Sontag, "Psychoanalysis and ..."

[Mr. McChoakumchild]

"What are the qualifications that a Kindergarten student
must have to teach a lesson?"


Dave Monroe wrote:
> 
> 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)

You go girl!

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

Thank god for uncommon sense. 


> 
> 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)

We understand them better now than the 60's folk, but it is
kinda like what Isaiah 2:4, Prairie's boyfriend in VL says
about the Tube. As a matter of fact, all this goes to
technology and sex and a wedding--differnet brides and
grooms, a common signal bleed or whatever, from
Plato--Phaedrus to Weber, Freud,  Brown, Marcuse, Graves,
Mcluhen, Pynchon. 


> 
> 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)

This is indeed how Brown approaches Freud and  makes use of
Freud's discoveries and ideas.  Brown is a dialectician and
Freud is not. This is a critical point.  Brown reads Freud's
conflicts, his Agons as Paradoxicals and unravels them with
Dialectic. Brown, is the Platonist in this sense, not Freud.
Brown offers what Freud would never even suggest, "The
Resurrection of the Body", or as Paul M. has mentioned
several times, what is commonly found in so many cultural
critiques, a final chapter that will provide us a "way
out",  in fact the final Part of *LAD* is titled "The Way
Out." But to a large extent Brown is able to do so, first
because what Sontag identifies here and credits to Brown and
Marcuse, not a political or cultural project per se for
Freud, but clearly not simply a mode of treatment ( one of
Brown's most important accomplishments in *LAD* is  tracing
Freud's development and showing how ideas change and become
more comprehensive in the later writings.)

snip  ...genital organization....  

very important idea in Brown and in GR. 

  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)

Again...

> 
> 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)

Yes, so Brown goes to Sexuality and Childhood, brief essay
of Freud's to make this point. 


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

Supported? I don't understand this statement? Supported is
an odd way to describe Freud's view of the perennial
aspirations of repressive culture. 

snip 

> 
> 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)

He links it to both, Chapter One is "The Disease Called Man.
"


> 
> [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, Norman O., Life Against Death, Part Six: The Way Out,
Chapter XVI The Resurrection of the Body, Page 309



> 
> 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)

That's a damn good one! 


> snip 

Sontag might not like this but, 

I'm still Proust reading Oblomov