Sontag, "Psychoanalysis and ..."

[Dave Monroe]

Selected selections from Susan Sontag, "Psychoanalysis and Norman O.
Brown's Life Against Death," in Against Interpretation (New York: Dell,
1969), pp. 258-64 (sorry, screwed up the publication date of my ed. in
my last post, but do note that all the essays in AI were
written/published 1961-65, this one in 1961; again, though, do note that
the page numbers I give here might be idisyncratic to most, but the
quotations are easily located in their respective essays, so ..):

The publication of Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (1959) in a
peprback edition is a noteworthy event.  Together with Herbert Marcuse's
Eros and Civilization (1955), it represents a new seriousnes about
freudian ideas which reveals most previous writing on Freud published in
America ... as theoretically irrelevant, or at least superficial.   But,
more important than its value as a reinterpretation of the most
influential mind of our culture is its boldness as a discussion of the
fundamental problems--about the hypocrisy of our culture, about art,
money, religion, work, about sex and the motives of the body.  (258)

Norman Brown's book ... does not aim at eventual reconciliation with the
views of common sense.  (259)

The truth is that love is more sexual, more bidily than even Lawrence
imagined.  And the revolutionary implications of sexuality in
contemporary society are far from being fully understood.  (259)

Brown, like Marcuse, pursues Freud's ideas as a general theory of human
nature--not as a therapy which returns people to the society which
enforces their conflicts.  Psychoanalysis is conceived by Brown not as a
mode of treatment to smooth away teh neurotic edges of discontent, but
as a project for the transformation of human culture, and as a new and
higher level in human consciousness as a whole.  Freud's psychological
categories are thus correctly seen, in the terminology of Marcuse, as
political categories.  (260)

The step which Brown takes, which moves beyond Freud's own conception of
what he was doing, is to show that psychological categories are also
bodily categories.  For Brown, psychoanalysis ... promises nothing less
than the healing of teh split between the mind and the body: the
transformation of teh ego into a body ego, and the resurrection of the
body taht is promised in Christian mysticism (Boehme) and in Blake,
Novalis, and Rilke.  he invites us to accept the androgynous mode of
being and the narcissistic mode of self-expression that lie hidden in
the body.  According to Brown, mankind is unalterably, in teh
unconscious, in revolt against sexual differentiation and genital
organization.  The core of human neurosis is man's incapacity to live in
the body--to live (that is, to be sexual) and to die.  (260)

It is no accident that Freud chose to use the word sex when, as he
himself declared, he might as well have used "love."  Freud insisted on
sex; he insisted on the body.  (261)

Freud nevertheless supported the perennial aspirations of repressive
culture.  (261-2)

More generally, Freud is heir to the Platonic tradition of Western
thought in its two paramount, and related, assumptions: the dualism of
mind and body, and the self-evident value (both theoretical and
practical) of self-consciousness.  (262)

Neurotic illness, in his conception, is a form of amnesia, a forgetting
(bungled repression) of the painful past.  Not to know the past i to be
in bondage to it, while to remember, to know, is to be set free.  (262)

Brown criticizes boith these assumptions of feud.  We are not body
versus mind, he says; this is to deny death, and therefore to deny
life.  And self-consciouness, divorced from the experiences of the body,
is also equated with the life-denying denial of death [now who mentioned
Joseph McElroy's Plus here ...?].  Brown's argument ... does not entail
a repudiation of the value of consciousness or reflectiveness,  Rather a
necessary distinction is made.  What is wanted, in his terminology, is
not Apollonian (or sublimation) consciousness, but Dionysian (or body)
consciousness.  (262)

The key to this reinterpretation of Freud is Nietzsche.  It is
interesting, however, that Brown does not link his discussion to
Nietzsche, but rather to the eschatological tradition within
Christianity. (263)

[Here, Sontag quotes Brown, "The specilaty of Christian escahtology lies
precisely in its rejection of the Platonic hostility to the human body
and to 'matter,' its refusal to identify the Platonic path of
sublimation with ultimate salvation, and ..." and, well, so forth, up to
naming "the cobbler of Gorlitz, Jacob Boehme."  Unfortunately, she does
not provide a citation, and I don't have my copy of LAD at hand.
Terrance?]

Brown's commitment to Protestantism as the herald of a culture which has
transcended sublimation is, however, historically dubious.  To make only
the most obvious criticism, Protestantism is also Calvinism, and the
Calvinist ethic (as Max Weber has shown) provided the most powerful
impetus for the ideals of sublimation and self-repression which are
incarnated in modern urban culture.  (263)

Nevertheless, by putting his ideas in the framework of Christian
eschatology (rather tahn in the terms of the passionate atheist like
Sade, Nietzsche and Sartre), Brown raises some additional issues of
great importance.  The genius of Christianity has been its development,
from Judaism, of a historical view of the world and thehuman condition.
And Brown's analysis, by allying itself with some of the submerged
promises of Christian eschatology, opens up the possibility of a
psychoanalytic theory of historywhicxh does not simply reduce cultural
history to the psychology of individuals.  (264)

If this is so, however, we must reconsider the meaning of escahtology,
of Utopianism, itself.  Traditionally, eschatology has taken the form of
an expectation of the future transcendence of the human condition for
all mankind in inexorably advancing history.... But not all
eschatological theories are theorie of history.  There is another kind
of eschatology, which might be called the eschatology of immanence (as
opposed to the more familiar eschatology of transcendence).... for
Nietzsche, the promise of fulfilled immanence was available only to the
few, the masters, and rested on a perpetuation or freezing of the
historical impasse of a master-slave society; there could be no
collective fulfillment.  Brown rejects the logic of public domination
which Nietzsche accepted as the inevitable price for the fulfillment of
the few.  (264)