Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda

In this chapter, Adorno reworks Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego as a comprehensive frame of reference for the basic “psychological system” of fascist propaganda. Fascist agitators organize mass identification through the ego ideal, staging the fascist leader as an object of narcissistic identification and omnipotent authority. Rather than persuading their followers through “the rational statement of rational aims”, the fascist leader relies overwhelmingly on the repetitive mobilization of unconscious psychological mechanisms, methodically enlisted to instigate an “artificial regression” toward what Gustav Le Bon called “the psychology of the masses”. But rather than imposing false consciousness externally, fascist propaganda resonates with subjects’ existing social anxieties and frustrations, reproducing rather than transforming the prevailing psychological conditions of capitalist society. Fascism expropriates the unconscious in order to perpetuate submission, securing domination through the technological circulation of libidinal investments, and by manufacturing an atmosphere of “irrational emotional aggressiveness” towards designated out-groups.