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believed, rightly or wrongly, that any culture can and must always be
weighed against the demands made on behalf of man's libidinal life–
the gratifications and frustrations of which constitute man's inalienable
rights against the demands imposed by society. Both of these revolu–
tionary aspects of Freud's thought are conspicuously absent in Fromm's
system as they are in any other system of inspirational psychoanalysis.
Per contra,
one can search far and wide in Freud's works and will not
find that he leans on the authority of scripture-whether religious,
moral, or political. That Freud remained a "conservative" despite these
revolutionary implications of his thought is well known. Aside from
temperament, he was conservative because he was deeply convinced
(a) that an intractable Adam dwelled in the instinctual life of man,
(b) that the instincts obeyed a "conservative" principle of their own,
and (c) that they were called upon to perform impossible and in–
soluble tasks on behalf of human culture.
Ill
The theme of Marcuse's
Eros and Civilization
is the instincts
at war with culture. It is called "a philosophical inquiry into Freud,"
which will cause misgivings in circles distrustful of philosophical specu–
lation divorced from clinical experience and practical therapy. Others
more open to their metaphysical commitments may agree with Kluck–
hohn's judgment that, with the exception of the two volumes by Ernest
Jones, Marcuse's book is "the most significant general treatment of
psychoanalytic themy since Freud himself ceased publication." The
treatment is "orthodox" in that Marcuse accepts Freud's "dialectic of
civilization" and outlines his own solution of the problem against the
background of Freud's metapsychology. Thus, in content and spirit, this
approach differs sharply from any variety of neo-Freudian revisionism.
The contrast is particularly striking when we consider the different
meanings which Fromm and Marcuse assign to the same terms. Both
use "alienation" as their point of departure-thus indicating that both
bring the influence of Hegel and Marx to a study of Freud. But both
mean very different things by the same concept. For Fromm "alienation"
means that man living in a capitalistic society is debased in his "true"
nature, his essential humanity, which refers to the realization of the
ideal goals and spiritual values mentioned above. Marcuse, on the other
hand, takes Freud's hint that alienation means "alienation from in–
stincts," and that the reconditioning of our machines, both cultural
and personal, should begin and end with a liberation and transformation
