ON NORMAN O. BROWN
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been bypassed or slandered by "knowledge." Sick of ideology, un–
satisfied by notions of impersonal and objective truth, violated in
their selfhood by McLuhan's omnipresent electronic nervous system,
many are ready to believe that social existence itself
is
a swindle. They
are ready to toy with a new religion, but only a religion of solipsism
which confines its message to a promise of perfect self-indulgence.
Here Philip Rieff's brilliant study,
The Triumph of the Thera–
peutic,
seems to offer the right framework for comprehending Brown's
career. Western intellectuals, he says, are staging an elaborate act of
suicide, an apostasy from the cause of culture to the primitive forces
that culture
is
supposed to master. Rieff shows that unlike Freud,
who saw no alternative to social restraints and was superbly rec–
onciled to the pettiness of human fate, certain influential modems
have turned psychoanalysis to the purposes of ultimate cure-a cure
for individuals that disregards or even dispenses with society as a
whole. The choice of psychoanalysis seems natural in view of Rieff's
formula: "faiths develop first as primary modes of release from
earlier uses of faith, and then develop their own control functions."
Whatever its merit as science, psychoanalysis has served as a mode
of release from faith-indeed, as potentially the most anarchic release
in history, since it undermines not only specific taboos but the very
category of the sacred. It is to be expected that some thinkers who
have lived for a while with this unnerving perspective will cast about
for new certainties in the realm of instinct, and will pose these
certainties in psychoanalytic language. Hence jung, Wilhelm Reich
and Lawrence, among others, celebrate the natural man and use
Freudian terms to rail against the sober pessimism of Freud. Each
sets his sights on redemption; each corrupts the dynamic and descrip–
tive scheme of psychoanalysis into monism and moralism. The lost
soul of modem man may yet be recovered-in orgasm, in orgone
energy, in the tasteful museum of unconscious archetypes. In each case
the element of social control is minimal, as befits an age demanding
what Rieff calls remissive blasphemy, as opposed to the repressive
piety of the past.
Norman O. Brown's case should form a revealing appendix to
Rieff's analysis, for Brown is at once more reductive and more
remissive than
his
fellow prophets. Instead of the saccharine eclec–
ticism of jung, who somehow managed to imply that instinct and
culture were not opposed after all, Brown purports to abolish every
