ON NORMAN O. BROWN
275
Life Against Death
as "the best interpretation of Freud I know,"
Brown has always been a blithely misleading guide through the
thickets of factionalism, conceptual redundancy and biological archa–
ism that await every student of psychoanalysis.
Love's Body
may in–
deed be the more acceptable of the two books; because it insists on the
nonliteral status of its propositions, it creates less misunderstanding
about mental theory than
Life Against Death.
In one· substantial respect, however, Brown is a valuable com–
mentator on psychoanalysis. Anyone who wants to use Freudian con–
cepts to pose sweeping questions about mankind must face some
ethical ambiguities within Freud's thought. This Brown has brilliantly
done. He shows that the latent tendency of Freud's science cannot
be bounded by Freud's personal stoicism and conservatism, his sar–
donic acquiescence in available norms; and he justly accuses many of
Freud's successors of having betrayed the best psychoanalytic insight,
namely that which would have discredited their peddling of culture–
bound moral commonplaces under the label of objective knowledge.
Psychoanalysis, as Brown shows with relentless polemical vigor, has
never been able to decide whether it aims at individual therapy-i.e.,
conformity to the versions of tolerable unhappiness offered by a sick
society- or at a social transformation that would weaken the antag–
onism between instinct and "reality." The confusion is not merely
ethical; it extends deep into the theory itself. In its positivist mood
psychoanalysis tells us that cure lies in rational mastery of what was
formerly repressed: "where id was, there shall ego be." In its tragic
mood it implies that sacrifices of instinct will be avenged by a re–
surgence from below; the most exacting sublimations will trigger the
most catastrophic counterassaults by the repressed. Most importantly,
Brown sees that in trying to pass muster among the quantifying,
direct-observation sciences, psychoanalysis is disloyal to its own revolu–
tionary perspective on knowledge. To a philosophical mind the chief
merit of psychoanalysis is that it points a way out of the sterile
Western categories of subject and object, inner and outer reality,
thought and feeling, high and low motives. To have defended this
possibility in the face of revisionist theory and conformist therapy is
no small achievement.
Of course Brown promises much more than this. Witness the
subtitle of the book he is known by:
The Psychoanalytical Meaning
of History.
To follow Brown all the way is to "see history, as neurosis,
