This paper argues that the diagnostic import of Adorno's culture industry writings lie in their psychoanalytically rooted claim that contemporary culture is losing its ability to negate and reconfigure experience, due to the modern subject's instrumentalized relationship to culture. Adorno uses psychoanalytic ideas—namely, modified and historicized versions of Freud's theory of the instincts, ego formation, the reality principle, and the superego—to show that changes in the social organization of the psyche, which track the transition from myth to enlightenment, put the ego in a precarious position, torn between a primal fear of nature that drives it to submit to society, and internalized fear of its own internal nature, as well as of losing itself in society. This explains how culture becomes a resource capable of being mobilized by the ego's defense mechanisms of identification and introjection to shore up its own sense of solidity, thereby negating culture's potential for transcendence or transformation. This paper concludes with a coda that suggests that, while rejecting Adorno's metacritique of the reason is not sufficient grounds for rejecting the culture industry, critical theorists like Habermas and Honneth may have other tools at their disposal for contesting its conclusions.

中文翻译：

---

对自然的恐惧、对自我的恐惧、对社会的恐惧：阿多诺文化和经验理论中的心理防御机制

本文认为，阿多诺的文化产业著作的诊断意义在于他们的精神分析根源在于，由于现代主体与文化的工具化关系，当代文化正在失去其否定和重新配置经验的能力。阿多诺使用精神分析的思想——即弗洛伊德关于本能、自我形成、现实原则和超我的理论的修改和历史化版本——来表明心理社会组织的变化，它追踪了从神话到启蒙的过渡，将自我置于危险的境地，在对自然的原始恐惧驱使它屈服于社会与对自身内在本性以及在社会中迷失自己的内在恐惧之间左右为难。这解释了文化如何成为一种资源，能够被自我的认同和内摄防御机制所动员，以支持其自身的稳固感，从而否定文化的超越或转变的潜力。本文的结尾表明，虽然拒绝阿多诺对原因的元批判并不足以成为拒绝文化产业的充分理由，但像哈贝马斯和霍内斯这样的批判理论家可能有其他工具可以用来质疑其结论。