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the Victorian Age). He despised women and was pessimistic. His cultural
orientation was confined to middle-class Europeans (a complaint made
by some psychoanalytic writers with as strong a sense of outrage as if
they and their readers and patients were Dobuans and not middle-class
Europeans and Americans). He believed that certain facts about human
nature were fixed and unalterable. The severity of Freud's naturalism,
his sternness of mind, is now generally regarded as unworthy. Like so
much of the modern polemic dubiously associated with the liberal posi–
tion, the polemic of the culturally oriented analysts has been less con–
cerned with rationally disproving the validity of the enemy's assertiom
than with proclaiming him to be reactionary and otherwise disreputable.
The superiority of Freud consists in his having remained a psycho–
analyst. Whatever his failures-the biases of his mind, his tendency to
waver between a scientifically defensible method and his peculiarly
narrow metaphysics-he always regarded theoretical psychoanalysis as
a discipline for studying man's psychic constitution and not as a form
of ethics or liberalism or humanism or religion.
The point, of course, is not that a concern with liberalism or ethical
problems is wrong, either in the analyst or anyone else. One feels no
strong animus against Dr. Fromm's particular kind of post-Goethean
humanism, even when one deplores its vague universalism. The real ob–
jection, the real sinking feeling in the heart, comes when in Fromm's
books one finds the intelligible and delimited concepts of Freud shifting
before one's eyes, not into clearer, more comprehensive, more demon–
strable concepts, but into shapeless, generalized ethical quantities. Freud's
idea of the ego is not free of metaphysics, but it is at least clear and
discussable. In Fromm's writing the ego, occupying a dimly defined place
in the "self" and the "soul," is described in metaphors like this (the
metaphor may be instructive even though Fromm is not writing "tech–
nically"): "we experience this unique and individualized ego as only
one of the infinite versions of life, just as a drop from the ocean is dif–
ferent from and yet the same as all other drops which are also particu–
larized modes of the same ocean." Incest, we are told, is not primarily
sexual in origin. It is "interpersonal." The most illuminating episode
in the Oedipus myth occurs when the son meets his father at the cross–
road and kills
him~because
the father is an obstacle in the son's progress
from dependence to freedom.
If
such an idea is indeed useful and sug–
gestive, it has nevertheless neither the clarity nor the complexity of
Freud's use of the Oedipus myth. How are we to keep our grasp on such
terms as "incestuous" when we read in
Psychoanalysis and Religion
of
the general tendency of man to "fall back into the incestuous worship
