GYROSCOPE AND RADAR
119
itable concomitant of civilization). This means that society needs a
system of positive values, which can be incorporated in the private
conscience. Any code of values appropriate to our society would no
doubt
be
less individualistic and less puritanical than that of our grand–
fathers; inner direction need not involve the rigors of a Calvinist con–
science. But the crystallization of such a code probably requires more
social stability than can at present be expected; psychic gyroscopes
will not function unless men can feel a reasonable assurance that the
rules are not going to
be
changed.
Henry Bamford Parkes
ANALYSIS AT DEAD CENTER
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND RELIGION.
By
Erich Fromm . Yale Unive rsity
Press. $2.50.
To the nonprofessional reader Erich Fromm would appear to
be the most intelligent of that group of post-Freudian analysts nowadays
described as "culturally oriented." One finds in his writing very little
of the thoughtless and glib "emancipation" which leads such an analyst
as Clara Thompson to assert, in the light of the dear old KwakiutIs
and Zunis, the abysses of Freud's cultural unawareness. In her recent
Psychoanalysis: E volution and Development,
Dr. Thompson says that
what Freud believed to be "innate biological human nature was to a great
extent a reaction to European culture." Furthermore, it is now apparent
"that the two basic drives, sex and aggression, postulated by Freud are
not in themselves problems." It is a fact that Freud was very much a
man of his time and place and that he paid insufficient attention to the
ways in which biological drives may be modified by cultural influences.
Other facts are that such peoples as the Zunis found ways of getting
rid of their aggressions less destructively than we do and that the Casca–
gians (the people who write from the bottom of the page to the top, dis–
covered by Swift) show little interest in sex. Still the whole enormous
body of evidence assembled by modern anthropology does not force one
to believe that Freud was wrong when he said that a major part of the
human constitution is biological.
The new image of Freud invented in some of the purlieus of the
revisionist movement is very interesting. Dr. Thompson writes that Freud
was a Victorian prude who could not help feeling that sex was connected
with man's baser instincts. He was dangerously authoritarian and patri–
archal, like the men of the Dark Ages (an era roughly co-extensive with
