CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

(1) to deny the verb, so that the wish becomes ‘I do not love her; I hate her.’ The
wish is then transformed by projection into ‘She hates (persecutes) me, which
justifies me in hating her.’ The unconscious feelings now appear as if they
were the consequence of an external perception: ‘I do not love her; I hate her,
because she persecutes me.’ This mechanism to deny the wish is the one at
work in delusions of persecution.
The second way to deny the wish is
(2) to deny the object, so that it becomes ‘I do not love her; I love him (someone
else, this time of the opposite sex, so that it is an acceptable object of love to
the super-ego). This denial of the wish is projected outward as ‘I observe that
he (the more “acceptable” object put in place of the original object) loves me.’
The repressed wish is thus displaced to another object and encountered as an
outward perception: ‘I do not love her—I love him, because he loves me.”
This way to deny the unconscious wish is characteristic of erotomania.
The third way to deny the wish is
(3) to deny the subject: ‘It is not I who loves the woman—he (someone else)
loves her.’ This is the mechanism at work in delusions of jealousy.
Finally, the fourth way to deny the wish is simply to negate the whole sentence:
(4) ‘I do not love at all—I do not love anyone.’ This negation of the wish is then
transformed into ‘I love only myself,’ and is at the base of the megalomania
that, according to Freud, always accompanies paranoia.
How does this account of the repression of infantile wishes in paranoia apply to
the dialectic of enlightenment? Adorno and Horkheimer hold that the progress of
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