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FREDERICK C. CREWS
pressing restlessly and unconsciously toward the abolition of history,"
unless its course can be diverted into a general regression to the
body erotism that supposedly antedates the oral, anal and genital
"organizations of the libido." I wish I could formulate this idea more
clearly and still remain faithful to Brown's words; he seems quite
earnestly to imply that history is to be redeemed by taking his advice.
This, as Henry James said of Whitman's effort to identify himself
with the third person of the Trinity, is tolerably egotistical. But merely
to list the main steps Brown's claim requires us to make is to reduce
it to absurdity. We must first agree that history can be usefully per–
sonified as a psychoanalytic patient, and we must not pause over
such trifles as whether Eastern history is to be counted, whether his–
tory's case history forms a continuum across cultures and epochs and
whether there is any meaningful sense in which history can be re–
garded as harboring repressed memories of its infantile traumas. There
is no sign that these questions have crossed Brown's mind. Next,
having wrestled history onto the couch, we must assume that it will
be found as sick as the sickest neurotic, heading for psychosis-for
Brown sides with those who deny the possibility of successful sublima–
tion.
If
history sublimates, squandering its libido on would-be refine–
ments, then history is in for a vendetta from below. And we must
also believe that significant numbers of men, including the main
decision-makers of the world, will find themselves capable of con–
sciously banishing repression from their lives. This may be the trickiest
step of all, for we must assent to the most inexorably pessimistic
Freudian argument about man's unconscious slavery and then de–
clare that man is free to make himself over as he pleases.
It is unsettling to realize that Brown has not only failed to allay
these doubts, but has not bothered to defend his generalities through
illustration.
If
history is a deteriorating neurosis, we would like to
see how one of its phases shows a greater domination by pathologi–
cal factors than another. It is true that Brown characterizes early
Protestantism as "a new stage in history, a fuller return of the
repressed"; but fuller than what? Without any comparative dis–
cussion of the Catholic Middle Ages he can hardly be said to
have scored a point. Indeed, his lively chapter on Luther's anality,
the Devil, Protestantism and Capitalism makes a case
against
his
thesis, for he repeatedly complains that modem Protestants have
lost the diabolism and eschatology that Luther once brought to the
