Customer Reviews

Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

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An awesome book on the psychoanalytical meaning of history. I read that this book was admired by Jim Morrison in his bio by fellow band member Ray Manzarek. Books to read come in strange ways. I also read about this book referenced by the integral psychologist and philosopher Ken Wilber.

This books gives credibility to Freudian Analysis. Nor that it was ever lost, but there are neo-Freudians which of course differ from Freud and there is the reductionism when one looks only through one paradigm, regardless of it's accuracy. This is because there are other modes or of insight that co-inside and yet contradict some of Freud, but that's the beauty of it all, of the psychoanalytical analysis paradigm. And this paradigm is one of the subjective mind, unless you consider Freud to also be biological, then it would take in objectivity, but only in certain levels and degrees. And so this book I think expounds profoundly and is a deep book.

OK, this book speaks of Freud's "pleasure principle," "reality principle," Oedipus complex," "death instinct," castration anxiety," and while this outwardly may sound very limited, the issue comes down to one thing, repression. And whether its sexual, excremental, power or various levels of blocked emotional energies, the theories employed as to why and are very valuable in understanding ourselves and others. And this repression is based on sublimated infantile erotic pleasures beyond into a reality principle and in many cases death instinct. There are many fascinating chapters/essays on these ideas. The fact of the matter is we all came from the womb, all had consciousness of embryonic narcissistic selfhood and sought pleasure and had to deal with reality. We all had a mother (not including abandonment) who became our entire world, our need for pleasure verses pain and desire to possess and it was of a erotic nature. And we all had to deal with separation aspects as major threats to our consciousness.. So much of psychoanalysis rings of truth.

Interesting how the death instinct is the desire to get back to the womb, the incapacity to accept the individuality of life. So it's this form of romanticism, to get back to the child, to play. Unfortunately it negates life in that it fails to accept and represses and causes a life view, either socially, politically, individually & etc. to live a live of undue restraint or hardships with the idea that this life is all temporary, working towards dying in this life to be rewarded with the return back to the womb. And so this is a death against life, a life where the irrational Dionysian play is destroyed and we live in a purely empirical scientific age of logic and rationalistic work, where living is logic in work, as opposed to the idea of play, of childlike ability to live in the present moment, without historicity and guilt and instead the moment where all action is spontaneous play. But instead we repress our play, create history from guilt and rationalize a materialist way of living. The archaic man sublimated his guilt in group activity and had this marvelous trait of each year erasing his historicity in sharing, but even then it was a form of sublimation of guilt. Modern man just builds on his history and lives a capitalistic life based on valueless commodity. Value is measurement, quantity, no longer quality and art. Money has become our excrement. The archaic man transferred or sublimated his sexual and infantile narcissistic energies into a community or shared social system. The modern man sublimates his into money and things he puts value into.

History seen through the eyes of psychoanalysis can be viewed as the sublimation of repression. In this, the infant first exists according the pleasure principle in where is bodily functions take first priority. The reality principle of course combats this and the young child develops the Oedipus complex, wishing to completely own his mother, jealous, wishing to eliminate his father or become the father to himself.

In sublimation, there is the repression of bodily and sexual instinctive desires into what we know of as culture. And the higher the culture the greater the sublimation. What has culminated is our era of objective materialism and empirical science which represses the non-rational nature of wish fulfillment's, desires and instinctual drives. Brown proposes that we reestablish our Dionysian roots, the creative, non repressive self where the use of a money and culture are not the means of escaping the pleasure principle. Instead we play, erase historicity, loose the guilt and accept our entire bodies, not just our minds.

The essay on Jonathan Swift, his exposure of what appears to be prideful human intellectuals and cultural values to come from the anus and excrement (the as***le and sh*t). And he both Norman O. Brown and Jonathan Swift link as all ideas as coming from the human body, ideas used to empower persons, elevate and leave teachings that far outlive the human being's body, another wards a way to be immortal, as an act of repression of the anxiety of death, of separateness. The idea of becoming one's own father - immortality, the Oedipus complex. There is much to this. And yet in a sense, all "matter" comes from excrement, which is what all we are made from biologically, the very biological make up that brings forth our minds and intellectual ideas.

Much, much more to this book, not said here.

Norman O. Brown's interpretation of Freud is clearly written, startling in its conclusions, and important for anyone trying to understand Freud's theory of sublimation. However, he comes to the opposite view of Freud, insofar as Brown values art as a Dionysian and liberating force, rather than as a mere symptomology of the artist's psychic disturbance. The analysis of the death-instinct and its relation to culture is particularly brilliant. However, I found the latter part of the book, with its Swiftian emphasis, to be less than persuasive.

This is not really a review - time is lacking. Just a strong recommendation. If the question "What is the human animal?" is on your mind, read this book! In my opinion, Life Against Death ranks among the most important modern contributions toward an understanding of the human condition. It is on the same short list as Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. Like these works and indeed the subject, it is not an easy read. I am ordering a fresh copy and looking forward to the introduction by Christopher Lasch which I have not read. I also recommend Norman O. Brown's other works - in particular, Love's Body and the collection of essays, Apocalypse And/or Metamorphosis. I first read Brown in the 1960s and revisit him often. There are those who dismiss Brown as a 1960s enfant terrible (Life was in fact written in the 1950s) but listen to them not!

Brown presents a psychoanalytic theory of culture and history. The essence of this theory is contained within the following passage: "Culture exists in order to project the infantile fantasies into external reality, where they may be seen and mastered." Brown suggests that we are the source of society, culture and history. His perspective differs from theories of the reigning scholars, who propose that culture "descends" upon people from above (mind is shaped by discourse or the symbolic order).

Brown proposes a more difficult (and profound) way of understanding society, suggesting that cultural forms are created and perpetuated to the extent that they fulfill specific human needs and desires. A psychoanalytic theory of culture would require articulating why human beings bring into being certain ideologies and institutions--and why they are perpetuated.

My own research and writing builds upon Brown's theories in books such as "Hitler's Ideology: A Study in Psychoanalytic Sociology," "The Psychoanalysis of Racism, Revolution and Nationalism," and "Symbiosis and Separation: Towards a Psychology of Culture," and most recently:

Richard A. Koenigsberg, Ph. D.Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust and War

Norman O. Brown offers the best ever interpretation of Freud, and expands psychoanalysis, much like Marceuse, to encompass a broad and precise understanding of society. With a rich background in Classics, Brown incorprates the visions of Nietsche, Blake, Boehme, and Marx to formulate a mystical psycohanalysis. Through sheer logic he champions the intellectual superiority of the symbolic approach. Readers of Jonathan Swift will enjoy Brown's insight. Anyone concerned with the Great Questions and craving a booster shot of 20th century genius must read this master work.

Norman O. Brown was, for a few years during the sixties, a man with a cult following. His book Life Against Death, which can hardly be described in simple terms, had influence on both political processes and the sexual freedom movement. He popularized the term "polymorphosly perverse" to describe natural childhood sexuality before it has been channeled into the predictable forms of genitle sex. He argued that money had its origins in a child's natural interest in its feces. He managed, in this book, to turn everything we take for granted about normal life on its head.

No question this is a very liberating book in a lot of ways. It is very well written and his arguments present a kind of proof by authority - he states his case so well you just darn better believe him. I can't recall another book like this, that works so many themes simultaneoulsy. I can't read it without wanting to stop and quote sections to whoever is around to hear. I can't say that I really believe any of his argument, but like Alan Watts, he manages to make his case seem so plausible and desirable that I really wish I did.

This is a highly provocative work of psychoanalysis scholarship, especially for those of us with only a passing knowledge of Freud's work. Brown interprets and modernizes such seminal Freudian hypotheses as the castration complex and penis envy, love and religion as neuroses, the connection between feces and money, and the body's impediments to happiness. It is in this final arena that the book goes a bit over the top (though rooting Protestantism in Luther's bowels leaves "the top" in the dust as well), with Brown abandoning a more careful analysis of Freud in favor of a highly esoteric plea for the return of the body to its primal, unoppressed state. This is perhaps the most innovative section of the book, but it also undoes some of the work Brown did in earlier chapters to place the problem in the unconscious, accessible only via psychoanalysis (the occasional blatant evangelism is another drawback of the book for me).

A fascinating read that, though flawed, will level a swift kick to most readers' views of personhood.

Norman O. Brown, even though he is out of fashion nowadays, is my favorite Freudian interpreter. He has "inhaled" Freud to the point that he "over-understands" him and thus does not fear making large steps away from neo- or post-Freudian orthodoxy. "Life Against Death," Brown's first book, arguably is also his best: his magnum opus. It sets forth a daring set of refinements to traditional Freudianism that enlarges and subsumes (if not sub-plants) its. These are refinements that are so palpable I believe that even the master himself would have happily embraced them. For here Freudianism is used not just as a tool for psychoanalysis but for the more important task of studying and appraising the very destiny of man.

Brown begins this journey with the clear intention of enlarging Freud beyond the conventionally accepted bounds (i.e. with the apparent intention of moving from the psychology of sexuality, to the psychology of cultures, etc.). This book demonstrates how he did this; and how, more than any other of Freud's students and colleagues, Brown has become the model of how a student should "let go" of the teacher's hand so that he can "fly solo." And in the process, Brown soars right pass his leader to newer, richer and more fertile theoretical ground. Brown's powers of analysis proved much too keen, and he was much too restless, to be contained in a box of conventional Freudian orthodoxy, carefully arranged to serve society's need by those claiming to hold the sacred trust of Freud's inner circle. In short, this book is such a carefully staged and carefully guided reformulation of Freud's theories that it amounts to an "internal Freudian revolution."

One of my attractions to Brown is that I believe he is "dead on" when he argues that one of Freud's greatest work is his book "Totem and Taboo." It is here that Freud -- perhaps a bit too cautiously -- extends his framework from the individual to culture and society, or from individual psychology to cultural psychology. It is only in the manner in which this is done is one able to see a distance between Freud's original formulations and Brown's refinements of them set forth here in this book.

Reduced to its barebones, Freud's framework is simply a general theory of repression. The essence of society is repression of the desires of the individual; and the essence of the individual is repression of his own desires. Both are deeply in the business of repression. As we now know so well, Freud arrived at this understanding indirectly: by carefully observing madness, dreams, verbal slips, and the general psychology of everyday life. And from these he deduced that men were being driven by unconscious desires that they knew nothing of. Not knowing his "real" desires, man thus became hostile to life itself. And an existential choice was forced upon him: He either had to come to grips with his unconscious instincts, or die.

As Freud came nearer the end of his career, it seemed altogether clear which choice man was making: he was already on a steep descent (with the invention of WMDs, etc.) designed to destroy himself through what Freud termed a "death instinct." The question this book raises and tries to answer is this: What does man do to rescue himself from his existential dilemma?

Rather surprising, Freud's (and now his post-Freudian acolytes) answer was a disconcerting one to Brown: It was not to turn in the direction of more, but towards less, self-enlightenment? Freud's prescription for man's dilemma in society was to sublimate (or re-channel) individual repression into ostensibly more "creative and productive" (yet still subterranean) culturally and societally acceptable and beneficial ways.

On the issue of sublimation, Brown here disagrees both with Freud in particular and the new post-Freudian orthodoxy more generally, of which he comes just short of suggesting is in a subtle conspiracy with society to produce a more "socially pliable and adjustable" psychological man: To wit, one that is a very conservative and anal retentive normative one, an upholder of patriarchy, an advocate of the necessity of repression, and one who seeks therapies designed to hold the id at bay; in short one who shares normative and normalizing approaches to psychoanalysis.

Thus sublimation as outlined by Freud, (and as Brown sees it and argues here), is bogus: It is just repression by another name and by less novel means. According to Brown, what lies at its root is the turning of unconscious sexual and aggressive impulses into other equally subterranean psychological forms often only relabeled as "higher" and more socially useful;" but which in fact become equally self-destructive substitutes for repression-- (but which has now been raised to the cultural level).

What sublimation requires (if I understand Brown correctly) is further stunting the potentialities of the body, and thus encouraging a further artificial "distancing" from what is real about our hidden desires (their connections to our bodies). This he argues, sets up a Cartesian hierarchy based on a false dichotomy and separation between mind and body. For Brown, the way out of the Freudian trap is exactly the opposite of sublimation: It requires a return to, rather than a running away from, the body. It also requires a few other things such as rejection of the further fashioning of "psychological man," i.e. the further pursuit of goal-oriented culture in favor of living in the moment. But most importantly, it requires an acceptance of death as an integral part of life, instead of our continuing dread of death, which as one reviewer has put it, ironically turns life itself into a kind of "living death."

In short, the same openness needed at the level of the individual is also what is needed at the level of culture: more collective self-awareness and more societal self-enlightenment. And then a synthesis of psychology, anthropology, and history. This in a crude and incomplete (and perhaps even erroneous way) is how Brown plans to go about it. 10 Stars!

norman o brown is no longer in vogue, as he once was, back in the 60's, but intellectuals who criticize this book today, claiming their own mature wisdom and resignation, are the ones who have never read it, or read it carefully, in the first place. this is one of the most intelligent books ever written by an american professor. as a piece of work in the field of freud interpretation, it has a penetrating force unsurpassed by any other since the day of its publication. it's not likely that the official academic world will approve of it, but that doesn't matter. what the intelligent reader has to do, and all that he has to do, is to open the book and read it. yes, read this book, for it might be decades before another one of its caliber will come into this world.

This book had an incredible influence on me. It's Freudian interpretation impacted my views of both society and history. The influence one man can have over a million. The ability to awaken and influence a crowd of individuals into a single mob. This book helped me understand both my own and the mass psyche. It's thesis that mankind must be viewed as largely unaware of its own desires, hostile to life, and unconsciously bent on self-destruction at the time I read it had great appeal for me. Brown wrote repression had not only caused individual neurosis but social pathology as well. From this I conclude that crowds could have sexual neurosis much like those of individuals, and that these derangements could be quickly and effectively diagnosed and then 'treated'. This book is a must for anyone interested in figuring out the human psyche.