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

met intolerable frustration in relation to the social order requires an examination of socio-
historical developments that made satisfaction impossible in relation to external reality—
developments that are contingent and irreducible to what existed before and what had
already inscribed itself in the natural substratum of existents.
The fact that history reached a stage that created social conditions of intolerable
frustration for the human psyche was not necessitated by the natural substratum of social
life. Nor, finally, was there any necessity to the fact that, faced with intolerable
frustration, humanity regressed to the stage of primary mimesis (in a distorted manner, of
course) by withdrawing cathexes from the external world and attaching them to the
subject. At the level of the individual, Freud points out that the human organism is
capable of a variety of responses in the face of intolerable frustration: for instance, the
object desired may be substituted for one more easily attainable, the component desire
whose satisfaction is frustrated may be substituted for another, sublimation may take
place, or a return to perversion, or regression. Similarly, at the level of the history of
Western civilization, the fact that humanity regressed in response to the frustration
brought about by the failure of the bourgeois era to fulfill its promises of emancipation
and happiness was not the only possible reaction of a humanity faced with intolerable
conditions of existence—or, at least, it was not a reaction necessitated by the fact of
frustration. Changing the conditions of existence through revolutionary activity would
have been an alternative, for instance. But the conflict was lived in such a way that the
social imaginary simply regressed to a hyper-cathexis of the transcendental ego, the
mind, and through projection gave rise to a new world order characterized by paranoid
delusion.
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