ON NORMAN O. BROWN
281
ances that sound corroborative of his philosophy. The recourse to
Kleinianism may be understood as an ingenious new attack on the
reality-principle. Just as Ferenczi shrank all genitality to the pathetic
"dream of uterine regression," so Melanie Klein-adopting Ferenczi's
own terminology, by the way-purported to show that dealings with
"Reality" are determined by fantasies, specifically by the introjection
of parental figures. "Sadistic fantasies directed against the inside of
[the mother's] body constitute the first and basic relation to the
outside world and to reality." Thus Klein; and hence Brown: "the
world is the insides of mother."
Since remarks of this sort will sound imbecilic to most readers,
I want to point out that Brown values them in part for heuristic or
purgative reasons. Being opposed to the idea of separate selfhood, he
declares that we have fashioned our egos solely by ingesting what is
past and other; the boundary between inner and outer reality is
artificial, a rampart of the repressive personality. Insofar as he is
undermining the common prejudice, shared
in
much Freudian thought,
that the realm of fantasy is less real than the impinging environ–
mental demands, Brown is making a strong point.
As
he puts it, "Psy–
choanalysis began as a further advance of civilized (scientific) objec–
tivity; to expose remnants of primitive participation, to eliminate
them; studying the world of dreams, of primitive magic, of madness,
but not participating in dreams or magic, or madness. But the out–
come of psychoanalysis is the discovery that magic and madness are
everywhere, and dreams is what we are made of." We can recognize
the hyperbole in such a statement and still find it intellectually
liberating. Brown's invocation of Melanie Klein, like his use of
R6heim and Ferenczi, is a refreshing means of being more Freudian
than Freud; it does give us a peculiarly sharp view of Freud's onto–
logical ambiguity and of the inadequacy of his therapeutic ethic to
contain
his
insight into the persistence of unconscious fantasy in every
phase of life.
The usual unanswerable questions arise when we try to move
from Brown's attack on selfhood to his idea of salvation. Here Melanie
Klein's lurid picture of the fantasy-ridden human suckling becomes
an encumbrance, for exactly the reason that Freud's instinct theory
was finally an encumbrance in
Life Against Death;
to the degree
that the theory depicts mankind as subject to routine infantile traumas,
it makes the Brownian utopia unbelievable. Having chosen to read
