ON NORMAN O. BROWN
277
surface. He does not disguise his irritation at an epoch which is so
little tormented by its unconscious conflicts that it cannot appreciate
the need for a (Brownian) kingdom of grace, but he fails to notice
that such an epoch falls outside his alleged dynamic of history. At the
very least he might be expected to offer a crude sketch of "the
repressed's" inroads between Luther's century and ours, but this too
is missing.
My immediate concern is to show not that Brown's alannism
is unwarranted (maybe it isn't), but that his treatment of psycho–
analysis is governed by the special requirements of his argument. The
result is a subtle perversion of the whole body of Freudian theory.
If
that theory is germane to anything, it is to the data unearthed in
clinical experience, and any adjustments
in
the theory are obviously
to be judged on their capacity to account for the data more fully or
more economically. To Brown, however, psychoanalysis is a set of
paradoxical propositions about human fate-propositions which only
need a little editing to be brought into alignment with his favorite
tradition of mystical and dialectical thought. In a word, psycho–
analysis for Brown is not science but poetic philosophy, just as
its
harshest critics have always said. Only on this assumption can we ex–
plain, for example, how he feels entitled to assert with breathtaking
audacity that Freud was wrong to regard the sexual organizations as
biologically determined. The real meaning of such a statement is that
Brown has come across an obstacle to his utopianism and is wishing
it away.
Much of Brown's trenchant prose looks devious in a critical re–
reading. His strategy in general is to imply that Freud's deepest
in–
sights can be preserved only in his own idiosyncratic and ideological
formulations, which are offered as mere clarifications of the master's
ambiguities. What we tend to recall from
Lite Against Death
are
Brown's telling jibes at intellectual timidity: the timidity of those who
blind themselves to the bodily reference of symbolism, of those who
shy away from Freud's instinct theory because it leads to despair, of
those
rival utopians who glorify one organ at the expense of the whole
body, of those modern Aeolists and breech-peepers who must either
call Swift mad or deny his anal obsession altogether, and thus
"domesticate and housebreak this tiger of English literature." Brown
is a virtuoso of cold dismissal. He begins to seem fatally vague only
when we ask exactly how this analytic, Apollonian intellect of his can
