Psychoanalytic Radicals

The Freudian Left.
by Paul Robinson.
Harper & Row. 252 pp. $5.95.

Psychoanalysis, after years of bitter struggle, is by now securely established as part of the received mode of Western thought, and it does not appear likely that anything will unseat it in the foreseeable future. Indeed, the impact of psychoanalysis will probably be diminished only by the extent to which the movement becomes vulgarized as it is more widely diffused—a process that has of course been taking place for some time now. In any event, this much is certain: psychoanalysis has been most fortunate in its chroniclers. To begin with, there is Ernest Jones’s towering effort, the exhaustive, if somewhat hagiographic, trilogy on the founder of the movement; moreover, some of the original adepts have lived to tell their own stories. In David Rapaport, psychoanalysis found both a vaulting theorist and a skillful reporter; and, with the Freud centenary in 1956 came a series of interpretive essays, preeminently those by Erik Erikson and Lionel Trilling. Nor has the Viennese science been slighted by the more theoretically inclined intellectual and cultural historians. Here the studies of H. Stuart Hughes and Philip Rieff come immediately to mind.

The fact that psychoanalysis had evolved into something of an orthodoxy is no doubt what provoked these particular writings. But it would be unfair to fault scholars for fixing their interest on the mainstream and ignoring the side-currents. That is the way history is always written, including the history of ideas. But now and then the Zeitgeist, in all its imperious caprice, would seem to demand the redress of intellectual neglect. Thus amends, literary ones at any rate, have been made to such of history’s victims, left behind by a triumphant progress, as George Rude’s “crowds,” E. J. Hobsbawm’s “bandits,” E. P. Thompson’s “defeated workers,” Stephan Thernstrom’s “downwardly mobile Americans,” even Robert Conquest’s “purged Bolsheviks.” Rising also from the disdainful footnotes of the authorized texts loom the cranky visionaries of intellectual history, now revealed as monumental presences. (Frank Manuel’s redeeming portrait of Fourier is unrivalled in this regard.)

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Paul Robinson’s The Freudian Left seeks to effect just such an act of redemption for the dissidents who departed from Freudian orthodoxy. In the case of the three psychoanalytic “radicals” who form the subject of this book—Wilhelm Reich, Geza Roheim, Herbert Marcuse—it is hardly a matter of the resurrection of the forgotten but rather of rescue from a web of misconceptions. Roheim, to be sure, has not been a popular or standing reference point, but even he, through the mediation of Norman O. Brown, has found his latter-day admirers; and Reich and Marcuse have most decisively not suffered from want of notice. Indeed, any suffering they have endured has come from an excess of misguided attention on the part of both detractors and worshipers. Among the conventional Freudians, Reich and Marcuse call up a telling mixture of boredom and alarm; having been made objects of secular adoration by the cultists, they undergo at the hands of certain of their enthusiasts a worse fate: egregious distortion. The frequent result is that critics respond not to the subjects as they really are, but to their shadow images as refracted through the mass media and the effusions of half-baked disciples. Marcuse particularly has been on the receiving end of such treatment; just about everyone seems to feel competent to issue pronouncements against him, from the most illiterate editorialist to the Pope.¹

At the very least, then, The Freudian Left serves the purpose of timely instruction, as well as a corrective to the prevailing distortions. In an age described as one of “moral interregnum”—Nietzsche’s apt phrase—Robinson has provided an excellent abstraction of the work of three men who speak most directly to and of the mood of transition. In so doing, he has also restored the integrity and austerity of their viewpoints by clearing away the romantic underbrush that has accreted to their thought. This is no insignificant task. Where politics and economics are joined with sex in one radical theory—as in the thought of Reich, Roheim, and Marcuse—the abuses associated with too eager acceptance are only too likely to proliferate.

In the current climate of opinion, which is for many young people especially a climate of facile radicalism, it must be terribly reassuring to believe that Marx plus Freud (according, of course, to some chosen congenial reading) equals, as if by formula, the truth. By the same token, however, it is easy to dismiss out of hand the anxieties and sensibilities which push people to such spurious unities. Robinson, to his credit, avoids this trap; nor does he fall prey to the no less fashionable lure of academic cynicism. Throughout his scrupulous exegesis one is constantly aware of a concern with the most germane contemporary questions. Though far more subtle and sophisticated, the mental set of this volume, in fact, is not unlike those useful chapbooks of the 30’s, “What is living or dead in the thought of. . . .” Moreover, this approach is fully in accord with the moral intentions of the three men under consideration.

Each of them was, or is, in his own way, a chiliast, and the temperament of each was nourished by an elemental hostility to sexual and other forms of oppression. Being European rather than American, and therefore schooled in holistic traditions, each was led to see human suffering and deprivation not as separate experiences, but as aspects and expressions of all-subsuming rules. If psychological categories more than others define the quality of life, they do not do so without regard to the structures of institutions. And neither in Marcuse nor in Reich, nor even quite in the less explicitly political Roheim, are these institutions simply derivative from pre-existent psychic and familial patterns. Since the politics of angst and anomie, of personal aimlessness and sexual rebellion are now waged in tandem with the politics of race and class and international solidarity, it is illuminating to be able to go back to the pioneers who first drove in their stakes at the crossroads and who also, to the taunts of onlookers, indicated possible paths of liberation along personal as well as collective lines.

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If nothing else, this book should reawaken interest in Geza Roheim, whose anthropological investigations, carried on in the light of Freudian theory, doggedly insist upon the psychic unity of mankind and stand apart from the vogue of cultural relativism. His views are at odds with the functionalist tradition and its methodological inhibitions, through which that tradition cavalierly circumscribes the possibilities of social science. Robinson’s discussion of this subject shows him to be an outstanding adept of interdisciplinary understanding; briefly, but cogently, he elucidates one of the most vexing and elusive problems of social theory. Having stated his case so compellingly, Robinson is then able to reconstruct what was sensible in Roheim’s efforts to validate Totem and Taboo and to prove the historicity of myth. It was precisely Roheim’s fidelity to the bleakest implications of Freudian thought that forced him out of the acceptable mainstream. Too orthodox in some ways, too daring in others, virtually without impact on the discipline he hoped to reshape, Roheim appears at last to have produced heirs.

Reich, we know, has always had them, though we know little of what he would have made of the exultants who use his name. Robinson’s careful treatment of Reich’s sex-economic calculus will help readers to distinguish between what the master really believed and the debauch which some latter-day Reichians proclaim to be “liberation.” Reich was not a prophet of the polymorphous perverse, but, rather like Marcuse, saw sexual liberation basically in heterosexual and genital terms. Moreover, while he tried to make a career within both the Socialist and Communist movements, toward the end of his life he shared the anti-Communists’ phobias of the American 50’s. Just when the scientific establishment and the legal authorities embarked on their last and successful attempt to put him away, he persisted in believing that it was the Left which was tormenting him, and that President Eisenhower would save him. (Reich’s former wife, Use Ollendorf Reich, has discussed this aspect of his life in her recent biography² somewhat more fully than does Robinson.) This phase of Reich’s later years is not without importance in assessing his work on orgone energy, but Robinson has demonstrated that the core of Reich’s thought predates this unhappy time and stands independently of his phantasmagoric theories which sought to fuse medicine, religion, and physics.

The death instinct, rejected by Reich, is at the very center of the writings of Herbert Marcuse—a fact which helps to explain the pessimism which intrudes almost dialectically and persistently throughout his efforts to provide a generation of idealistic malcontents with guidelines for action. In the final analysis, Robinson’s portrait of Marcuse places him less in the activist tradition than in the line of grand philosophy, of German high culture, and idealism. Robinson has rightly stressed the continuity in Marcuse’s work, from his earliest studies at Frankfurt on the family to his current analyses of advanced capitalist society. Reading this chapter, one is made forcefully aware that Robinson has given us the essential Marcuse—a service he performs with equal distinction for Roheim and Reich.

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¹ To set the record straight, however, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Spitz, and Allen Graubard have written critically about Marcuse, without engaging in the fatuous totalitarianizing of various intellectual commentators. See also my essay, “Herbert Marcuse: Beyond Technological Rationality,” in Yale Review (Summer 1968); and “The Political Thought of Herbert Marcuse,” by George Kateb, in COMMENTARY (January 1970).

² Wilhelm Reich: A Personal Biography, St. Martin's Press, 224 pp. $5.95.