SIGMUND FREUD: 1856-1956
203
locked in mortal combat in Freud's "exquisitely duali!itic conception
of the instinctive life," now called Eros the life instinct and Thanatos
the death instinct. "The death instinct turns into the destructive in–
stinct" when it is directed outward to the external world, Freud
writes in "Why War?," and he concludes the grandest of his philo–
sophic works,
Civilization and Its Discontents,
with the extremely
moderate hope:
Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to
such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate
one another to the last man. They know this-hence arises a great part
of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension. And
now it may be expected that the other of the two "heavenly forces,"
eternal Eros, will put forth his strength so as to maintain himself along–
side of his equally immortal adversary.
In essence, this prophetic statement, written as long ago as 1929,
asks no more than the old horse player's reasonable prayer, "Lord,
let me break even, I need the money."
If
Freud produced a climate of opinion in which tragedy could
again flourish, an important group of his followers in this country, the
neo-Freudians or "revisionists," have done their best to dispel it as
quickly as possible. In half a century of existence, psychoanalysis
has raced through the whole religious cycle from revolutionary pro–
phetic truth to smug Sunday sermon, and almost as soon as Freud's
philosophy began to have an effect on our culture, it was hushed
up and denied in his name. The revisionists, principally the late
Karen Homey, Erich Fromm, and the late Harry Stack Sullivan,
along with a number of others of similar views, have put Freudian
psychoanalysis into what Emerson called the "optative mood."
All
began by publishing independently, but Homey and Fromm
had had some contact in Berlin, where they had been influenced in
varying degrees by Wilhelm Reich's "Freudo-Marxist" movement.
Homey, who has written most extensively about the causes of her
defection, has explained that she could not swallow either the views
of feminine psychology Freud published in the
New Introductory
Lectures
in 1933, or the death instinct, the former as a woman but
the latter
as a
citizen.
"Such an assumptidn," she
writes of
the death
