In 1953 I turned to a deep study of Freud feeling the need to reappraise the nature and destiny of man. Inheriting from the Protestant tradition a conscience, which insisted that intellectual work should be directed toward the relief of man’s estate, I, like many of my generation, lived through the superannuation of the political categories which informed liberal thought and action in the 1930s. Those of us who are temperamentally incapable of embracing the politics of sin, cynicism and despair have been compelled to re-examine the classic assumptions about the nature of politics and about the political character of human nature.
—NORMAN O. BROWN, LIFE AGAINST DEATH