Morris Dickstein
SEEDS OF THE SIXTIES:
The Growth of Freudian Radicalism
One of the dominant notes of the nineteen-flfties was its
moralism, which led to the displacement of concrete political issues
into abstract ethical ones . With an eye on the human condition as a
whole , the flfties moralist could hardly lower his olympian sights to
attend to the individual lot ofman-in-society. In this context Norman
Mailer was a particularly signiflcant dissenting flgure. For a time he
remained rooted in the residual political culture of the forties, which
distinguished his flction but also proved to
be
something of a dead
weight . Gradually, like the rest of America, he shifted from a Marxian
to a Freudian terrain . Like other flfties radicals he was most effective,
and most prophetic, in the psychosexual sphere rather than in the old
political one. He became adept at invoking the official values of the
flfties against the lived reality . In essays like " The White Negro" he
took the moralism of the flfties seriously but inverted its content . He
took the individualism of the flfties seriously too , but without its
stoical overtones . Where repression was , let liberation be: this was the
message not only of Mailer but of a whole new line of Freudian (or
Reichian) radicalism, which did so much to undermine the intellec–
tual consensus of the cold war period .
"These have been the years of conformity and depression ,"
Mailer wrote in 1957 in "The White Negro. " "A stench of fear has
come
out of every pore of American life , and we suffer from a collec-
