FREUD AND CULTURE
123
cept of ambiguity from Freud's analysis of the interaction of cultun: and
personality. Culture is not necessarily Janus-faced; according to Fromm,
it may well smile on all of us with a benign and benevolent face. Instead
of doubt, we get reassurance; instead of ambiguity, inspiration; and
Freud's subtle irony makes way for the voice of prophecy.
It must be said that Fromm's voice is one of the sanest
in
the
siren songs of neo-Freudian revisionists. There is much that is attractive
in his blueprint for a sane society, which he calls "communitarian social–
ism"; but these are details which, again, must be set a£ide. In general,
the reforms he advocates are in the tradition of humanitarian socialist
thinkers as set forth, say, in Buber's
Paths in Utopia .
Yet, curiously
enough, the elaborate psychological apparatus yields results which, on
the whole, are rather commonplace or ideological. They are common–
place in that they ultimately amount to saying something like this: if
only we go to work and set our house in order,
i.e.,
improve and reform
social institutions and ideologies, the world will be a better place to live
in.
They are ideological in that the justification for this faith does not,
or need not, come from any psychological knowledge in depth, but from
an acceptance of the traditional wisdom of religious prophets. "Fromm,"
as Marcuse puts it sharply, "revives all the time-honored values of
idealistic ethics as if nobody had ever demonstrated their conformist
and repressive features." Fromm
3
has objected to this charge: if "ideal
goals" like love, integrity, maturity, etc. are said to be ideological, would
the critic also rule out terms like hate, destructiveness, sadism as ideo–
logical language? This defense does not meet the issue head-on for the
crucial point is what the ideal goals mean in Fromm's vocabulary. And,
as we shall see presently, they mean what they have always meant in
religious and moral discourse. Hence, the psychological foundations which
Fromm employs for his critique of society cannot go beyond the tradi–
tional interpretations of these ideal goals.
This is not true of Freud. Even a brief indication of his thinking
on reform, revolution, and conservatism helps to throw his approach to
these problems into sharp contrast with Fromm's. Freud spoke
in
favor
of "reforms" at least along three general lines: ( 1) sexual morality;
(2) economic injustice; and (3) technological progress. But in addition
to these reformist tendencies, Freud's thinking is "revolutionary" at
least
in
two respects: First, he believed that reforms were patchwork
"without altering the foundations of the whole system." Secondly, he
3 See the controversy between Fromm and Marcuse conducted in the pages
of
Dissent
(Summer and Autumn 1955, Winter 1956).
