Life Against Death Pdf

[Samantha Figueredo]

LifeAgainst Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959; second edition 1985) is a book by the American classicist Norman O. Brown, in which the author offers a radical analysis and critique of the work of Sigmund Freud, tries to provide a theoretical rationale for a nonrepressive civilization, explores parallels between psychoanalysis and Martin Luther's theology, and draws on revolutionary themes in western religious thought, especially the body mysticism of Jakob Bhme and William Blake. It was the result of an interest in psychoanalysis that began when the philosopher Herbert Marcuse suggested to Brown that he should read Freud.

The book became famous when Norman Podhoretz recommended it to the critic Lionel Trilling, and over fifty-thousand copies had been sold by 1966. It has been compared to works such as Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) and the philosopher Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1961), and Brown's objectives have been seen as being the same as Foucault's. Though Life Against Death has been called one of the great nonfiction works of the 20th century, some critics have found it of lesser weight than Eros and Civilization, and Brown has been criticized for misinterpreting Freud's theories. It has been suggested that, despite his objectives, Brown's arguments imply that sexual repression is biologically inevitable. Brown later called parts of Life Against Death "quite immature" and wrote of his Love's Body (1966) that it was written to confuse any followers he acquired due to the book and destroy its positions.

"Brown begins his Life Against Death with the riddle that haunts all romantics: Why does man who is born into a garden of innocent delight create a culture in which he is alienated from himself, his fellows, and nature? Why civilization and its discontents instead of paradise? In the tradition of Nietzsche and Freud, Brown considers man a diseased animal. Culture emerges when erotic energy is sublimated and turned to the production of objects, character structures and political organizations that yield little pleasure. Man alone of all the animals represses his true desires, lives in continual conflict and guilt, and constructs for himself a corporate neurosis that he calls civilization."

Brown praised The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) as one of the great applications and extensions of the Socratic axiom "know thyself", but criticized Totem and Taboo (1913), writing that in that work Freud correlates psycho-sexual stages of development with stages of history, thereby seeing history as a "process of growing up". Brown saw that view as a "residue of eighteenth-century optimism and rationalism" and considered it inadequate as both history and psychoanalysis. He credited the philosopher Stuart Hampshire with providing an acute comparison between Freud and the philosopher Baruch Spinoza in Spinoza (1951), but wrote that Hampshire fails to recognize important differences between the two, such as Freud's dualism.[2]

Brown, whose background was in classical studies, became interested in psychoanalysis because of Herbert Marcuse,[3] a philosopher associated with the Institute for Social Research based in Frankfurt. Marcuse had little direct concern with Freud while in Frankfurt, but devoted more attention to psychoanalysis in the 1950s,[4] and in 1953 suggested to Brown that he should read Freud.[5]

Seeking a passage to a "post-Marxist world", Brown began his turn to psychoanalysis partly because he had become disenchanted with politics after the failure of Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential candidacy.[6] In Life Against Death, Brown wrote that he had begun a careful study of Freud in 1953, because he felt the need to reconsider both human nature and the human race's future prospects. Commenting that he had inherited from Protestantism a conscience which dictated that intellectual work should be directed toward ending or minimizing human suffering, Brown addressed the book to everyone ready to consider new ideas and possibilities.[7] Brown proposed a synthesis of psychoanalysis, anthropology, and history, calling the analyst Gza Rheim's efforts in that direction pioneer work of significance second only to Freud's.[8] Brown also commended Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) as, "the first book, after Wilhelm Reich's ill-fated adventures, to reopen the possibility of the abolition of repression."[9]

According to the historian Paul Robinson, Radicals such as Reich and Rheim represented a minority current of opinion within psychoanalysis, which by the 1940s was viewed as fundamentally conservative by the European and American intellectual community. Critics outside the psychoanalytic movement agreed in seeing Freud as a conservative. The left-wing psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had argued that several aspects of psychoanalytic theory served the interests of political reaction in his The Fear of Freedom (1942), an assessment confirmed by sympathetic writers on the right. The sociologist Philip Rieff, in Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), portrayed Freud as a man who admirably urged men to make the best of an inevitably unhappy fate.[10]

In the 1950s, Marcuse and Brown, along with Trilling in Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (1955), challenged this interpretation of Freud. They believed that Freud showed that a high price has been paid for civilization, and that Freud's critical element was to be found in his late metahistorical studies, works considered unscientific by orthodox analysts and reactionary by the neo-Freudians.[11] Marcuse and Brown shared a similar general outlook and devoted the most attention to the same Freudian concepts. They saw Freud's greatness in his metahistorical analysis of "the general neurosis of mankind", argued that modern man is sick with the burdens of sexual repression and uncontrolled aggression, attempted to make explicit the hidden critical trend in psychoanalysis that promised a nonrepressive civilization as a solution to the dilemma of modern unhappiness, and accepted the most radical and discouraging of Freud's psychological assumptions: the pervasive role of sexuality and the existence of the death instinct. Brown, unlike Marcuse, had strong mystical inclinations and drew on revolutionary themes in western religious thought, especially the body mysticism of Bhme and Blake.[12]

Life Against Death was first published in the United States by Wesleyan University Press in 1959.[13] In 1959, the book was published in the United Kingdom by Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sphere Books published editions in 1968 and 1970.[14] In 1985, a second edition with an introduction by the historian Christopher Lasch was published.[13][15]

"I did feel when writing Love's Body some kind of obligation to undo what I had done in Life Against Death. I wanted to release any followers I had acquired or at least to confuse them. Insofar as Life Against Death happened to end up by making me a leader, I did want to get lost...Thus I felt under some existential stress to write Love's Body in order to torpedo Life Against Death, to destroy it as a position."

Brown later expressed dissatisfaction with Life Against Death, referring to its chapter on "Language and Eros" as "quite immature."[17] He observed that the book, "records the first revision of my historical identity, from Marx to Marx and Freud", a process which occurred because his first "historical identity", Marxism, had been "wrecked in the frozen landscapes of the Cold War, the defeat of the simplistic hopes for a better world that inspired the Henry Wallace campaign for the Presidency in 1948." Brown, who saw Louis Zukofsky's poetry as anticipating the ideas of both Life Against Death and Love's Body (1966), has called Life Against Death "my first exuberant surge of premature post-Marxist energy", writing that in it he had wagered his "intellectual life on the idea of finding in Freud what was missing in Marx." Brown "found in Freud's analysis of the pathological dimension of human desires the basis for a post-Marxist critique of capitalism." Commenting on his intellectual development, Brown noted that, "My Marxist background had given me a healthy prejudice against moneymaking. Imagine my excitement when I discovered Sandor Ferenczi's article 'The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money'; with its immortal conclusion, 'After what has been said money is seen to be nothing other than deodorized, dehydrated shit that has been made to shine.'"[18]

That this shift of Brown's interests toward psychoanalysis led to the writing of Love's Body, which concluded that "there is only poetry", showed, according to Brown, that pursuing the implications of Freud's ideas consistently led to the breakdown of "categories of traditional 'rationality' still accepted as authoritative by both Marx and Freud; that massive breakdown...which Nietzsche baptized with the name of Dionysus." Brown wrote that he now realized that he did not really know what he was saying when he called for "Dionysian consciousness" in the last chapter of Life Against Death. Brown added that it was clear to him in that work "that at that deep level which can only be expressed in myth or metaphor, Freud's 'instinct theory' needed to be remythologized in terms of Dionysus, that is to say in terms of instinctual dialectics rather than instinctual dualism. Or, to use another metaphor, in terms of Heraclitus rather than Empedocles." Brown concluded that the last chapter of Life Against Death was disfigured by the misleading idea that the world could be 'a pastoral scene of peace and pleasure, luxe calme et volupt, Baudelaire's utopian image invoked by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization'."[19]

Life Against Death received a positive review from Susan Sontag in The Supplement to the Columbia Spectator,[20] and was also reviewed by the philosopher Frank Meyer in National Review,[21] and discussed by Loren Baritz in The Nation,[22] the sociologist Edgar Z. Friedenberg in The New York Times Book Review,[23] Ralph Flores in Library Journal,[24] the political scientist Alan Wolfe in The New Republic,[25] Charles Peck in Across the Board,[26] the art critic Roger Kimball in The New Criterion,[27] the critic George Scialabba in Bookforum,[28] and in Time and Yale - Theatre.[29][30][31]

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