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for the educated middle class in the urban centers of America. Psy–
choanalysis was no longer simply an idea; it became a clinical prac–
tice with all the institutional prestige of a medical science. No longer
the revolutionary of the twenties, Freud came to be regarded as a
master, the authority in a tradition that bears his name, compara–
ble to Marx vis-a-vis Marxism or the church fathers vis-a-vis
medieval Christianity. Disputes were resolved by appeal to the
"sacred" Freudian text - or to a particular understanding of the text.
Simply put, the psychoanalytic orthodoxy had resolved the appar–
ently insurmountable dualisms in Freud's thought: consciousness
versus unconsciousness, ego versus id, reality versus pleasure, in
favor of the repressive term in each of the dualisms. The reality prin–
ciple (and its cognate terms: ego, consciousness) had been elevated
to the supreme place in the psychoanalytic hierarchy. The healthy
psyche was now obliged to postpone its gratifications and accom–
modate itself to social reality. Orthodox theory and practice in effect
dissolved Freud's ambivalent and equivocal view of the Manichaean
struggles within self and civilization.
Against this psychoanalytic orthodoxy, Marcuse and Brown
asserted the claims of desire, pleasure, unconsciousness - indeed, of
all the repressed terms in the Freudian oppositions. Marcuse openly
reacted against the Enlightenment legacy in the psychoanalytic tra–
dition. "Self-consciousness and reason, which have conquered and
shaped the historical world, have done so in the image of repression,
internal and external. They have worked as the agents of domina–
tion; the liberties they have brought (and these are considerable)
grew in the soil of enslavement and have retained the mark of their
birth." Marcuse shared with his orthodox antagonists an enormous
respect for Freud's achievement: he too believed that Freud was the
central figure of modern culture. But his development was not ex–
clusively within the Freudian tradition. He came to Freud as a
member of the Frankfort school, formed in the traditions of Hegel
and Marx. And as one might expect, he was primarily concerned
with the political and social implications of Freudian psychological
categories.
It should be remarked apropos of Marcuse's critique of Enlight–
enment reason that his identification of reason with repression is
based on an extraordinary misconstruing of the Freudian concept of
repression. As Freud stated with special emphasis in his 1915 essay ,
"Repression,"
"The essence oj repression lies simply in thejunction oj rejecting
and keeping something out ojconsciousness."
It need hardly be said that the
