Life Against Death

rdf:langString Life Against Death

rdf:langString Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

rdf:langString Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History

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rdf:langString Cover of the first edition

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rdf:langString Harry Zelenko

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rdf:langString 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."

rdf:langString "Brown begins his Life Against Death with the riddle that haunts all romantics: Why does man who is born into a garden of innocent delight create a culture in which he is alienated from himself, his fellows, and nature? Why civilization and its discontents instead of paradise? In the tradition of Nietzsche and Freud, Brown considers man a diseased animal. Culture emerges when erotic energy is sublimated and turned to the production of objects, character structures and political organizations that yield little pleasure. Man alone of all the animals represses his true desires, lives in continual conflict and guilt, and constructs for himself a corporate neurosis that he calls civilization."

rdf:langString "I did feel when writing Love's Body some kind of obligation to undo what I had done in Life Against Death. I wanted to release any followers I had acquired or at least to confuse them. Insofar as Life Against Death happened to end up by making me a leader, I did want to get lost...Thus I felt under some existential stress to write Love's Body in order to torpedo Life Against Death, to destroy it as a position."

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rdf:langString Norman O. Brown, 1974.

rdf:langString Norman Podhoretz, 1999.

rdf:langString Sam Keen, 1974.

rdf:langString Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959; second edition 1985) is a book by the American classicist Norman O. Brown, in which the author offers a radical analysis and critique of the work of Sigmund Freud, tries to provide a theoretical rationale for a nonrepressive civilization, explores parallels between psychoanalysis and Martin Luther's theology, and draws on revolutionary themes in western religious thought, especially the body mysticism of Jakob Böhme and William Blake. It was the result of an interest in psychoanalysis that began when the philosopher Herbert Marcuse suggested to Brown that he should read Freud. The book became famous when Norman Podhoretz recommended it to the critic Lionel Trilling, and over fifty-thousand copies had been sold by 1966. It has been compared to works such as Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1955) and the philosopher Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1961), and Brown's objectives have been seen as being the same as Foucault's. Though Life Against Death has been called one of the great nonfiction works of the 20th century, some critics have found it of lesser weight than Eros and Civilization, and Brown has been criticized for misinterpreting Freud's theories. It has been suggested that, despite his objectives, Brown's arguments imply that sexual repression is biologically inevitable. Brown later called parts of Life Against Death "quite immature" and wrote of his Love's Body (1966) that it was written to confuse any followers he acquired due to the book and destroy its positions.