TRP V.-relevant serendipitous find, maybe

[Mark Kohut]

In a book called Psychological Man edited by Robert Boyers, Harper 1975, which
is a reprint, it seems, of essays from a special isssue of Salamagundi Magazine 
appears
N.O. Brown among others.   

Brown, in what seems to have been written in 1973, links himself with Marcuse 
and Philip Reiff
all of whom in 1959 published books on the social implications of psychoanalysis 
[mostly Freudianism]. 

We know something about Brown's '59 Life Against Death's influence on TRP, esp 
in GR.  The three
continued to write in that vein...and here Brown quoting Heraklitus sez "the 
unseen harmony is stronger than
the seen." 

So, what follows comes after GR and I send it because some exact words resonate 
deeply with V.....and
 whenever TRP went deep into developing his full vision, Brown on Reiff shows 
how pervasive was the conversation
and the tropes.   Brown is commenting on parts of Reiff's soon-to-be published 
book, one excerpt in this book 

called The Impoverishment of Western Culture. 

But here's the money paragraph [shitty irony intended]: "In Reiff, as in Vico, 
the great historical process in a long-range
view is a process of secularization, or profanation. He sees America 'edging 
nearer and nearer to a condition of life entirely
free from the sacred and its prohibitions. This is what (in Reiff's) terms the 
triumph of the therapeutic means: instead of souls
we have neuroses, instead of sacraments, we have shows."......[All is theater 
now and in V. that mysterious theater scene murder] 

.Therapy is that form which degrades all contents......'therapists' themselves
successors to early psychologists, who were successors to moralizers, who were 
themselves successors to all primitive
spiritualizers. ........................[for Vico, used by Joyce, I believe, the 
first 'age' was the age of the gods, i.e. the primitive spiritualizers]

Among other things, I remember the plist back-and-forth on Pynchon's perspective 
on shrinks, on freud.