the libidinal attachment the follower
develops for the Father-Leader. Freud defines libido, in the simplest terms, as energy, that which derives
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from the instincts of love (Freud 29). This libidinal energy within the group is manifested as emotional
ties from both an individual group member to fellow group members as well as from individual group
members to the leader, with the underlying cause of this libidinal bond two essential qualities that are
antecedent to the libidinal attachment itself, that of identification and idealization. Identification is one of
the steadfast psychological mechanisms human beings rely on as a substrate for social connection. Freud
defines identification as “[…] the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person” and
connects it to the Oedipus complex’s reliance on the father as the earliest ego ideal and subject of the ego,
hich is in contrast to the mother as the
since the father is often the person the child would like to be, w
object of the ego for the Oedipal child, that which the child would like to have (Freud 47). There is a
degree of mimesis here, too, for the child is self-fashioning their ego into a likeness of their father, who
has become their primary model (Freud 48). In many respects, the superego is what happens when the ego
ideal fails to live up to its model — it becomes internalized in the form of a normativity that can leave one
hamstrung. Likewise, fear is what happens when one’s emotional bond, or libidinal cathexis, to the ego
ideal disintegrates, for this libidinal bond precludes the followers of a fascist leader from entering into a
state of fear (Freud 37). But when one is a part of a mass fascist following, the fascist leader’s reiterative
propaganda and mass of followers stabilizes the ego ideal into a group ideal that is reified in a collective
ethos.
Adorno writes of the narcissistic element of identification via the ego ideal, in that the object one
wishes to incorporate into oneself becomes a mere form of self-reflection because it is the idealized
version of oneself or an “[…] enlargement of the subject’s own personality, a collective project of
himself, rather than the image of the father […]” (Adorno 125). In this sense, the technique of narcissism
appears to enable a safe emotional distance from the symbolic consequence of the leader saliently
actualizing the role of Father-Leader. A narcissistic identification would essentially allow the father
image to fade into the background, for what results from this mechanism of narcissistic identification with
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an object, in this case the fascist leader, is the idealization of the leader: “We see that the object is being
treated in the same way as our own ego, so that […] a considerable amount of narcissistic libido
overflows on to the object” with the object “[serving] as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal of our
own” (56). Adorno likens the object of the ego ideal, in this case, the fascist leader, to Freud’s examples
of legitimated authorities like Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church or the Commander-in-Chief of an army,
the “substitute fathers” (Freud 33), due to the similar nature and implications of narcissistic identification
and idealization.
However, there is also an ambivalence toward the leader because the follower wants to both
submit to the authority of the leader and become the authority himself, yet this ambivalence is conciliated
through the dual mechanisms of identification and idealization (Adorno 127-128), along with the
messages received from propaganda itself. Adorno mentions how fascist leaders encourage hierarchical
organization in their propaganda thus maintaining the Us vs. Them dialectic, the in-group and out-group
dynamics of othering. Adorno references Hitler’s famous formula, Verantwortung each oben, Autoritat
each unten, which, when translated to English reads “responsibility towards above, authority towards
below” (128) as a way of exemplifying how the fascist leader infects his penchant for persecution into his
followers like a plague. This ambivalence is reconciled once one has cathected to their new ego ideal by
idealizing both the fascist leader and idealizing the group; by necessity, one can do nothing but love
oneself and exalt oneself since the mechanism of identification with both the leader and the group
precedes idealization (Adorno 126).
What this underscores is one of the most powerful aspects of Freudian analysis applied to the
problem of fascism. When one’s unconscious drives and ego ideals are reconciled through one’s
membership in a group that effusively advocates for a fascist political ideology, this group membership
becomes an adequate sublimation for eschewing membership in a civil society based in civic and
humanitarian engagement, political freedom and agency, and self-accountability. As Freud writes, “At
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bottom this hero is no one but himself” (88). The hero here, manifested through idealized projections and
identifications of what one could call the Father-Hero, is really just a distorted and displaced version of
one’s own tortured self. As history has demonstrated, it is a tragic, inestimable loss when the narcissistic
object supplanting the ego ideal is a fascist dictator.
V. BEAUVOIR AND TRANSCENDENCE VS. IMMANENCE IN THE SECOND SEX
Simone de Beauvoir’s intellectual project in writing The Second Sex was to analyze the history,
character, and consequence of the secondary status of women in society to ask why it was that women had
become subordinated as the inferior sex. The “Introduction” and “Independent Woman” chapters are
especially relevant in this discussion because they underscore how Beauvoir considers the becoming of
woman’s immanent situation existing only as a relational provision to the transcendence of man. Beauvoir
emphasizes the immanent situation of women as contingent on men’s transcendence, for the agentive
subjectivity of men is what allows for their superior status in the upper strata as social absolutes, whereas
the subjectivity of women is wholly considered in terms of embodiment and limitation. Beauvoir quotes
Aristotle to support this: “The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,” and Saint Thomas,
who qualified a woman as an “‘incomplete man,’ an ‘incidental’ being” (5). What these fatalistic
descriptions suggest is that the historical situation of women renders them as essentially inessential in
binary schemas: “She is determined and differentiated in relation to man, while he is not in relation to her;
she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other”
(Beauvoir 6). What Beauvoir means in her use of the word transcendence is freedom, and how both
personal freedom and social mobility are lacking in the concept of the immanent woman, which one could
consider in terms of a material determinism of sorts: “[…] an attempt is made to freeze her as an object
and doom her to immanence” (17). Through the following poetic prose, Beauvoir qualifies this problem
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of immanence: “The spirit with all its riches must project itself in an empty sky that is its to fill; but if a
thousand fine bonds tie it to the earth, its surge is broken” (Beauvoir 749).
Beauvoir has an acute awareness of how the alterity of women is unlike any other historical cases
of alterity, such as colonial conquests, genocides, and slavery: “In these cases, for the oppressed there was
a before: they share a past, a tradition, sometimes a religion or a culture” (8). After that, something
happened t hat changed a group’s status and locus of experience, which Beauvoir believes is different
from the othering women experience: “Alterity here appears to be an absolute, partly because it falls
outside the accidental nature of historical fact” (8). Women have, since time immemorial, been considered
the second sex, for “[…] the myth of the Woman, of the Other, remains precious for many reasons”
(Beauvoir 14). The historical truth and perpetuation of subjugation is not, however, simply a result of
man’s dominion due to his essential and transcendent status, it is also, as Beauvoir illuminates, due to
woman’s material reliance and, at times, satisfaction from remaining as the provisional Other to man.
What Beauvoir is suggesting in this existential dialectic is how the historical ontology of women finds
them in a seemingly fixed situation of alterity due to the static polarity and historical binary of the sexes;
yet, what may not be as vividly patent, is how Beauvoir subtly probes women to absolve their fealty as
sexed lieges and realize their agency, freedom, and equally essential transcendence.
VI. BEAUVOIR AND THE TRANSCENDENCE OF THE FATHER-LEADER
The following addresses Beauvoir’s transcendent Subject vis-à-vis the paternalistic man and
symbolic Father-Leader. The deceptive characteristics undergirding the Father-Leader’s transcendence
are believable because of how normative his transcendence becomes. The women of a society that believe
men are more transcendent and thereby the primary and more powerful sex, cherish this belief because
they are indoctrinated by social and cultural inscriptions that decree a value differential between the
sexes, with men capable of transcending their physical, embodied form and elevating to a higher social
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and intellectual strata, while women remain as immanent, embodied objects because their bodies are their
sole economic currency. As Beauvoir writes, at some point women begin to believe in their secondary
status and may even derive satisfaction from it since men’s transcendence feels too out of reach: “[…]
woman makes no claim for herself as subject because she lacks the concrete means, because she senses
the necessary link connecting her to man” (Beauvoir 10). When Beauvoir also writes of Mitsein (17),
Heidegger’s concept of Being-with, she imparts her hope for the future of women after millennia of
otherness, yet one could consider the only Mitsein of Beauvoir’s woman as the bond she has with man.
Nancy Bauer’s articulation of Mitsein i s useful in conveying the social deficit of women: “the idea, very
roughly speaking, is that an absolutely, ontologically, basic feature of being human is experiencing
oneself as part of a fellowship about which one is bound to care ” (Bauer 130). Aside from the privileged
elite, for most of history, women never had their own public, their own fraternal collective aside from the
familial bonds of domestic life.
In many ways, one could consider the women who abide by social norms and remain in their
domestic milieu as the in-group women, those who identify with and perhaps idealize femininity, and
those who transgress in hopes of finding transcendence as the out-group, those who find identification
with and idealization of masculinity. The in-group women are paternalistically embedded within their
in-group because society is under the dominion of the privileged sex who rationalize the subjugation of
women, exalting those who abide by the logos that decrees that which is “natural and universal.” This
logos maintains women in a stratified state of subjection, for many subsequently come to believe that it is
right to abide and obey as followers saturated with a thirst for obedience, especially when voluntary
associations and horizontal bonds of alliance catalyze in-group women-followers to assimilate their
objects and ideals of identification and idealization. Adorno alludes to an illusory transcendence that
followers may assume when identifying with and idealizing the in-group and its leader: “[…] the
follower, simply through belonging to the in-group, is better, higher and purer than those who are
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excluded” (130). Women who are inculcated with the belief that their social place is as followers beneath
men learned at some point in their lives that this is what a good woman does: She follows the rules and
obeys so to maintain her purity, virtue, and decided follower status in the in-group. Thus the
transcendence of men is accepted and consolidated by both the privileged and subordinated sexes who
buy into the culturally-inscribed propaganda and manipulative logic for establishing women as inferior in
strength, fortitude, intellectual acuity, and economic know-how.
For this last point, one must simply call on Marx and Engels’ studies of capital, particularly their
writing on historical materialism (Marx and Engels 150), to see the historical process of women’s
exclusion from the general domain of economic opportunity, specifically, labor, land, and money through
most of agrarian and industrial history. Referencing Marx here in the context of The Frankfurt School is
apropos, for Adorno and friends sought to create a synthesis between Marx and Freud to demonstrate how
one’s inner nature is dominated by the repression of emotions, in this case, perhaps as a way of trying to
make sense of the oppressive, patriarchal superstructures that reinforce women’s material reliance on
men. Beauvoir suggests economic freedom as the zenith for women’s self-reliance and the development
of proprietary rights for accumulating and sustaining their material and economic livelihood, for “[…]
work alone can guarantee her concrete freedom” (Beauvoir 721). Yet, one sees how the influx of women
who left the duties of domestic labor for more agentive and autonomous roles in the industrial factories
ended up with double the workload. Once women were able to work outside the home, following their
monotonous work, they would return home to fulfill their domestic, quotidian duties, along with the
emotional labor that is part and parcel of being a mother and wife: “She will be a double for her husband
at the same time as being herself; she will take charge of his worries, she will participate in his successes
just as much as taking are of her own lot, and sometimes even more so” (Beauvoir 734). Many women
have been desperate to achieve the transcendence that is gained when one is declared equal rights, status,
power, and prestige, a freedom and agency that is often sought in work, and often difficult to negotiate
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with motherhood. Most women during the time Beauvoir wrote were not as freed by their work as they
may have hoped to be, and the consequence of this is still being felt today.
In the example of America, it was only once more women started joining the workforce that new
types of feminist circles began to provide a public network for women, whereas prior to this, women's
groups were largely private and considered in relation to concerns of the domestic housewife (Ikegami
60). Beauvoir speaks to how a woman grows up nurtured by the domestic, familial fellowship of her
mother and other seasoned women. These older woman are to be respected for their own capaciousness
for the eternal feminine: “Her mother and other older women have fostered her nesting instinct: a home of
her own was the earliest form of her dream of independence; she would not think of discarding it, even
when she finds freedom in other ways” (Beauvoir 725). This domestic apprenticeship that women are
grown into and through is instilled by the values of the older and more respected women in their
horizontally-bonded milieux. Perhaps then the historically subjugated woman may have learned that there
is a special fellowship in domestic unfreedom, that the immanence she was taught to value would be what
ultimately connects her to her procreative purpose among an exclusive coven of like-minded, negligible
Others. Nevertheless, there is also a salient tension here, for the woman grows up within the domestic
feminine only to soon learn of all the unfreedom she has in comparison to her transcendent counterpart.
This tension is the duality that women are faced with when trying to reconcile the domestic feminine with
the masculine public: “Haunted by childhood and adolescent dreams; she has difficulty reconciling the
inheritance of her past with the interest of her future” (Beauvoir 737).
Beauvoir herself recognizes this tension as psychological, although it has the capacity to translate
to and manifest in the body, sometimes as physical ailments, “[…] because of all the tasks they take on
and the contradictions they struggle against,” for “[…] a situation does not depend on the body; it is rather
the body that depends on it” (736). Indeed, the question remains after the dearth of social, material, and
political opportunities women have been denied are hereto expressed — what about the psychological
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dimension Beauvoir dimly references? Or, borrowing from the title of one of Judith Butler’s books, what
about the “psychic life of power” in the context of the Father-Leader and subjugated second sex? What
are the psychoanalytic mechanisms that sustain women in a state of alterity? The answer lies in the same
dimensions one finds in the mass psychology of a group under the dominance of a fascist leader —
identification and idealization. Yet, what Beauvoir offers as an ancillary to the prestige and Superman
characteristics of the fascist leader is the notion of the paternalistic man as transcendent Subject. The
trappings of transcendence, i.e. prestige, privilege, and superior influence is what allows for the devices of
identification and idealization and what makes the hypnotic power and contagion of the Father-Leader
diffuse.
These trappings derive from the ideological exaltation that has positioned men into an elevated
social position since time immemorial. The stratification and binary model of the sexes has allowed men
to become the voice of the world and arbiter of how one best adjudicates social, moral, and political life.
This voice is mentioned by Adorno in his discussion of how the fascist leader comes to appropriate such
savvy in mass manipulation, with “[…] the leaders […] generally oral character types, with a compulsion
to speak incessantly and to befool the others” (Adorno 132). It is understandable how men come to have
such command over speech and rhetoric, for it is men who have had the access and means for literacy and
education to so artfully use language to their advantage. The socially constructed yet seemingly universal
higher status of men is what sets the stage for both their transcendence and the mechanisms of
identification and idealization that create the psychic underbelly and ubiquity of the Father-Leader.
VII. IDENTIFICATION, IDEALIZATION, AND THE FATHER-LEADER IN BEAUVOIR
Beauvoir begins her analysis in The Second Sex by speaking to the social myth of the “eternal
feminine” that underlies the situation of how women become w
omen. This becoming is actualized by
some women through the embodiment of femininity in such a way that allows them to either identify with
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and idealize femininity, thereby alleging femininity as an immanent, objective status, declaring “Tota
muller in utero: she is a womb,” or to remain in ardent denial of being representative of any feminine
qualifier, as seen through the more defiant women who identify with and idealize masculinity. Beauvoir
writes of her observations of American women: “She was denying her feminine frailty; but it was for the
love of a militant man she wanted to be equal to. The defiant position that American women occupy
proves they are haunted by the sentiment of their own femininity” (Beauvoir 3-4). This emphasizes how
dualistic the situation of many women really is, for women are forced to either assume their immanent lot
and all normativity attendant to the feminine stereotype, or resist the norms around performatively doing
femininity. What this may presuppose is the identification with a different embodiment than that which
they were born — that which is the other side of the binary and is diametrically opposed to their primary
and learned, gendered body, in this case, espousing the characteristics of masculinity.
It is relevant to briefly address the genealogy of how gender and sex has been historically
interpreted. Gender, at least through the progressive left, is now largely accepted as a
culturally-prescribed injunction rather than a natural, universal, and uniform disposition, and gender
performativity, or doing gender, took nearly forty years after Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex to enter the
postmodern turn of phrase. It was not until 1987 with Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman’s seminal
article, “Doing Gender,” and Judith Butler’s popularization with her influential 1990 book, Gender
Trouble, that gender became, as Judith Butler writes, “the cultural meanings that the sexed body assumes”
(Butler 474). Beauvoir mentions what happens when women become frustrated by the servility of doing
femininity, and therefore attempt the doing of masculinity: “[…] she tries to take her revenge by playing
the game with masculine weapons: she talks instead of listening, she flaunts clever ideas, unusual
feelings; she contradicts her interlocutor instead of going along with him, she tries to outdo him”
(Beauvoir 726). When women transgress and absolve themselves of feminine norms, they automatically
assume the social status of rebel, which is a “risky tactic,” as Beauvoir writes (724), to both their
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reputation and career (Beauvoir 726). Much time and energy is expended in order to, as one could say, do
risk in a right and safe way. If women mingle risk and sexuality, they are prone to more sexual diseases
and less sexual satisfaction, along with the risk of pregnancy and rape (Beauvoir 727-728). Yet, when the
woman subverts from the feminine norm, she is then just a re-qualified woman: She then becomes
something else, in this case, the risky woman or rebellious woman, rather than the feminine or
sophisticated woman. The point is, regardless of how women present themselves socially, they are unable
to escape their sexed being. Beauvoir elucidates this: “The woman […] knows that when people look at
her, they do not distinguish her from her appearance: she is judged, respected, or desired in relation to
how she looks” (724). When a woman undoes her femininity and rebels against the social mores that
prescribe who, how, and what she should be, the only behavior left to emulate is that of the powerful and
transcendent.
Therefore, like the fascist follower, out of unconscious necessity, the woman identifies and
idealizes the social, material, and political freedom and sexual prowess of man in order to work with what
her options are within the binary order. In many respects, the female identification with masculinity may
be one that is necessary for the woman because that is the safest ego ideal. If women choose men as their
ego ideal, they have an ideal model that allows for their own mimetic transcendence, that which
circumvents the transcendence of man’s “essential and sovereign consciousness” (Beauvoir 17). As
Beauvoir elegantly writes, “[…] she could only win by losing,” for “[…] it is out of the question to think
of her as simply free” (730). What women must then do to compensate for the immanence they have been
taught to abide and stay obedient toward is to identify and idealize with something that has been
oppressive, yet, once re-appropriated, may be empowering: “[…] the woman who chooses to reason, to
express herself using masculine techniques, will do her best to stifle an originality she distrusts; like a
female student, she will be assiduous and pedantic; she will imitate rigor and virile vigor” (Beauvoir 745).
It could then be argued that transcendence, or freedom, for a woman is identifying and idealizing man’s
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transcendence and incorporating his own deeds, desires, and practices, into her habitus. As Beauvoir
writes, “[…] when she is productive and active, she regains her transcendence; she affirms herself
concretely as subject in her projects; she senses her responsibility relative to the goals she pursues and to
the money and rights she appropriates” (721).
In addition, Beauvoir would believe that the reason why many women are so quick to feed their
“thirst for obedience” is because they recognize that what men want from women is obedience, and in
order for men to willingly provide the social and material resources that women rely on, women must
deliver obedience, or at least postured obedience. As Beauvoir asserts, “She needs to please men to
succeed in her life as a woman,” for because women “[…] do not receive the moral and social benefits
they could legitimately expect in exchange for their work, they simply resign themselves to its constraints
“ (722). This suggests that the process Adorno applies to the fascist leader, that of Freud’s notion of
libidinal attachment and subsequent mechanisms of identification and idealization, are really just
conciliatory stopgaps for managing alterity. Even once women do identify and idealize, establishing a
solid model-object as an ego ideal, they are still bridled and fettered by the chains of their bodies and
womb, all of the particulars that encourage the myth of the eternal feminine and aggrandizement of the
Father-Leader. In fact, in many respects, part of the process of women’s identification and idealization
with the paternalistic Father-Leader is having men’s desires necessarily presuppose their own. Robert
Pippin speaks to this vis-à-vis Rene Girard’s notion of mimetic desire: “ […] their desires are everywhere
dependent on ‘mediators,’ on others who certify or make worthy their desire, others whom, given the
extreme importance of the desirer’s self-image as independent, they eventually come to hate and compete
with” (Pippin 34). If the desires of women are mimetic, and therefore mediated by the desires of men,
does it not follow tautologically that men become the ego ideal of women? In a way, men’s desires, that
which one could call desire-ideals, presuppose women’s and make it seem true to course for women to
use the Father-Leader as the placeholder for their identification and idealization of transcendence.
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This emphasizes a crucial point in applying Freudian analysis to Beauvoir: Even once women
identify with the transcendence that is arguably only idealized because of their immanence and
unprivileged social status, they are then just living a double life and consciousness. Beauvoir speaks to
this, as “[…] most working women do not escape the traditional feminine world; neither society nor their
husbands give them the help needed to become, in concrete terms, the equals of men” (722). The reason
for this is because women are without the same prestige and essentiality as men. Beauvoir discerned this
prestige as one that endows men with virility, the phallic sovereignty that ignites the collective spirit and
primacy of patriarchal hegemony. How are women to create anything of value when they are not even
granted the rights to create themselves? As Beauvoir writes, “As long as she still has to fight to become a
human being, she cannot be a creator” (750).
The lack of freedom of Beauvoir’s woman strikes many parallels to that of the fascist follower,
yet, the power of the Father-Leader in the case of fascism differs from that of sexism. The Father-Leader
in Adorno is both the fascist leader and fascist following of the in-group. In the eyes of Beauvoir’s
subjugated woman-Other, the Father-Leader is sex and gender because the Father-Leader and group ideal
are the institutional constructs of sex and gender. There is no one Father-Leader, but instead an enormous
mass of in-group followers that abide by this social and cultural construct. Most everyone abides, or has at
some point in their life, abided by a binary ideology that deems biological divergence as symbolically
instituting and substantiating inequality — at least up until the emergence of revolutionary women’s
coalitions and first wave feminism. The consequences of this is that the libidinal attachment
foregrounding the mechanisms of identification and idealization begins as an attachment to an ideological
artifice that is then translated into a material object through in-group relations realized through mass
society. The manifest world renders this visible through manifold institutions, from the family to the
school, to the church — through all of Foucault’s disciplines. In fact, one could argue that the dominion
of this Father-Leader is so pervasive that it is internalized at an early age by many women not as an ego
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ideal or supplanted group ideal, but instead, as mentioned earlier, the superego — an internalized version
of the Adorno’s “great little man,” for it is the consequence of a failed ego ideal that leaves one having to
negotiate the crippling effects of superego self-judgment. Beauvoir mentions how any negative judgment
or appraisal is difficult for women to overcome, for “worth is not a given essence” (739). This is
especially true for the sensitive woman, the woman that is inured to devaluation because of the perpetual
sense of failure she feels responsible for compensating for, with this failure arguably derived from a belief
that is both reinstated by and descended from her failed ego ideal/superego.
Therefore, the Father-Leader in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex begins as a symbolic construct, a
psychic manifestation of Freud’s superego — an artifice of authority that might as well be as divine and
powerful as any other invisible religious or juridical power, and then is reified by people and institutions.
In many respects, the Freudian analytic frame for understanding how totalitarian authorities are
legitimated is illuminated even more greatly in the case of patriarchal relations. With fascism, the
Father-Leader must be Adorno’s “great little man,” because people must be changed t hrough the
propaganda of the fascist leader’s political ideology — this makes the great little man provisionally
hereas in the case of Beauvoir and the problem of sexism, there is no change or provision to
essential. W
the essentiality of the Father-Leader because the heteronomy of the Father-Leader is foregrounded in a
monolith of congenital ideological constructs that are soon realized through the transcendent man and
immanent woman binary.
VIII. CONCLUSION
This paper applied Freudian psychoanalytic theory to parts of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex t o
demonstrate how the fascist dictator and corollary of group followers are analogous to Beauvoir's
dialectic of the transcendent Subject-man and immanent Other-woman. The theoretical consequence of
likening the fascist leader to the paternalistic man is the symbolic classification of the Father-Leader.
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Pursuing a comparative analysis of Adorno and Beauvoir in this representative context requires one to
align the techniques of power, control, and manipulation implemented by a fascist leader and accepted by
a dominant nationalist collective with that of a patriarchal ideology that subjugates and others women into
a subaltern social echelon. This is why one may view with great surprise how the final pages of Adorno’s
essay reveals his negation, or better yet, denial of the salience of psychological mechanisms undergirding
fascism. The reason for this is Adorno’s belief that once the ego ideal has been replaced by the group
ideal through the narcissistic object of the fascist leader, a psychic transference and translation takes place
that brings the unconscious into consciousness and results in a psychic resolve. Adorno finds that once
fascist leaders tap into mass psychology and exploit the masses through their propagandistic scheme of
social control, once they “take it into their own hands, it ceases to exist in a certain sense” (Adorno 136).
It appears that Adorno loses faith in psychoanalysis at this point because there is no actual resolve as
fascism remains to be a problem. However, the theoretical purpose of Freudian psychoanalysis is not to
eliminate the evils of the world, but to provide the instruments that allow one to confront and better
understand the psychic processes that are the most troubling; yet processes that, like that of metaphysical
origin, cannot be empirically proven — which may change now that psychoanalysis has teamed up with
cognitive neuroscience vis-à-vis Neuropsychoanalysis.
By placing segments of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in conversation with Adorno’s essay on
fascist propaganda, greater attention has been directed toward the psychic underpinnings of the symbolic
authority of the Father-Leader, which has been a convenient term for applying Freudian psychoanalysis to
the mechanisms underlying alterity in both authors’ work. The theoretical consequence of aligning
Adorno with Beauvoir is that it merges conventional distinctions between psychoanalysis, feminism, and
fascist political regimes, a nexus that would appear compelling to some and appalling to others. However,
what this paper hopes to demonstrate is how psychoanalytic schemas may be used as powerful and
constructive nodes for seemingly divergent historical trajectories. Whether it is through the Frankfurt
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School or feminist philosophy, a remarkable characteristic of Freudian psychoanalysis lies in its ability to
translate and improvise itself across a range of contexts and disciplines. Both Adorno and Beauvoir
devoted their lives to critical thought and the problem of alterity, which we have much to thank them for.
As for the fate of the Father-Leader, Adorno and Beauvoir, in all of their bleak realism, would not
be without hope for the future. Beauvoir’s dim view of living in a sexed world is temporarily dwarfed by
her optimism: “[…] the historical past cannot be considered as defining an eternal truth; it merely
translates a situation that is showing itself to be historical precisely in that it is in the process of changing”
(Beauvoir 750). The hopeful truth that change brings is what allows women to learn confidence and create
in themselves their very own ego ideal that encourages a positive image of self-worth. Likewise, Adorno
remained hopeful in his conviction that the social forces operating within the very mass group of
followers lies in those who can lead in collective resistance, “and in the end awaken those who keep their
eyes shut though they are no longer asleep” (Adorno 137). Beauvoir would not disagree, and perhaps she
would also add that just as any historical tragedy has demonstrated, those who have suffered the most,
whether under the totalitarian reign of fascism or sexism, must use their agency to try and become
something else.
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