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FREDERICK C. CREWS
psychoanalysis as tragedy, Brown finds himself obliged to rewrite the
script to allow for a redemptive "conscious magic, or conscious mad–
ness." But once we have registered the Kleinian vision of everything
human as governed by unconscious projections and introjections,
mostly of a murderous nature, we can no longer conceive of the
polymorphously narcissistic body of childhood. Brown's own sources
expose the emptiness of his cry, "Down with defense mechanisms,
character-armor; disarmament."
In various tacit ways Brown now acknowledges the discontinuity
between his values and their supposed evidential underpinnings. He is
much vaguer than before in alluding to the end of history; no sus–
tained analysis of movements or art works is provided to match the
fascinating chapters on Luther and Swift in
L ife Against Death;
no
longer does he systematically attack the commonsense psychological
assumptions behind the social sciences. Indeed, he is no longer much
concerned about the limits of acceptable psychoanalytic thought.
Whereas he once sneered at "Jungian
Schwarmerei"
and quite prop–
erly characterized Jung's orientation as "flight from the problem of
the body," now he uses words like "soul" and "archetype" with
literary abandon, and alludes favorably to the Jungian mythographers
Kerenyi and Neumann. Perhaps a close reader of
Life Against Death
might have predicted this change, which is not so great if we realize
that Brown's intent has been religious from the start; witness his
incautious celebration of Mircea Eliade, to say nothing of Boehme
and Berdyaev. It should also be mentioned that Brown's most radical
pronouncements ("Work is a masturbation dream" ; "All movement is
phallic") are now delivered with a subdued, unpolemical air. The
entire book seems almost to excuse itself as a verbal game, a self–
conscious overvaluation of words. But I do not mean to say that
Brown is insincere; the point is that he seems to recognize the privacy
of his reflections and is content to have us keep our intellectual
distance.
It is instructive to take up a psychoanalytic perspective on the
most alarming aspect of
Love's Body,
its solemn and pervasive Chris–
tian language. Brown's crypto-religious declaration of independence
from the Oedipus dilemma is highly suspect- is, indeed, virtually a
filial confession. He rejects genital intercourse for the explicit reason
that it constitutes a fantasied incest, and he identifies himself with
Christ because, in his understanding, Christ is "a Son of God who is
