Life against Death

436 Pages·2016·1.37 MB·English

Life against Death : The Psychoanalytical Meaning
title:
of History
author: Brown, Norman Oliver.
publisher: Wesleyan University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0819561444
print isbn13: 9780819561442
ebook isbn13: 9780585370163
language: English
Civilization--Philosophy, Civilization--Psychological
subject aspects, Psychohistory, Psychoanalysis, Death
instinct.
publication date: 1985
lcc: CB19.B69 1985eb
ddc: 150.19/52
Civilization--Philosophy, Civilization--Psychological
subject: aspects, Psychohistory, Psychoanalysis, Death
instinct.
Page i
Life Against Death
Page ii
ALSO BY NORMAN O. BROWN
Closing Time
Love' s Body
Hesiod's Theogony
Hermes the Thief
Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis
Page iii
Life Against Death
The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History
Second Edition
By
Norman O. Brown
With an Introduction by Christopher Lasch
Page iv
Wesleyan University Press
Published by University Press of New England,
Hanover, NH 03755
Copyright © 1959 by Wesleyan University
Introduction to the Second Edition copyright © 1985
by Christopher Lasch
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America 5
Brown, Norman Oliver, 1913-
Life against death.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. CivilizationPhilosophy. 2. Civilization
Psychological aspects. 3. Psychohistory. 4. Psycho-
analysis. 5. Death instinct. 1. Title.
19.B69 1985 150.19'52 85-17928
CB
0-8195-5148-1 (alk. paper)
ISBN
0-8195-6144-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN
Page v
CONTENTS
Introduction to the Second Edition,
vii
by Christopher Lasch
Acknowledgments xv
Preface xvii
Part One: The Problem
I
3
The Disease Called Man
II
11
Neurosis and History
Part Two: Eros
III
23
Sexuality and Childhood
IV
40
The Self and the Other: Narcissus
V
55
Art and Eros
VI
68
Language and Eros
Part Three: Death
VII
77
Instinctual Dualism and Instinctual Dialectics
VIII
87
Death, Time, and Eternity
IX
110
Death and Childhood

Page vi
Part Four: Sublimation
X
137
The Ambiguities of Sublimation
XI
145
Couch and Culture
XII
157
Apollo and Dionysus
Part Five: Studies in Anality
XIII
179
The Excremental Vision
XIV
202
The Protestant Era
XV
234
Filthy Lucre
Rationality and Irrationality
Sacred and Secular
Utility and Uselessness
Owe and Ought
Time is Money
Giving and Taking
The City Sublime
Immortality
The Human Body
Excrement
Part Six: The Way Out
XVI
307
The Resurrection of the Body
Reference Notes 323
Bibliography 351
Index 361
Page vii
INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION
Christopher Lasch
If you want to read Norman O. Brown at his best, read his chapter on Swift, "The
Excremental Vision." Forget what you know or have heard about Brown the prophet;
here is Brown the scholar and critic: tough, learned, witty, and invenfive. Note his
contempt for the academic Bowdlerism that wants to bury Swift's scatological works
and to "housebreak this tiger of English literature." But note also his attack on
psychoanalysisthat is, on the kind of psychoanalytically informed (or ill-informed)
criticism that serves only to domesticate and denature Freud's insights.
Brown's attack on the psychoanalytic Bowdlerizers of Swifton Aldous Huxley and
John Middleton Murry in particulartakes us into the heart of his entire argument. Let
us see how he proceeds. He praises Huxley and Murry for calling attention to Swift's
"hatred of the bowels," as Huxley called it. But he deplores their inability to see that
Swift was on the track of something important, not just rattling on about some
unfortunate obsession of his own. Murry and Huxley see scatalogical themes in Swift
only as a symptom of impending mental breakdown. Instead of following the track of
Swift's imagery, they adopt an attitude of moral superiority. Thus Murry calls on
psychoanalysis, not in order to underscore the importance of Swift's interest in anality,
but in order to disparage it and to subject Swift himself to clinical investigation.
Murry's biography of Swift, Brown writes:
is a case study in perverted argumentation. The texts of the 'noxious compositions' and the
fourth part of Gulliver are crudely dis-