Richard A. Koenigsberg

Brown, Norman O., Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985. 387 pp. $28.95 U.S. (pb.) ISBN 0819561444. (Originally published in 1959).

"One of the most interesting and valuable works of our time. Brown's contribution cannot be overestimated. His book is far-ranging, thoroughgoing, extreme, and shocking. It gives the best interpretation of Freud I know"—Lionel Trilling

Norman O. Brown was Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He set forth a vision expanding the scope and meaning of psychoanalysis beyond the clinical setting.

For information on how to order, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

Politics, Brown asserts, is that dimension of culture functioning to allow neurotic and psychotic fantasies to be perceived and enacted through projection into the external world.

But we don’t call our political world neurotic or psychotic, however “insane” it may appear to be. We don’t have an adequate language to characterize psychopathology that occurs in society. What's more, we fail to recognize that this pathological political world in which we exist is a world which we have created. 

Brown sets forth a vision for the psychoanalytic interpretation of culture and history. Why has his project had difficulty making its way into the world? Perhaps most significantly, psychoanalysis until recently has been identified with the clinical situation, considered a mode of therapy.

Brown, on the other hand, aspires to “reshape psychoanalysis into a wider theory of human nature, culture and history” to be “appropriated by the consciousness of mankind as a new stage in the historical process of man’s coming to know himself.”

A fundamental concept of psychoanalysis is transference. However, as Nunberg suggests, why do we assume that the transference mechanism occurs only within the psychoanalytic situation? It is reasonable to assume that transference occurs at all times and in all places.

Human beings project fantasies into the external world and enact them on the stage of culture. Society, Brown says, is “one vast arena in which the logic of the transference works itself out.” The fantasies that create the human neurosis cannot themselves be directly apprehended or mastered, but their “derivatives in human culture can.”

Nonetheless, we don’t call the political world neurotic or psychotic, however “insane” it appears to be. We don’t have a language to characterize psychopathology that occurs in society. Indeed, we often fail to recognize the world that we have created as our own.

Ideologies or institutions such as warfare seem to be “out there on their own,” independent of human agency. We imagine that "culture" as if descending upon us from another world. Brown states that projections bring the inner world into external reality, but only “under the sign of negation or alienation.”

Who created the symbolic order? Who creates discourse? What is the source of the apparently overwhelming power of society?”

Freud observed that the mythological conception of the universe, which survives in the most modern religions, is fundamentally psychology projected into the external world. Brown suggests that not just mythology, but the entirety of culture is a projection. In the words of Stephen Spender, “The world which we create—the world of slums and telegrams and newspapers—is a kind of language of our inner wishes and thoughts.”

What a radical idea, yet obvious upon reflection. We human beings are the source of that which exists in the world. We create ideologies and cultural forms because they fulfill our own fantasies and desires. It is not enough to say that reality is a social construction. Constructed based on what? By whom? For what purpose?

We have no difficulty acknowledging that human beings are the source of cultural forms such as airplanes or air-conditioners or baseball games or Hershey bars. Obviously, these forms of culture exist because they represent the fulfillment of our desires. We have more difficulty acknowledging that we human beings are the source of war, genocide and the desire to create and use atomic bombs. With regards to these societal institutions, we pretend that it's all coming from "out there." Not us.

Brown says that when we project unconscious fantasies into the world to create society, we perceive what manifests “only under the general sign of negation or denial.” We project fantasies into the external world, then deny that we are the source of what we have projected or created. This splitting off of culture from the self represents a fundamental dynamic. We imagine that the world of exists as if a domain of reality separate from us--from the creators of this world.

One may suggest that the following dynamic governs the creation of many cultural forms. First, a fantasy is projected into an ideological structure. The shared fantasy establishes the shape of the ideology or institution and is the source of the energy that sustains it.

Second, human beings deny that they are responsible for the institutions and forms of behavior that have come into being as a result of these fantasies that have been projected into reality. We pretend that the ideology or institution exists as a dimension of society—but that we have had nothing to do with creating or sustaining it.

Brown suggests that once we recognize the limitations of talk from the couch (or recognize that talk from the couch is still an activity in culture), then it becomes plain that there is “nothing for psychoanalysis to psychoanalyze” except the projected fantasies that constitute culture. Thus, Brown says, psychoanalysis “fulfills itself only when it becomes historical and cultural analysis.”

But who will psychoanalyze the shared fantasies—those projections that are the source of the nightmare of history? Apparently not the psychoanalysts--huddled away in their “clinics.” There has been nothing more destructive to Freud’s aspirations than confining of psychoanalysis to the “clinical situation.”

Freud’s vision has yet to be actualized. Neurosis and psychosis are embedded within civilization. Perhaps the domain of politics especially is where human beings manifest and enact their deepest fantasies and anxieties.

It’s difficult to know and say this. We are unable or unwilling to acknowledge that civilization itself contains or constitutes a radical form of pathology. We are oppressed and repressed by this symbolic object—” society” or “the nation”—in which we have invested so much psychic energy. We tremble before it, lest it destroy us, yet refuse to abandon it: like an abused child that refuses to separate from its mother.