DISEÑO, CONSTRUCCIÓN Y FUNCIONAMIENTO DE UNA CENTRAL NUCLEAR

Socialisation denotes the process through which the individual acquires current societal norms and structures, thus becoming part of the society in question. The process includes both an individual and a social-societal aspect in line with this book’s conception of learning. Rather than signify a particular part of the learning process or a particular form of learning, socialisation may, therefore, be perceived as a specific viewpoint on learning and development, namely, the societal viewpoint. In this lies the notion that the significance of learning is perceived based on the relationship that develops between individual and society, and which can occur directly through teaching and other forms of goal-directed transmission, and to a great extent also indirectly, by the individual gaining experience of how things work and how different people behave.

There have thus always been considerable elements of socialisation theory in learning, developmental, personality and social psychology, but a more direct and targeted socialisation theory approach first seriously developed in extension of the work of the so-called Frankfurt School concerning the scientific school of thought called critical theory (for a broader understanding of this concept see Brookfield 2005).

It concerns the approach that developed in the years between the two World Wars at the ‘Institut für Sozialforschung’ in Frankfurt, other places in Europe and especially the USA after Hitler came to power in 1933, and from the early 1950s again in Frankfurt. Central people in the first generation of the Frankfurt School were particularly Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and, later, Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979). The main academic point lay in the intersecting field between philosophy, sociology and psychoanalysis, and, in many ways, the problems that were focused on concerned the relationship between individual and society, often seen in a contemporary historical perspective. The approach was primarily a coupling between the Marxist conception of society and the psychoanalytical conception of the individual – but both in a critical inter- pretation in which there was also room for other approaches, while certain Marxist and psychoanalytical interpretations were rejected (not least the dialectical materialistic conception of Marxism that was predominant in the Soviet Union) – and the theories were applied to current societal and political problems.

A major work from the early period was Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment which took the form of outlines and dialogues, but still describes the Frankfurt School’s objective of critical enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1944). For Adorno, too, aesthetic and artistic dimensions took a central position. Of more direct interest in the present context is the extensive investigation of the authoritarian personality structure that was perceived as a basis for the success of Nazism (Adorno et al. 1950)

– I return to this later in the present chapter. Finally, it must be mentioned that Marcuse gained some degree of status as the student rebellion’s philosopher, particularly with his books Eros and Civilization (Marcuse 1955) and One Dimensional Man (Marcuse 1964), which, in different ways, deal with new forms of alienation in the post-war period.

The second generation of the Frankfurt School is most strongly signified by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who took over management of the institute in Frankfurt in 1965. Habermas has dealt with a broad range of subjects, including the relationship between theory and practice (Habermas 1988 [1963]), the elucidation of various interests in knowledge (Habermas 1989a [1968]), and a number of books on language, communication and public life (especially Habermas 1989b [1962] and 1984–87 [1981]). To summarise very briefly, Habermas attempts to oppose modernity’s technical or instrumental rationality that increasingly characterises society, with a communicative rationality, discourse, the ideal speech situation and life- world, as approaches that can maintain a humanistic emancipatory practice and ‘knowledge-constitutive interest’.

Habermas has also addressed the theory of socialisation in a short work (Habermas 1971), but it was with the ‘branch’ of the Frankfurt School that has sometimes been called the Hanover School that this interest first became concentrated on the socialisation theory approach.

The key work in the Hanoverian School’s treatment of the socialisation concept is the draft of a materialist theory of socialisation drawn up at the beginning of the 1970s by Alfred Lorenzer (1922–2002), precisely in an attempt to combine the approaches of Marx and Freud:

This investigation pursues the question: how can the child’s development be seen as a natural process and as a social process of development at one and the same time? . . . What is alluded to here is not the harmless old cliché about a weaving together of natural aptitudes and cultural influences. Rather, the investigation is fully concerned with the confrontation between two theories that seem mutually exclusive: psychoanalysis and historic materialism. . . . If psychoanalysis under- stands human structures of experience – action, thought, feelings, perception – as determined by drives, historic materialism must maintain that these very structures must be seen as dependent on history, on the encounter of humans with external nature, as it is here and now . . .

(Lorenzer 1972, p. 7) On this basis Lorenzer places his main emphasis on the generally socialising content in the early interaction processes of the child, not least the part of socialisation or personality formation that is embedded in the unconscious. He is thus mainly concerned with the earliest interaction between the child and its primary relation object in what he calls in a generalised form, the

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mother-child-dyad. Here the child forms its most fundamental subjective structures in its intimate interactions or exchange relations through accor- dances. Lorenzer points out that even here there will necessarily be frustrations. The mother will not be able to completely meet the child’s needs, and frustrations are also necessary for the child to develop into a societal individual.

Later the field of interaction broadens, the child’s structures develop and become differentiated, and the unconscious, sensuously spontaneous inter- action forms are gradually supplemented by two further types of interaction forms: the linguistic symbolic interaction forms that are internalised into the conscious layer, and the sensuously symbolic interaction forms that lead to the creation of the so-called protosymbols, which can be characterised as broader and more open symbol formations which transmit the tensions between the conscious and the unconscious layers in relation to socially prescribed practice, and form the basis for the identity and the imagination. However, in any stage of the development process there can also occur what Lorenzer calls systematically broken practice, i.e. repeated discor- dances, incomprehensible to the child, which can lead to the interaction forms in question being driven out of the linguistic level and becoming unconscious clichés, which ‘make the subjects available at the service of an existing order (and) blocks potential discussions of the action norms that belong to the behaviour complex in question’ (Lorenzer 1972, p. 143). Socialisation is thus a process that will always embrace both development and limitation or damage, and will never be able to be the frictionless transfer of societal conditions to the individual that is the underlying basis in much of developmental psychology.

Today, the importance of Lorenzer’s socialisation theory, itself, is probably rather limited. But his critical mode of thought has, without any doubt, inspired a number of his colleagues to produce a whole series of important contributions to the understanding of various important matters in connection with the interaction dimension of socialisation, and thus also learning, in modern capitalist society.

First to be mentioned are social psychologist Peter Brückner (1922–1982) with his highly critical book The Social Psychology of Capitalism, which drew attention to many repressive aspects of socialisation (Brückner 1972), and consciousness sociologist Oskar Negt, whose work on formation of experience and much more I return to in section 8.2. I also return later to social psychologist, Thomas Leithäuser, who both drew up the theory of ‘everyday consciousness’ and has taken interest in the life world in working life, first and foremost in section 9.3.

Other important names are Alfred Krovoza, who was particularly interested in the repression of sensuality and paid particular attention to the human resistance potential (Krovoza 1976), which made him a source of inspiration to the conception of resistance that is described here in section

9.5, as well as Regina Becker-Schmidt, who has especially worked on socialisation and ambivalence in low-skilled women, see section 9.4. Final mention goes to Thomas Ziehe with his understanding of cultural liberation and his interest in current youth and education problems, to which I have already made reference and will return several times, in particular in section 11.3.

There is, thus, no doubt of the importance of critical theory for the understanding expressed in many places in this book, and not least through its identification of the fact that the interaction processes that are part of learning can often be full of ambiguities and contradictions, and that many influences are deposited in the unconsciousness, inter alia if they subjectively are too much of a burden on conscious cognition. This is a very brief summary but, as mentioned, the various contributions will be taken up in the chapters and sections to which each of them belongs.

7.5 The heritage of the cultural historical tradition