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PARTISAN REVIEW
human conditions, of the likeness of the human plight, has made
possible a deeper sense of the brotherhood of man. It has in any
case tempered the spirit of punitiveness toward what once we took
as evil and what we now see as sick. We have not yet resolved the
dilemma posed by these two ways of viewing. Its resolution is one
of the great moral challenges of our age.
Why, after such initial resistance, were Freud's views so phe–
nomenally successful in transforming common conceptions of man?
One reason we have already considered: the readiness of the
Western world to accept a naturalistic explanation of organic phe–
nomena and, concurrently, to be readier for such explanation in the
mental sphere. There had been at least four centuries of uninter–
rupted scientific progress, recently capped by a theory of evolution
that brought man into continuity with the rest of the animal kingdom.
The rise of naturalism as a way of understanding nature and man
witnessed a corresponding decline in the explanatory aspirations of
religion. By the close of the nineteenth century, religion, to use
Morton White's phrase, "too often agreed to accept the role of a
non-scientific spiritual grab-bag, or an ideological know-nothing."
The elucidation of the human plight had been abandoned by religion
and not yet adopted by science.
It
was the inspired imagery, the proto-theory of Freud that was
to fill the gap. Its success in transforming the common conception
of man was not simply its recourse to the "cause-and-effect" dis–
course of science. Rather it is Freud's imagery, I think, that provides
the clue to this ideological power. It is an imagery of necessity, one
that combines the dramatic, the tragic, and the scientific views of
necessity. It is here that Freud's intellectual heritage matters so deeply.
Freud's is a theory or a proto-theory peopled with actors. The char–
acters are from life: the blind, energic, pleasure-seeking id; the
priggish and punitive super-ego; the ego, battling for its being by
diverting the energy of the others to its own use. The drama has an
economy and a terseness. The ego develops canny mechanisms for
dealing with the threat of id impulses: denial, projection, and the
rest. Balances are struck between the actors, and in the balance is
character and neurosis. Freud was using the dramatic technique of
decomposition, the play whose actors are parts of a single life. It
is a technique that he himself had recognized in fantasies and
