You are correct in terms of their critical/political agenda, and the same must be said for Marcuse. The present assessment of Adorno, etc., however, in part depends on to what extent we want to keep psychoanalysis as part of leftist critical arsenals. While I don't go so far as to dismiss psychoanalysis as a form of mysticism as Carrol might put it, the portion I'm prepared to assign to it is a _very_ small one (simply a nod of recognition that we still live in the psychoanalytic century ideologically).
>> (snip) ....because psychoanalysis itself resists empirical
>> corroborations and refutations.
>
>In other words: because empirical corroboration's meet with
>the expectations of those who conduct such experiments
>using strict tautological formulations, they must be
>correct. Whereas a theory that confronts (unexpectedly) an
>investigator with their own limitations, contradictions,
>and subjectivity, is false. Using this logic - we'd have
>to say good-bye to quantum physics, hermeneutics,
>psychoanalysis, higher mathematics, and evolutionary
>biology. The problem is, as Lacan notes, the frameworks of
>science cannot accommodate psychoanalysis because of their
>built in restrictions. And, as Adorno notes (in his
>Introduction to the Positivist Dispute), the objectivity of
>the scientific procedure has nothing to do with the truth
>of its findings and everything to do with the objectivity
>of its method (see also Horkheimer's essay, "Critical
>Theory").
I don't class psychoanalysis into the same category as evolutionary biology, for instance. It's a wee bit like literary interpretation, except that literary criticism has a stronger claim to objectivity than psychoanalysis does (after all, not just interpretive conventions but also literary texts place certain constraints upon interpretation, whereas in psychoanalysis only conventions seem to do).
Look, why do you think that Adorno was capable of coming up with his outrageous statement that "totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together"? If he had been mindful of facts as to what fascism actually did to homosexuals, he might have noticed that Nazis were radically and fundamentally anti-homo, as some other leftists of his time did. It is true that his homophobia might have prevented him from taking note of empirical evidence sticking in his face and found 'facts' to fit his 'theory' in any case, but that's not an argument against empirical investigations -- that's an argument against homophobia.
I already said this before on this list, but to repeat, radical nominalism cannot explain the collective accumulation of knowledge, esp. in science. Science has to _work_, after all, to become exploitable, for better and worse. Besides, the work of science that works is not positivistic nor Humean, though 'scientism' or the philosophy of science can be.
Yoshie