Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

Norman O. Brown – 1959

Excerpt:  “The aim of psychoanalysis – still unfulfilled, and still only half-conscious – is to return our souls to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves...  Hence, since sublimation is the essential activity of soul divorced from body, psychoanalysis must return our sublimations to our bodies; and conversely, sublimation cannot be understood unless we understand the nature of the soul in psychoanalytic terminology, the nature of the ego.”

Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death had a massive (but short-lived) influence on academe in the 60s by encouraging a restoration of Freud to augment or even supplant Marx as the premiere philosopher for the ethical man.  Though certainly left-leaning, especially in his writing about the evils of wealth, Brown was driven to write Life Against Death by his disillusionment with Marxism since the 40s.  There are darker issues at work in the human psyche for which Marxism simply cannot account.  A Marxist would be shocked and distressed that the idealism of the 60s climaxed with murder (Altamont, Manson) in 1969, while conversely a Freudian would find it inevitable.  In this book, as in his other writings and speeches, Brown is keen to encourage visceral life experience – something he sacrificed in his own life in order to focus his intellect – and warned universities against dispensing generations of bookworms into society.  He envisioned an evolved man capable of advancing past the hopelessness of Freud’s conclusions to a state of genuine happiness; what he interprets as “polymorphous perversity;” an ability to retain a form of play beyond childhood that would produce not oblivion but poetry.  Camille Paglia regards Brown as part of a triumvirate of American thinkers – with Marshall McLuhan and Leslie Fielder – who should be regarded as far more honest and relevant than the French poststructuralists.  The ideas in Life Against Death would develop into the basis for Brown’s next book, the more abstract Love’s Body, with its poetic evocation of his Erotic/Dionysian proposals.