48
PARTISAN REVIEW
RIMBAUD
IS NOT
the only example of a paranoiac intellect put at
the service of reaction
(a reference to Claudel's attempts to capture
Rimbaud for the Church--translator).
Marxism is in the same
boat. Bernstein's reformism, the reformism of de Man and of
Stalin use Marxism to turn it against the proletariat itself, the only
social force which is able to bring about the new order. Having
falsely interpreted the writings of Marx, reaction has gone on to
attack psychoanalysis. Not only Adler and Jung, but even Freud
tries to enroll psychoanalysis among the forces of regression. Jung
does this consciously in a reactionary spirit, Adler in the petty
bourgeois and social-democratic spirit which characterizes his
whole attitude, while Freud does it out of weakness. He compen–
sates for his scientific audacity by an astonishing social conform–
ism. One might say that he is frightened by the practical conclu–
sions to which his genius has led him. Morally, Freud expresses
the bourgeois attitude, and he seems to want to destroy his own
work by appealing to the only power left to reaction today, the
power to kill. As if to repay the recognition which the bourgeoisie,
after scoffing at him so long, has finally given him, Freud wishes
to endow death with a power equal to that of life by raising it to
the rank of an instinct. The instinct of death will save Freud, the
bourgeois Freud, from his own revolutionary daring. Is it not plain
that Freud's moral watchword is:
"si vis vitam para mortem"?
But we have already said that Freud is only an unconscious
reactionary. This is why it has remained for Jung, a conscious
reactionary, to do the job of expounding a doctrine of human
behavior and a morale which have as their purpose the adaptation
of man to death. Jung compares the life of man to the sun's daily
course. A rising, a zenith and a setting are discerned. Man reaches
his zenith in his fortieth year; that is why it is such a critical age.
It makes necessary. on our part an effort of readaptation and the
acceptance of an attitude which will prepare us better to die. For
Jung one of the great sources of the troubles of our day is that false
morale which consists in trying to stay young when you no longer
have enough physical strength left for it. We no longer know how
to grow old, he laments.
The analogy drawn by Jung between the sun's course and the
