The work of Sigmund Freud and his disciples is one of the most striking examples of the miscarriage of the romantic and naturalist movements of the nineteenth century. For it was presumably the intention of these movements to bring man to himself by overcoming the ancient dualism of mind and body, spirit and matter, reason and instinct, which for so long had been the religious and philosophical expression of the human being’s mistrust of himself. Self-consciousness has almost always involved the dilemma and the vicious circle of every delicate system of control: quis custodiet custodies—who guards the guards, or rather, how do we control the controller, particularly when the controlled and the controller are one? How can man govern his bodily appetites if his mind and will are the same as his body? How can a hand hold onto itself? The problem seemed to be solved if man could be considered a duality—a mind in a body like a driver in a car. This was all very well so long as the controlling mind, soul, will, or ego could be trusted. But one of the main insights of Christianity, of Jesus, St. Paul, and St. Augustine, was that the root of evil lay in the spiritual sphere, in the perversion of the controlling will.
This insight actually destroyed the usefulness of the soul-body dualism, though it was not effectively questioned until the materialistic and naturalistic viewpoints of nineteenth-century science suggested a theory of man in which mind and will could be considered as operations of the body. Freud played an enormous part in constructing this unitary view of man. From his early days he had been convinced that mental processes could ultimately be explained in terms of neurology, but his contribution to the unitary view was not to lie along these lines. It came through psychology, through a reduction of the motivations of the conscious will to irrational bodily instincts, or at least to instincts that had always been associated with flesh rather than spirit.
But this unitary, naturalistic view of man miscarried in a number of ways. It seemed impossible to take it seriously since for all practical purposes human beings had to feel themselves to be conscious wills directing and mastering nature both inside and outside their own organisms. Through the technology that arose from nineteenth-century science, men succeeded in controlling nature as never before, and this very success confirmed the feeling that, more and more, the rational will has to stand in opposition to natural spontaneity, and that the future development of man can no longer be left to the unmanaged process by which our species, our brains, and our consciousness have evolved. Here, at once, is seen the difference between the theory of evolution and the idea of human progress that the theory was originally supposed to justify. Evolution was the result of spontaneous natural selection; progress, of controlled mechanical direction. The terminology of man’s separation from his body and his physical environment had changed, but the feeling, and modes of action expressing it, became stronger than ever. Scientific objectivity became the new distance between man and his nature.
In Freud and psychoanalysis this miscarriage is the more remarkable just because it was Freud’s discovery that mental disease came about through man’s repression of his own nature, and especially of that erotic energy that Freud felt to be the basic character of all living matter. Psychoanalysis, if it was to be something more than a system of investigation and description, that is, if it were to be a clinical technique for healing mental disease, had therefore to do something to reconcile the conscious will to its own erotic foundations—in short, to accept them instead of disowning them. But I have always wondered why Freud and his school have described the erotic processes of life with a curiously obscene nomenclature. Why call the erotic energy libido, suggesting “libidinous”? Why call the total distribution of erotic feeling over an infant’s body “polymorphous perversity”? What is the final effect of being able to speak of literary, artistic, and philosophical productions as manifestations of “anal eroticism”? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is yet another symptom of disgust with oneself, and that Freud was at heart a moralist who, despite his brilliant diagnosis, did not like what he found and could not bring himself to that love of his own nature that would be the necessary condition for reconciling man to himself.
There is another, though related, respect in which the Freudian philosophy stands in the way of letting psychoanalysis be an effective cure of man’s division against himself. This has been brought out and quite marvelously developed in a book that should certainly turn out to be one of the great philosophical works of our time, Professor Norman O. Brown’s (1959) Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. This is a sympathetic critique of the Freudian movement, written largely from a sociological standpoint, by a professor of classics at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, a man of obviously considerable learning in many fields—philosophy, literature, economics, political science, and sociology. With humor, scholarship, and philosophical sophistication, Professor Brown proposes the outrageous thesis that Freud’s diagnosis be taken seriously, and that we actually face the practical possibility of doing without repression. It is his carefully argued opinion that civilization as we know it is an almost total denial of the human organism and its needs, a system of habitual and organized repression that is not biologically viable since it will destroy itself through pent-up hostility. He suggests that the lifting of repression will unveil many surprises: that exclusively genital sexuality is itself a repression, that death so far from something to be dreaded, is the foundation of individual personality, and that bodily existence is a form of bliss, which, if we would allow ourselves to experience it fully, would result in an almost mystical awareness of our union with the whole natural universe.
Professor Brown begins by asking why Freud ended his life on a note of pessimism, and why, in effect, his final position was to take the side of the ego and the superego against the id. For if the function of psychoanalysis has to be to square the pleasure-principle of the libido with the reality-principle of civilization, to adjust erotic energy to practical human relations and their moral imperatives, surely it must fail as a means of healing the basic human sickness. If this is to be the final position of psychoanalysis, then, says Professor Brown, we need a psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis, which is what his book begins to provide.
He traces Freud’s pessimism to his dual theory of the instincts, to the idea that in all living creatures there is a necessary and ingrained conflict between Eros and Thanatos, between the love of life and the wish to die. If this is so, says Professor Brown, “all organic life is then sick; we humans must abandon hope of cure.” He goes on, however, to reexamine Freud’s theory of the instincts, skillfully arguing that the pleasure-principle and the death-wish constitute not an irresolvable situation of conflict but a polarity or dialectical unity. He argues that the death-wish is not necessarily at variance with the pleasure-principle, for fear of death arises precisely from the repression of Eros, from living a life that at every present moment is so unsatisfactory that the only hope seems to lie in an indefinitely prolonged future in which we seek repeatedly for lost delights of a past infancy.
The difference between men and animals is repression. Under conditions of repression, the repetition-compulsion establishes a fixation to the past, which alienates the neurotic from the present and commits him to the unconscious quest of the past in the future. (p. 92)
The lifting of repression reveals that life, to which Eros presses, is life-and-death, and that death can be accepted when life has been fully lived, quoting Nietzsche’s, “What has become perfect, all that is ripe—wants to die.” “The precious ontological uniqueness which the human individual claims,” says Professor Brown, “is conferred on him not by possession of an immortal soul but by possession of a mortal body. … At the simplest organic level, any particular animal or plant has uniqueness and individuality because it lives its own life and no other—that is to say, because it dies” (p. 104). Perhaps this is another way of saying that if an individual is unrecognizable without certain limits in space, it must also have limits in time, if time and space are actually inseparable. Freud’s dualism of the instincts, he says elsewhere,
leads to a suicidal therapeutic pessimism, because it results in representing conflict not as a human aberration but as a universal biological necessity; our modification of Freud’s ontology restores the possibility of salvation. It is the distinctive achievement of man to break apart the undifferentiated or dialectical unity of the instincts at the animal level. Man separates the opposites, turns them against each other, and, in Nietzsche’s phrase, sets life cutting into life. It is the privilege of man to revolt against nature and make himself sick. But if man has revolted from nature, it is possible for him to return to nature and heal himself. Then man’s sickness may be, again in Nietzsche’s phrase, a sickness in the sense that pregnancy is sickness, and it may end in a birth and a rebirth. (p. 84)
The repression of Eros and its sublimation into the abstract and bodiless ends of human culture that are always somewhere off in the future, representing an unconscious quest for the past, is thus what gives man a history. His concern with his history, personal or social, is the measure of his failure to be alive in the real present, becoming the fatuous pursuit of an ever-receding goal. Professor Brown quotes the economist J. M. Keynes’ Essays in Persuasion:
Purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on our environment. The “purposive” man is always trying to secure a spurious and delusive immortality for his acts by pushing his interest in them forward into time. He does not love his cat, but his cat’s kittens; nor, in truth, the kittens, but only the kitten’s kittens, and so on forward for ever to the end of cat-dom. For him jam is not jam unless it is a case of jam tomorrow and never jam today. Thus by pushing his jam always forward into the future, he strives to secure for his act of boiling it an immortality. [cited in Brown, 1959, p. 107]
The ending of repression, and thus the success of psychoanalysis, would therefore mean a recovery from history and a deliverance from spurious time. “Unrepressed life,” Professor Brown says, “would be timeless or in eternity. Thus again psychoanalysis, carried to its logical conclusion and transformed into a theory of history, gathers to itself ageless religious aspirations … [It] comes to remind us that we are bodies, that repression is of the body, and that perfection would be the realm of Absolute Body; eternity is the mode of unrepressed bodies” (p. 93).
Much of Professor Brown’s book is devoted to a discussion of what the life of the unrepressed body would be—something very different from the normal expectation of a life of unrestrained lust, hatred, and self-interest. His argument is that we should return (though why must he use this phrase?) to the “polymorphous perversity” of the infant, to a state in which the whole body is, as it were, an erogenous zone, resulting in a constant erotic communion with itself and the external world. He points out that though this may sound like the remotest utopian ideal, such a state of affairs has in fact occasionally been realized by mystics, both Western and Eastern, and may, indeed, descend out of the blue for brief periods upon very ordinary people—invariably carrying with it the conviction that this way of seeing things is reality, and that the so-called sober reality of the world as seen on Monday morning is a socially inculcated sham, based upon repressed senses. In such a state of open sensitivity, the most ordinary circumstances are so intensely marvelous that there is no conceivable necessity to go out seeking the enormous “kicks” of lust and violence. He argues, further, that if the Eros in us is indeed ultimately ineradicable, we have no choice but to be utopian, and to employ all our scientific resources, psychological and technological, in that direction.
There is an attack on the great god Science in psychoanalysis; but the nature of the attack needs careful explanation. What is being probed, and found in some sense morbid, is not knowledge as such, but the unconscious schemata governing the pursuit of knowledge in modern civilization—specifically the aim of possession or mastery over objects (Freud), and the principle of economizing in the means (Ferenczi). … In contrast, what would a nonmorbid science look like? It would presumably be erotic rather than (anal) sadistic in aim. Its aim would not be mastery over but union with nature. And its means would not be economizing but erotic exuberance. And finally, it would be based on the whole body and not just a part; that is to say, it would be based on the polymorphous perverse body. (p. 236)
How is such a state of affairs to be brought about, and how are we to answer the obvious “practical” objections, let alone religiomoral objections, to the unrepressed life? It is here, I feel, that Professor Brown’s book leaves something to be desired; he does not really tackle these problems save, perhaps, to point out the enormous practical objections to continuing in the ways society believes to be realistic. Apparently Professor Brown has only slight faith in the psychoanalysis of couch and consulting room, seeing rightly enough that these problems are not to be solved by talking, and agreeing with Trigant Burrow in feeling that they are really social rather than individual. By this he does not appear to mean that the solution lies through such political measures as the abolition of capitalism or monogamy, but rather, I would gather, through the recognition that such social institutions as our concepts of time, the ego, money, success, status, personality-role, and even death, have only a conventional reality.
Psychoanalysis … transformed into a science of culture would, of course, be able to dispense with its mysterious rites of individual initiation. The necessity, on which Freud insisted, of undergoing individual analysis in order to understand what psychoanalysis is talking about would be eliminated: the problem and the data would no longer be individual but social. I am not criticizing psychoanalytical therapy as a technique for restoring broken-down individuals to a useful role in society. (p. 155)
There is a certain loss of insight reflected in the tendency of psychoanalysis to isolate the individual from culture. Once we recognize the limitations of talk from the couch, or rather, once we recognize that talk from the couch is still an activity in culture, it becomes plain that there is nothing for psychoanalysis to psychoanalyze except these (cultural) projections—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—and thus psychoanalysis fulfills itself only when it becomes historical and cultural analysis. (p. 170)
So far so good, but surely Professor Brown does not mean historical and cultural analysis solely in the form of books and public discussions.
At this point the author becomes vague, and this criticism seems to me well worth making because it is hard to believe that so cogent a thinker has not a great deal more to say about this aspect of the problem. It is almost impossible in a review to do justice to the complexity of the argument and the multiplicity of topics in this extraordinary book—the fascinating digressions into literature and economics, history and religion. All in all, the great contribution of this work is Professor Brown’s spirited and learned defense of the supreme reality and value of the organic human body and its physical environment. But one should not, I feel, jump to the conclusion that he is in any ordinary sense a mere materialist with a dreary mechanical-causal view of the physical world. He would certainly agree with Blake, whom he so often quotes, that “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body. … Energy is Eternal Delight.” And again, “If we could cleanse the doors of perception, we should see everything as it is—infinite.” Indeed, as Professor Brown himself says, “The mentality which was able to reduce nature to ‘a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material endlessly, meaninglessly’—Whitehead’s description—is lethal. It is an awe-inspiring attack on the life of the universe” (p. 316).
If I may put this philosophy of trust in one’s own body and one’s own nature in my own words, I would say that if our senses could be sufficiently open, what we call the physical world, mortal and changing as it is, would give us all and perhaps more than we have ever asked of any spiritual world that we can possibly imagine. There have been times when, by various chances, my own senses have been opened far enough to see it, and to know that the process within us that Freud called libido is a love that comprises within itself at once everything from the earthiest sexuality, through the most human endearment, to Dante’s “love that moves the sun and other stars.” Perhaps the thing that is most deeply repressed in the Freudian system is that Eros is the same as Logos, that the supposedly blind and unconscious id is profoundly intelligent.
Brown, N. O. (1959). Life against death: The psychoanalytical meaning of history. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
From ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, 1959, 16(4), 486–494. Copyright © 1959 by the Institute for General Semantics. Reprinted with permission of the Institute for General Semantics.