Against Interpretation (36 page)

[
1961
]

Psychoanalysis and Norman O. Brown’s
Life Against Death

T
HE
publication of Norman O. Brown’s
Life Against Death
(1959) in a paperback edition is a noteworthy event. Together with Herbert Marcuse’s
Eros and Civilization
(1955), it represents a new seriousness about Freudian ideas which reveals most previous writing on Freud published in America, be it the right-wing scholasticism of the psychoanalytic journals or the left-wing cultural studies of the Freudian “revisionists” (Fromm, Horney, etc.), as theoretically irrelevant or, at best, superficial. But, more important than its value as a reinterpretation of the most influential mind of our culture is its boldness as a discussion of the fundamental problems—about the hypocrisy of our culture, about art, money, religion, work, about sex and the motives of the body. Serious thinking about these problems—rightly, in my opinion, centered on the meaning of sexuality and of human freedom—has been continuous in France since Sade, Fourier, Cabanis, and Enfantin; it is to be found today in such disparate works as the sections on the body and on concrete relations with others of Sartre’s
Being and Nothingness,
in the essays of Maurice Blanchot, in
L’Histoire d’O,
in the plays and prose of Jean Genet.

But in America, the twin subjects of eroticism and liberty are just beginning to be treated in a serious way. Most of us still feel required to fight the stale battle against inhibitions and prudery, taking sexuality for granted as something which merely needs a freer expression. A country in which the vindication of so sexually reactionary a book as
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
is a serious matter is plainly at a very elementary stage of sexual maturity. Lawrence’s ideas on sex are seriously marred by his class-romanticism, by his mystique of male separateness, by his puritanical insistence on genital sexuality; and many of his recent literary defenders have admitted this. Yet Lawrence must still be defended, especially when many who reject him have retreated to an even more reactionary position than his: treating sex as a matter-of-fact adjunct to love. The truth is that love is more sexual, more bodily than even Lawrence imagined. And the revolutionary implications of sexuality in contemporary society are far from being fully understood.

Norman Brown’s book is a step in this direction.
Life Against Death
cannot fail to shock, if it is taken personally; for it is a book which does not aim at eventual reconciliation with the views of common sense. Another distinction which it possesses: it shows, convincingly, that psychoanalysis is not to be written off—as many contemporary intellectuals have done—as one more vulgar and conformist “ism” (along with Marxism, original sin-ism, existentialism, Zen Buddhism, etc., etc.). The disenchantment with psychoanalysis which animates the most sophisticated voices of our culture is understandable; it is difficult not to reject a view which has become both so official and so bland. The vocabulary of psychoanalysis has become the routine weapon of personal aggression, and the routine way of formulating (and therefore defending oneself against) anxiety, in the American middle classes. Being psychoanalyzed has become as much a bourgeois institution as going to college; and psychoanalytic ideas, incarnated in Broadway plays, in television, in the movies, confront us everywhere. The trouble with psychoanalytic ideas, as it now appears to many, is that they constitute a form of retreat from, and, therefore, conformity to, the real world. Psychoanalytic treatment does not challenge society; it returns us to the world, only a little better able to bear it, and without hope. Psychoanalysis is understood as anti-Utopian and anti-political—a desperate, but fundamentally pessimistic, attempt to safeguard the individual against the oppressive but inevitable claims of society.

But the disenchantment of American intellectuals with psychoanalytic ideas, as with the earlier disenchantment with Marxist ideas (a parallel case), is premature. Marxism is not Stalinism or the suppression of the Hungarian revolution; psychoanalysis is not the Park Avenue analyst or the psychoanalytic journals or the suburban matron discussing her child’s Oedipus complex. Disenchantment is the characteristic posture of contemporary American intellectuals, but disenchantment is often the product of laziness. We are not tenacious enough about ideas, as we have not been serious or honest enough about sexuality.

This is the importance of Brown’s
Life Against Death,
as well as of Marcuse’s
Eros
and
Civilization.
Brown, like Marcuse, pursues Freud’s ideas as a general theory of human nature—not as a therapy which returns people to the society which enforces their conflicts. Psychoanalysis is conceived by Brown not as a mode of treatment to smooth away the neurotic edges of discontent, but as a project for the transformation of human culture, and as a new and higher level in human consciousness as a whole. Freud’s psychological categories are thus correctly seen, in the terminology of Marcuse, as political categories.

The step which Brown takes, which moves beyond Freud’s own conception of what he was doing, is to show that psychological categories are also bodily categories. For Brown, psychoanalysis (and he does not mean the institutions of current-day psychoanalysis) promises nothing less than the healing of the split between the mind and the body: the transformation of the human ego into a body ego, and the resurrection of the body that is promised in Christian mysticism (Boehme) and in Blake, Novalis, and Rilke. We are nothing but body; all values are bodily values, says Brown. He invites us to accept the androgynous mode of being and the narcissistic mode of self-expression that lie hidden in the body. According to Brown, mankind is unalterably, in the unconscious, in revolt against sexual differentiation and genital organization. The core of human neurosis is man’s incapacity to live in the body—to live (that is, to be sexual) and to die.

In a time in which there is nothing more common or more acceptable than criticism of our society and revulsion against civilization, it is well to distinguish the arguments of Brown (and Marcuse) from the general run of criticism, which is either childishly nihilistic or ultimately conformist and irrelevant (or often both). And since both books are sharply critical of Freud at many points, it is also important to distinguish them from other attempts to modify Freudian theory and to extend it as a theory of human nature and a moral critique of society. Both Brown and Marcuse offer the sharpest opposition to the bland “revisionist” interpretation of Freud which rules American cultural and intellectual life—on Broadway, in the nursery, at the cocktail parties, and in the suburban marriage bed. This “revisionist” Freudianism (Fromm to Paddy Chayevsky) passes for a criticism of mechanized, anxious, television-brainwashed America. It seeks to reinstate the value of the individual against the mass society; it offers the worthy ideal of fulfillment through love. But the revisionist critique is superficial. To assert the claims of love, when love is understood as comfort, protection against loneliness, ego-security—while leaving all the claims of sublimation unchallenged—hardly does justice to Freud. It is no accident that Freud chose to use the word sex when, as he himself declared, he might as well have used “love.” Freud insisted on sex; he insisted on the body. Few of his followers understood his meaning, or saw its applications in a theory of culture; two exceptions were Ferenczi and the ill-fated Wilhelm Reich. The fact that both Reich and Ferenczi, in Brown’s account, misunderstood the implications of Freud’s thought—mainly, in their acceptance of the primacy of the orgasm—is less important than the fact that they grasped the critical implications of the Freudian ideas. They are far truer to Freud than the orthodox psychoanalysts who, as a result of their inability to transform psychoanalysis into social criticism, send human desire back into repression again.

Of course, to some extent, the master does deserve the disciples he gets. The contemporary appearance of psychoanalysis as a form of expensive spiritual counselling on techniques of adjustment and reconciliation to culture proceeds from the limits in Freud’s own thought, which Brown points out in careful detail. Revolutionary mind that he was, Freud nevertheless supported the perennial aspirations of repressive culture. He accepted the inevitability of culture as it is, with its two characteristics—“a strengthening of the intellect, which is beginning to govern instinctual life, and an internalization of the aggressive impulses, with all its consequent advantages and disadvantages.” Those who think of Freud as the champion of libidinal expressiveness may be surprised at what he calls “the psychological ideal,” for it is none other than “the primacy of the intellect.”

More generally, Freud is heir to the Platonic tradition of Western thought in its two paramount, and related, assumptions: the dualism of mind and body, and the self-evident value (both theoretical and practical) of self-consciousness. The first assumption is reflected in Freud’s own acceptance of the view that sexuality is “lower” and the sublimations in art, science, and culture “higher.” Added to this is the pessimistic view of sexuality which regards the sexual as precisely the area of vulnerability in human personality. The libidinal impulses are in uncontrollable conflict in themselves, a prey to frustration, aggression, and internalization in guilt; and the repressive agency of culture is necessary to harness the self-repressive mechanisms installed in human nature itself. The second assumption is reflected in the way in which the Freudian therapy assumes the curative value of self-consciousness, of knowing in detail how and in what way we are ill. Bringing to light the hidden motives must, Freud thought, automatically dispel them. Neurotic illness, in his conception, is a form of amnesia, a forgetting (bungled repression) of the painful past. Not to know the past is to be in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.

Brown criticizes both of these assumptions of Freud. We are not body versus mind, he says; this is to deny death, and therefore to deny life. And self-consciousness, divorced from the experiences of the body, is also equated with the life-denying denial of death. Brown’s argument, too involved to summarize here, does not entail a repudiation of the value of consciousness or reflectiveness. Rather, a necessary distinction is made. What is wanted, in his terminology, is not Apollonian (or sublimation) consciousness, but Dionysian (or body) consciousness.

The terms “Apollonian” and “Dionysian” will inevitably remind one of Nietzsche, and the association is appropriate. The key to this reinterpretation of Freud is Nietzsche. It is interesting, however, that Brown does not link his discussion to Nietzsche, but rather to the eschatological tradition within Christianity.

The specialty of Christian eschatology lies precisely in its rejection of the Platonic hostility to the human body and to ‘matter,’ its refusal to identify the Platonic path of sublimation with ultimate salvation, and its affimation that eternal life can only be life in a body. Christian asceticism can carry punishment of the fallen body to heights inconceivable to Plato, but Christian hope is for the redemption of that fallen body. Hence the affirmation of Tertullian—‘The body will rise again, all of the body, the identical body, the entire body.’ The medieval Catholic synthesis between Christianity and Greek philosophy, with its notion of an immortal soul, compromised and confused the issue; only Protestantism carries the full burden of the peculiar Christian faith. Luther’s break with the doctrine of sublimation
(
good works
)
is decisive, but the theologian of the resurrected body is the cobbler of Görlitz, Jacob Boehme.

The polemical drive, if not the exquisite detail, of Brown’s book can be seen from this passage. It is at the same time an analysis of the whole range of Freudian theory, a theory of instinct and culture, and a set of historical case studies. Brown’s commitment to Protestantism as the herald of a culture which has transcended sublimation is, however, historically dubious. To make only the most obvious criticism, Protestantism is also Calvinism, and the Calvinist ethic (as Max Weber has shown) provided the most powerful impetus for the ideals of sublimation and self-repression which are incarnated in modern urban culture.

Nevertheless, by putting his ideas in the framework of Christian eschatology (rather than in the terms of the passionate atheists like Sade, Nietzsche, and Sartre), Brown raises some additional issues of great importance. The genius of Christianity has been its development, from Judaism, of a historical view of the world and the human condition. And Brown’s analysis, by allying itself with some of the submerged promises of Christian eschatology, opens up the possibility of a psychoanalytic theory of history which does not simply reduce cultural history to the psychology of individuals. The originality of
Life Against Death
consists in its working out a point of view which is simultaneously historical and psychological. Brown demonstrates that the psychological point of view does not necessarily imply a rejection of history, in terms of its eschatological aspirations, and a resignation to the “limits of human nature” and the necessity of repression through the agency of culture.

If this is so, however, we must reconsider the meaning of eschatology, or Utopianism, itself. Traditionally, eschatology has taken the form of an expectation of the future transcendence of the human condition for all mankind in inexorably advancing history. And it is against this expectation, whether in the form of Biblical eschatology, enlightenment, progressivism, or the theories of Marx and Hegel, that modern “psychological” critics have taken their largely conservative stand. But not all eschatological theories are theories of history. There is another kind of eschatology, which might be called the eschatology of immanence (as opposed to the more familiar eschatology of transcendence). It is this hope that Nietzsche, the greatest critic of the Platonic devaluation of the world (and of its heir, that “popular Platonism” known as Christianity), expressed in his theory of the “eternal return” and the “will to power.” However, for Nietzsche, the promise of fulfilled immanence was available only to the few, the masters, and rested on a perpetuation or freezing of the historical impasse of a master-slave society; there could be no collective fulfillment. Brown rejects the logic of public domination which Nietzsche accepted as the inevitable price for the fulfillment of the few. The highest praise one can give to Brown’s book is that, apart from its all-important attempt to penetrate and further the insights of Freud, it is the first major attempt to formulate an eschatology of immanence in the seventy years since Nietzsche.