ON NORMAN O. BROWN
279
hydraulic idea of "stores" and "reservoirs" of sexual energy that are
set to one side by the classic traumas of childhood. Such a concep–
tion can be invoked at the proper moment to belittle the possibility of
nonrepressive sublimation and to accuse the sexual organizations of
being needlessly parsimonious with life. Only in this perspective
can Brown say that psychoanalysis regards sociability itself as a sick–
ness-a remark which is in fact nothing more than an article of
Rousseauistic ideology on Brown's part. Above all, he clings to Freud's
proposals that thinking is merely a detour to a remembered (infantile)
image and that only the earliest wishes yield true gratification.
Brown's ferocity toward ego psychology, with its allowance for
desexualized, autonomous, adaptive functions, is a necessary corollary
of this stance, as is his admiration for the most zealous and specula–
tive of id psychologists, Sandor Ferenczi and Geza R6heim. A La–
marckian
jeu d'esprit
like Ferenczi's
Thalassa,
which biologists dis–
regard for excellent reasons, strikes Brown as a masterpiece because it
dares to psychoanalyze all living matter throughout evolutionary time,
and does so in terms of the Eros-Death theory. Brown and Ferenczi
alike undertake the dubious task of applying a single set of terms to
the amoeba and the ego, but Ferenczi at least confesses that he is
thinking in analogies. With Ferenczi and R6heim, Brown has a taste
for direct and deflating reductions of "advanced" capacities to the
emotional crises that may have prompted their first use in a typical
life-history. The effect of such originology, as Erikson calls it, is to
extend the concept of trauma across the whole domain of innate com–
petence, as if man's unique gifts were somehow explainable as im–
provisations in the face of infantile disappointment. All language, says
Brown, is made out of sexuality, and all thinking comes from anal
erotism-that it, from a perversion of eros. "Since money breeds,
the genital region is involved" in the money complex. Social organiza–
tion is merely
(a
la
R6heim) a collective confession of guilt. The
time sense is the work of repression and nothing more. Sublimations,
such as music and mathematics, are negated instincts entering con–
sciousness under false colors. Thus Brown sweeps out of view every–
thing but an arbitrarily simplified "natural tendency of the body"
and the deepest unconscious, which is now taken to be "the 'nou–
menal' reality of ourselves." This inverted Transcendentalism is not
the outcome of Brown's study of Freud but rather the governing
theology behind that study.
