ON NORMAN O. BROWN
283
without a father ... the Oedipus Complex transcended." Freud
would surely have smiled at the quaint idea of erasing the Oedipus
Complex by pretending to be parentless; what is it but a variant of
the family romance? And Freud would not have been startled to find
this self-castrating advocate of pregenitality going on to revel in the
sacrificial imagery of the Cross. Much that seems bizarre in
Love's
Body
makes sense in this way.
If,
as John Wisdom fairly well proved,
Bishop Berkeley's Idealism involved an equation of matter with
excrement, Norman O. Brown's wished-for "crucifixion of the self"
appears to be a quixotic anti-Oedipal maneuver. "There is no way to
avoid murder," he says, "except by ritual murder." Such sentences
form a revealing gloss on the lyricism of polymorphous perversity;
on the one hand they indicate why Brown
must
pastoralize a pre–
Oedipal state; on the other hand they cast further doubt, if more is
needed, on the supposed triumph over repression. A man who must
comfort himself with the fantasy of being consumed in the Eucharist
has not yet reentered the paradise of infancy. Is he nearer to it than
l'homme moyen sensuel?
One's mind returns to one of the earliest
and most curious sentences in
Life Against Death:
"To experience
Freud is to partake a second time of the forbidden fruit; and this
book cannot without sinning communicate that experience to the
reader." Brown's spiritual career begins to look like a passage from
such sinning to ritual atonement: from rebellious Luther to anni–
hilated Christ.
It is Brown, of course, who has most eloquently warned us
against the self-righteous use of psychoanalysis as a means of con–
cealing our own irrationality; like Swift, he invites condescension
because he deals openly with, and finally fails to resolve, conflicts
which the psychological cowardice of mankind would prefer to keep
disguised. Again, it is Brown who has shown us the narrowness of
Freud's dismissal of religion as mere wishful thinking, to be replaced
by rational science. Religion and psychoanalysis both are ways of
coping with the madness that threatens every human generation, and
each way is affected by what it opposes. As Freud confessed, "No one
who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons
that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can
expect to come through the struggle unscathed." We may prefer
psychoanalysis to religion on both intellectual and medical grounds,
yet still recognize that it is unreal to demand of any thinker-even
