FREUD AND CULTURE
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tended to think of the products of fantasy and imagination, in the
normal adult as well as in the special case of the artist, as harmless
play, as delightful escapes into an illusory world, as pleasing anodynes
against the harshness and frustrations of life.
Drawing upon the humanistic idealism of Kant and Schiller, Mar–
cuse enlarges the meaning of play and art so that they may become
the tools for building a new world beyond history:
la, tout n'est qu'ordre
et beaute, luxe, calme, et volupte.
He insists, as do other critics of
Freud, that art is more than a harmless illusion or substitute gratifica–
tion. The creative imagination caught in the works of art makes a
cognitive
claim upon the individual by confronting him with "truths"
about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness which are buried under
the debris of an ugly social reality and a repressive scientific rationality.
Play has a reality-testing function (Riesman). Moreover, play is self–
determined or self-regulative. It creates its own pattern and structure
in the process of transforming intrapsychic energy. Structure, organiza–
tion, and sublimation emerge spontaneously from the instinctual sources
which are absorbed in playful activity; they are not imposed from the
outside by social rules or natural necessity.
This argument is crucial for Marcuse's version of a libidinal aes–
theticism. In a long and difficult chapter called "The Transformation
of Sexuality into Eros," he sets out to show that as in play, so in sex,
the impulse or psychic energy behind the activity may and will develop,
as part of its own dynamics, certain self-inhibiting and self-denying
mechanisms-even, and especially, when the impulse is liberated from
the traditional cultural super-ego and its repressive features. Thus checks
and balances generated by the instinct itself will sustain the cultural
process beyond its present liberation. Only the cultural process will
then be nourished by displacements and sublimations under the aegis
of a liberated id, instead of under the destructive and painful tyranny
of the traditional super-ego. Taking a cue from R6heim, Marcuse en–
visages the prospect of libidinal freedom as a reversal of the traditional
dynamics of the cultural process. Instead of a hostile and anxiety-ridden
super-ego wresting valuable ground from the id, the id will, as it were,
break through and flood both ego and super-ego with libidinal energy.
The result of
this
great reversal will be twofold : ( 1) There will come
about what Marcuse calls an "erotization of the total personality,"
i.e.,
a rediscovery on the mature, adult level of the polymorphous-perverse
state of sexuality which Freud attributed to early infancy; and (2) there
will come about an "erotization" of social relations, including the work–
ing conditions still required to maintain a state of material abundance.
