Life Against Death
| Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History | |
|---|---|
 Front cover of the 1970 Sphere Books edition |
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| Author(s) | Norman O. Brown |
| Country | United States of America |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Literary theory |
| Publisher | Sphere Books |
| Publication date | 1959 |
Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History is a work by Norman O. Brown, first published in 1959. A radical analysis and critique of the work of Sigmund Freud, it has been compared to works by Herbert Marcuse (Eros and Civilization) and Michel Foucault (Madness and Civilization), as well as to Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther and Lionel Trilling's Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture. Made famous when Norman Podhoretz recommended it to Lionel Trilling, it has been called "one of the great nonfiction works of the 20th century", though some critics have found it of lesser weight than Marcuse's work.
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[edit] Background
The book's fame grew when Norman Podhoretz recommended it to Lionel Trilling. After reading Life Against Death on Podhoretz's urging, Trilling "produced a favorable review of this central text of the nascent cultural radicalism toward which he was in general antagonistic." According to Podhoretz, "...Brown issued a powerful challenge to Freud's doctrine that human possibilities were inherently and insurmountably limited. But he did so not by arguing, as earlier critics like Karen Horney and Erich Fromm had done, that the master's theories had been valid only, or mainly, for the particular kind of society in which he himself had lived. Disdaining the cheap relativism of such tactics, Brown set out to show that Freud's pessimistic sense of human possibility did not necessarily follow from his analysis of human nature, an analysis Brown accepted as sound in all essential respects. The brilliance of Life Against Death lay in the amazingly convincing case Brown was able to build for the consistency of that analysis with his own vision of a life of 'polymorphous perversity', a life of play and of complete instinctual and sexual freedom."[1]
[edit] Interpretation of Martin Luther
Richard Webster writes that, like Erik Erikson's portrait of Martin Luther, Life Against Death points to "numerous similarities between Luther's view of the human condition and that found in psychoanalysis."[2] Joel Kovel writes that Life Against Death deals extensively with the theme of how "Luther achieved some of his spiritual breakthroughs while defecating."[3]
[edit] Evaluation
Paul Robinson describes Life Against Death as one of three books published in the 1950s that brought into question the prevailing interpretation of Freud, the others being Lionel Trilling's Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture and Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. Robinson dismisses Trilling's work as lightweight in comparison to those of Brown and Marcuse, but writes that all three authors shared "the conviction that Freud's great accomplishment was to remind us of the high price we have paid for our civilization." In his view, they "were in agreement that the critical element in Freud was to be found in his late metahistorical forays, that is, precisely those works which the orthodox considered unscientific and which the neo-Freudians condemned as reactionary. Brown and Marcuse undertook a systematic analysis of psychoanalytic theory in order to reveal its critical, even revolutionary, implications. Both went far beyond Reich or Roheim in probing the dialetical subtleties of Freud's thought, and both reached conclusions which were more extreme, more 'utopian', than those to be found in either of Freud's earlier left-wing exegetes."[4]
Robinson initially considered Marcuse and Brown's work of equal importance, but became convinced that Marcuse was "the finer of the two theorists", and that his treatment of Freud in Eros and Civilization is more substantial than Brown's in Life Against Death.[4] Robinson writes that Life Against Death is "unquestionably a powerful book", suggesting that it is more elegantly written than Eros and Civilization due to Brown's background in literature and the classics. He believes that it draws effectively on revolutionary themes in western religious thought, especially the body mysticism of Jakob Böhme and William Blake, and that its exploration of psychoanalysis is more rigorous and systematic than Marcuse's, as well as consistently more radical on a psychological level. However, Robinson believes Life Against Death fails on a political level, and that unlike Eros and Civilization, it is unsuccessful in transforming psychoanalytic theory into historical and political categories.[5]
Kovel similarly finds Life Against Death comparable to, but less successful than, Eros and Civilization.[6] Liam Hudson asseses the two books differently from Robinson and Kovel, finding Eros and Civilization more reductively political in tone and therefore less stimulating than Brown's "strange, fertile work".[7]
Brown himself later called Life Against Death "my first exuberant surge of premature post-Marxist energy", commenting that its last chapter was disfigured by the misleading idea that the world could be "a pastoral scene of peace and pleasure, luxe calme et volupté, Baudelaire's utopian image invoked by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization."[8]
[edit] Influence
Todd Dufresne, who compares Life Against Death to Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, notes that its influence can be measured "in sheer number of books sold": over fifty thousand copies of Life Against Death had been sold by 1966.[9] According to Hudson, however, Life Against Death was neglected by radicals because its publication coincided with that of Marcuse's Eros and Civilization.[7] Brown's work affected Foucault's reception in the United States: American reviewers of Foucault's Madness and Civilization were quick to note that it shared a "kinship in mood if not in tone or method" with Life Against Death.[10] Camille Paglia identifies Life Against Death as an influence on her work of literary criticism Sexual Personae.[11] Paglia calls Life Against Death "one of the great nonfiction works of the 20th century", saying that, "It is what Michel Foucault longed to achieve but never did."[12] Kovel calls Life Against Death, along with Eros and Civilization, "ancestors" of his work History and Spirit, writing that they, "drew psychoanalysis away from the clinic because Marcuse (from the Frankfurt School perspective of Hegelian Marxism) and Brown (from a background of religious Puritanism) saw an emancipatory potential in Freud's discoveries."[3]
[edit] References
- ^ Podhoretz, Norman (1999). Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Helman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. New York: The Free Press. pp. 75, 198–199. ISBN 0-684-85594-I.
- ^ Webster, Richard (2005). Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: The Orwell Press. p. 517. ISBN 0951592254.
- ^ a b Kovel, Joel (1991). History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN 0-8070-2916-5.
- ^ a b Robinson, Paul (1990). The Freudian Left. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. p. 149. ISBN 0-8014-9716-7.
- ^ Robinson, Paul (1990). The Freudian Left. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. pp. 224-233. ISBN 0-8014-9716-7.
- ^ Kovel, Joel (1981). The Age of Desire: Case Histories of a Radical Psychoanalyst. New York: Pantheon Books. p. 272. ISBN 0-394-50818-1.
- ^ a b Hudson, Liam (1976). The Cult of the Fact. London: Jonathan Cape. p. 75. ISBN 0 224 01221 5.
- ^ Brown, Norman O. (1991). Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. Berekley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. pp. 179, 190. ISBN 0-520-07298-7.
- ^ Dufresne, Todd (2000). Tales from the Freudian Crypt: The Death Drive in Text and Context. Stanford: Stanford University Press. p. 111. ISBN 0-8047-3885-8.
- ^ Merquior, JG (1991). Foucault. London: FontanaPress. p. 25. ISBN 0-00-686226-8.
- ^ Paglia, Camille (1993). Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays. London: Penguin Books. p. 114. ISBN 0-14-017209-2.
- ^ "The pussy-whipped princelings of the press corps". http://www.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2000/03/15/suprtues. Retrieved 2011-05-04.
