Fetishism and regression in Freud and Adorno: from psychoanalysis to social theory

Abstract:

In the “Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis” (1916-1917), Freud argues for the fundamental participation of regression in the etiology of both neurosis and perversion. In “Fetishism” ( 1927 ), the author formulates a new version of this concept, so that the characteristics of fetishism came to represent the general structure of all perversions. In 1938, Adorno, a philosopher and sociologist from the Frankfurt school, published his essay “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in which he approaches both concepts from a sociological perspective. Our objective here is to comparatively analyze how the concepts of fetishism and regression are defined and employed by the two authors and to discuss the influence of Freud’s theory on Adorno, based on the texts mentioned above. This subject is rarely explored in the literature of the field, thus its discussion can contribute to a better understanding of the concepts and the impact of their different interpretations.

Keywords:
fetishism; regression; Freud; Adorno