In a society that reproduces itself within a domination pattern, psychology as a multisided discipline provides the possibility of containing both violence and the tendency of replacing barbarity. The latter masks its self-generating objective factors, whereas its opponent searches for the subjective conditions maintaining the objective irrationality, and so understands that the critic of knowledge must be the critic of society. Psychology has no answers and at the same time refuses to investigate the dialectics that would uncover social antagonism, in the way that is indicated in Adorno's sentence, written in 1955, that is the title of this essay. Although being completely blind about the elements generating totality, one might find signs of truly progress indicating that, although something was possible, it was never brought to be effective. Reaching freedom and happiness might be an objective task in a way to overcome rules of self-conservation. Nevertheless, human beings find themselves completely lost and the only possible way of resist rests upon knowing the limits of prison. The thought that psychology should be responsible for working directly with suffering is ideological; it is necessary to struggle against what produces suffering and not to create ways of maintaining the illusion that the suffering does not exist.
violence; critical theory of society; social psychology; individual; labour; sexuality