Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History by Norman O. Brown

Author:Norman O. Brown [Brown, Norman O.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Published: 2012-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

Part Five

STUDIES IN ANALITY

But Love has pitched his mansion in

The place of excrement.

—YEATS *

We have tried to reshape psychoanalysis into a general theory of human nature, culture, and history. In this effort the concept of sublimation is crucial, and the last chapter attempted a technical revision both of the theory of sublimation and of the (interconnected) theory of the ego. It is time to confront these abstractions with the facts, to see what use they are for the interpretation of the actualities of human culture. And since the cutting edge of psychoanalysis is always paradox, we have chosen to investigate the most paradoxical of psychoanalytical specifications of sublimation, anality. “Perhaps the most astonishing of Freud’s findings,” says Ernest Jones, “and certainly the one that has evoked the liveliest incredulity, repugnance, and opposition, was his discovery that certain traits of character may become profoundly modified as the result of sexual excitations experienced by the infant in the region of the anal canal. I imagine that every one on first hearing this statement finds it almost inconceivably grotesque, a fact which well illustrates the remoteness of the unconscious from the conscious mind, for of the truth of the statement itself no one who has undertaken any serious psychoanalytical study can have any doubt.” 1

*From William Butler Yeats, “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop,” in Collected Poems (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952), p. 254. Copyright, 1956, by The Macmillan Company. Reprinted by permission.

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