Customer Reviews

The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud (Background: Essential Texts for the Conservative Mind)

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In this brilliant work Philip Rieff expands on his first book on Freud, The Mind Of The Moralist. He looks at the moral aspects of the writings of Freud, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich and DH Lawrence, in which he sees the birth of Psychological Man and the victory of relativism. He observes that psychoanalysis was instrumental in breaking down standards of morality and undermining religion. But in the 19th century, rationalism had already weakened Christianity in its heartland. The negative trends that replaced it contain no positive symbolism and above all, require no commitment.

Rieff does not deny the obvious literary genius of these authors and thinkers but rejects their respective faiths of the inner God, hedonism and impulse. Defining faith as "the compulsive dynamic of culture," Rieff does not think that any of the aforementioned substitutes has what it takes to serve as integrating factor for Western culture. They lack the binding force of commitment, enhance hedonist tendencies and undermine virtue. The feeling of the individual is exalted over the virtuous as a measure of value. This matter is brilliantly examined by Theodore Dalrymple in Our Culture, What's Left of It.

He argues that the negation of concepts like good and evil has become the foundation upon which personality is formed. The dangers are obvious. The therapeutic society provides an easy, feel-good substitute to religion that severs the roots, leading to selective morality and shamelessness. I'm not so sure about his criticism of Jung's version of the immanence of God - an ancient concept present in most major religions - but it cannot be denied that the idea encourages New Age drivel, fake spirituality and gross superstition.

The Triumph Of The Therapeutic is a brilliant study of faith, psychology and culture and the ties between them, whether one always agrees with the author or not. The writing style is elegant with many a bon mot and memorable turn of phrase. Rieff's observations and predictions are today confirmed by the situation in Europe where the civilizational crisis is most evident. Birthrates have fallen, unassimilated immigrant communities have created two societies in many cities whilst the intelligentsia cling to a false ideology of pacifism that masks resentment at powerlessness and in some instances becomes complicit with evil.

This European malaise is very thoroughly examined, from various angles, by Bruce Bawer in While Europe Slept, Claire Berlinski in Menace in Europe, Walter Laqueur in The Last Days of Europe and Chantal Delsol in Icarus Fallen.

I'll be honest with you...Philip Reiff is not an easy read. But he's well worth it. This book takes on Freud and some of his (ironically) patricidal disciples, showing how Freud was instrumental in the dismantling of faith as the organizing principle of culture. In its place, we have "psychological man," whose only organizing principle is self-fulfillment. It's not hard to see where that leads: a culture adrift, pleasure-seeking individuals heedless of the needs of community, and so on. Reiff is such an incisive critic of our present situation that the only theory I have for his not being more widely read and cited is that he's just too darn hard to read. But don't let that stop you.

Philip Rieff made his early career as perhaps the most penetrating interpreter of Freud in the Twentieth Century. Although Freud's theories may be deemed to have been superseded by subsequent developments in psychoanalysis, his impact on Western culture has been profound and lasting. In what is perhaps the key work in his entire opus, Rieff argues that Freudian psychiatry marked the beginning of Western civilization's decisive turn away from the authoritative truths of faith to the relative 'truths' of therapy, and the birth of 'Psychological Man'. In later work, Rieff would come to place the onus for this seismic shift squarely on Freud himself, but 'The Triumph of the Therapeutic' remains ambiguous on this question, concentrating on the apostasies of Freud's students and intellectual heirs as agents of the Western crisis of authority. He traces the thought of three key heretical psychoanalytic thinkers of the Twentieth Century, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and D. H. Lawrence, but here I'll single out Reich for the influence he came to exert through the revolutions of the 1960s, which carried the crisis well beyond its initial ambit. Reich's distinct contribution was the fusion of Freudian psychoanalysis and Marxism on the basis of an analogy he drew between the repression of forbidden desires by the superego and the oppression of the proletariat by their bourgeois exploiters. Reich's voice thus combined with those of other leading theorists, such as Herbert Marcuse and R. D. Laing, whose thought served as a rallying point for the New Left, to shape the character of the West's ongoing revolt against authority.

In this brilliant work Philip Rieff expands on his first book on Freud, The Mind Of The Moralist. He looks at the moral aspects of the writings of Freud, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich and DH Lawrence, in which he sees the birth of Psychological Man and the victory of relativism. He observes that psychoanalysis was instrumental in breaking down standards of morality and undermining religion. But in the 19th century, rationalism had already weakened Christianity in its heartland. The negative trends that replaced it contain no positive symbolism and above all, require no commitment.

Rieff does not deny the obvious literary genius of these authors and thinkers but rejects their respective faiths of the inner God, hedonism and impulse. Defining faith as "the compulsive dynamic of culture," Rieff does not think that any of the aforementioned substitutes has what it takes to serve as integrating factor for Western culture. They lack the binding force of commitment, enhance hedonist tendencies and undermine virtue. The feeling of the individual is exalted over the virtuous as a measure of value. This matter is brilliantly examined by Theodore Dalrymple in Our Culture, What's Left of It.

He argues that the negation of concepts like good and evil has become the foundation upon which personality is formed. The dangers are obvious. The therapeutic society provides an easy, feel-good substitute to religion that severs the roots, leading to selective morality and shamelessness. I'm not so sure about his criticism of Jung's version of the immanence of God - an ancient concept present in most major religions - but it cannot be denied that the idea is widely exploited by practitioners of New Age drivel, fake spirituality and gross superstition.

The Triumph Of The Therapeutic is a brilliant study of faith, psychology and culture and the ties between them, whether one always agrees with the author or not. The writing style is elegant with many a bon mot and memorable turn of phrase. Rieff's observations and predictions are today confirmed by the situation in Europe where the civilizational crisis is most evident. Birthrates have fallen, unassimilated immigrant communities have created two societies in many cities whilst the intelligentsia cling to a false ideology of pacifism that masks resentment at powerlessness and in some instances becomes complicit with evil.

This European malaise is very thoroughly examined, from various angles, by Bruce Bawer in While Europe Slept, Claire Berlinski in Menace in Europe, Walter Laqueur in The Last Days of Europe and Chantal Delsol in Icarus Fallen.

This is possibly the most profound book I've ever read. The origins of our ideals, the death of old beliefs - everything in our culture is explained and in most cases gracefully eviscerated. The sad part is that while Rieff could tear down Freud, Jung, Reich, et al, he couldn't provide (or at least didn't bother to provide) a replacement for the civilization they've wrought.
Rieff's style takes a few pages to get used to, but once you assimilate his vocabulary and idiom, you find yourself tripping intellectual land mines on nearly every other sentence. Wish I could say the same for his other books, but this one does well enough by itself. Definitely worth multiple readings.

Near then end of THE TRIUMPH OF THE THERAPEUTIC / USES OF FAITH AFTER FREUD (1966) by Philip Rieff, chapter 8 examines "various uses of faith in a culture populated increasingly by psychological men. Each [Freud, Reich, and Jung] attacked the connection between morality and a culture about which they expressed strong disapprovals." (p. 232). "The process by which a culture changes at its profoundest level may be traced in the shifting balance of controls and releases which constitute a system of moral demands." (p. 233).

Ambivalence
Those who think they can win any argument by defining the terms of the discussion as they wish must imagine "Competing symbolisms gather support in competing elites; they jostle each other for priority of place as the organizers of the next phase in the psychohistorical process." (p. 234). "In all cultures before our own, the competing symbols took the language of faith. A language of faith is always revelatory, communicating through some mouthpiece of the god-term a system of interdicts--a pattern of `thou shalt nots,' or taboos. The language of science is not revelatory but analytic; for this reason, the scientist can never claim that his own terms have a prophetic function. His work is non-moral, that is, without interdictory purpose." (p. 234).
"A language of hypothesis is culturally neutral. Commitment to hypothesis is made to be abandonable. The scientific psychologist, as clinician, aspires to be neither interdictory or counter-interdictory. Because the clinical attitude aspires to moral neutrality, its therapeutic effect is culturally dubious. ... No culture has yet produced a third type of symbolic--one that would embrace that historical contradiction in terms: a `scientific culture.' If, and only if, a neutralist symbolic becomes operative, may we speak of a scientific culture." (p. 235)
... "Some fresh imbalance is required before the succeeding system of culture can be born, bringing into being a new symbolic of expectations, and, moreover, institutions appropriately organized to enact those expectations, translating the high symbolic into rules of social conduct." (p. 236).
... "Thus even the most stable moral demand systems are inherently liable to change. The primary process of cultural change refers to shifting jurisdictions over categories of social action by controlling and remissive symbolisms of communal and individual purposes." (p. 237).
... "With respect to culture, it is still unclear whether the social sciences will produce control devices, as Comte hoped, or in what sense they may help create and install fresh convictions of communal purpose." (p. 237).
... "Because Freud's doctrine was anti-communal, it could be used as a theoretical basis for elaborating a strategy of self-realization for the therapeutic. Americans, in particular, have managed to use the Freudian doctrine in ways more remissive than he intended, as a counter-authority against any fresh access of communal purpose." (p.238).
... "No one knows the internal voice, or external look, of the new devices of control and release that will succeed our failing ones. That even Freud expected them indicates the hold of the inherited configuration of culture over even the most radically inquiring minds." (p. 238).
... "With their secondary needs automatically satisfied, men may no longer need to have something in common, as an end, to love. The organization of indifference may well succeed the organization of love, producing a culture at lower cost to individual energies. Indeed, by this reorganization the interior life would cease to press its sickening claim to superiority." (p. 239).
"The strange new lesson we have begun to learn in our time is how not to pay the high personal costs of social organization. ... The present swing in the direction of release may not be orbital but more extended and historically more permanent, based on the automaticity and ease with which an infinity of created needs can now be satisfied." (p. 239).
... "But the modern cultural revolution has built into itself a unique prophylaxis: it is deliberately not in the name of any new order of communal purpose that it is taking place. On the contrary, this revolution is being fought for a permanent disestablishment of any deeply internalized moral demands, in a world which can guarantee a plenitude produced without reference to the rigid maintenance of any particular interdictory (and counter-interdictory) system. This autonomy has been achieved by Western man from common and compelling mobilizations of motive. Stabilizing the present polytheism of values, there is the historic deconversion experience of the therapeutic, proposing an infinity of means transformed into their own ends." (pp. 239-240).
"Cultural revolution is usually distinguishable from political revolution, which may assault the social order and leave the moral demand system fundamentally unaltered. Our cultural revolution has been made from the top, rather than from the bottom. It is anti-political, a revolution of the rich by which they have lowered the pressure of inherited communal purpose upon themselves." (p. 240).
"Our revolution is more Freudian than Marxist, more analytic than polemic, more cultural than social. There is no reason why, as the reluctant leader of moral revolutionaries, Freud should have threatened the social order. ... Culture, not the social order, takes the point of Freud's analytic attack, as it does of Jung's reconstructions in terms of religious psychology. Attacking the culture, such insights as the subjects of this volume propose could be adapted as safeguards against all inherited therapies of commitment. For the culturally conservative enemy of the ascetic, enemy of his own needs, there has been substituted the image of the needy person, permanently engaged in the task of achieving a gorgeous variety of satisfactions." (p. 241).

... "One main lesson is being more and more widely learned: that all compelling symbols are dangerous, threatening the combined comfort of things as they are. ... All binding engagements to communal purpose may be considered, in the wisdom of therapeutic doctrines, too extreme. Precisely this and no other extreme position is stigmatized as a neurotic approach to paroxysms of demand for a more fundamental revolutionary dogma. It is in this sense that the contemporary moral revolution is anti-political; more precisely, it serves the purpose of the present anti-politics, representing a calm and profoundly reasonable revolt of the private man against all doctrinal traditions urging the salvation of self through identification with the purposes of community." (pp. 242-243).
... "Crowded more and more together, we are learning to live more distantly from one another, in strategically varied and numerous contacts, rather than in the oppressive warmth of family and a few friends." (p. 243).

Hard-to-find book and our son-in-law has really enjoyed it. Great service. Book arrives just in time for Christmas.