"/.78
FREDERICK C. CREWS
be abrogated in favor of polymorphous perversity. After several
hundred pages the suspicion arises that Brown does not know what he
means hy the undoing of repression or the mystical body of childhood.
At most we are left with a promise ("the task of judicious ap–
praisal ... comes later") which
Love's Body
no longer pretends to
postpone, much less to honor.
Brown's handling of psychoanalytic terminology is cavalier in
the extreme. He is
ine~itably
drawn to the most dramatic--<me is
inclined to say melodramatic-aspect of Freudianism, the Eros-Death
dualism. Freud embarrassed most of his followers by taking this
dubious hunch about the properties of organic matter and using it
to explain mental acts, but Freud at least recalled occasionally that
this was speculation, a philosophical overlay on the observables of
psychoanalysis. Brown in contrast is satisfied that a view of all life as
composed of unstable fusions of Eros and Death will give maximum
exercise to the spirit of paradox. On this controversy as on others, he
never once deviates into petty considerations of evidence. Residual
doubts are swept away with the clinching thought that all the wrong
people, the anti-Freudians and the plodding therapists, reject instinct–
ual dualism; the only reason it is omitted from psychoanalytic
orthodoxy must be that it is conducive to gloom. For Brown this
gloom is something to be cultivated and then dialectically overcome;
by supposing that Life and Death coexist in undifferentiated unity at
the animal level one can pass to the millenarian hope that "they
could be reunified into some higher harmony in man." To recognize
that psychoanalysis is chiefly a theory of psychic drives, structures and
compromises, not a theory about the contest between two bodily
energies, would be to ring the curtain on Brown's cosmic melodrama.
Brown can be relied on to celebrate those points of theory that
could be turned against Freud's ideal of adult
normality-C<lieben und
arbeiten,"
as he once put it with his genius for brevity. Brown's
rhetorical task is to reduce
lieben
to body narcissism and
arbeiten
to
sheer sickness. In order to do so he must resuscitate everything in
Freudian thought that has proved least acceptable to physical scien–
tists. Thus he embraces the biologically discredited idea that organisms
are constantly dedicated to tension reduction, and he willingly follows
Freud into intricate applications of the Nirvana principle to the
human mind; "ageless religious aspirations" look quite up to date
in such terms. Similarly, he is only too eager to accept Freud's
