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

"The guilty conscience is formed in childhood by the incorporation of the parents."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"We must return to Freud and say that incest guilt created the familial organization." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"What the child knows consciously and the adult unconsciously, is that we are nothing but body." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"Life is of the body and only life creates value; all values are bodily values."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"Infants know no guide except the pleasure-principle"  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"Infants have a richer sexual life than adults."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"[Children] have not acquired that sense of shame which, according to the Biblical story, expelled mankind from Paradise, and which, presumably, would be discarded if Paradise were regained."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"Childhood remains man's indestructible goal."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"Parental discipline, religious denunciation of bodily pleasure, . . . have all left man overly docile, but secretly in his unconscious unconvinced, and therefore neurotic."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"Neurotic symptoms, with their fixations on perversions and obscenities, demonstrate the refusal of the unconscious essence of our being to acquiesce in the dualism of flesh and spirit, higher and lower."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"The new guilt complex appears to be historically connected with the rise of patriarchal religion (for the Western development the Hebrews are decisive.)"  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"The repression of normal adult sexuality is required only by cultures which are based on patriarchal domination."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"Human consciousness can be liberated from the parental (Oedipal) complex only be being liberated from its cultural derivatives, the paternalistic state and the patriarchal God."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"The ability to promise involves the loss of the natural animal forgetfulness of the past, which is the precondition for healthy living in the present."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"If there is a universal neurosis, it is reasonable to suppose that its core is religion."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"Through the ability to promise, the future is bound to the past."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"It is what makes man responsible; it is his conscience."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"Psychoanalysis must treat religion as a neurosis."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"The key to the nature of dialectical thinking may lie in psychoanalysis, more specifically in Freud's psychoanalysis of negation."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"By 'dialectical' I mean an activity of consciousness struggling to circumvent the limitations imposed by the formal-logical law of contradiction"  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
"The only valuable things in psychic life are the emotions."  Norman O. Brown
 Life Against Death. Middletown Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1959 p. 7
"Dreams are in essence wish-fulfillments."
"The essence of man consists in desiring."
"The goal of the pleasure principle is happiness." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 8
"Reality imposes on human beings the necessity of renunciation of pleasure; reality frustrates desires."
"The pleasure principle is in conflict with the reality principle, and this conflict is the cause of repression."
"Dreams and neurotic symptoms show that the frustration of reality cannot destroy the desires which are the essence of our being."
"The conscious self is governed . . . by the principle of adjustment to reality."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 9
"Under the conditions of repression the essence of being lies in the unconscious."
"If society imposes repression, and repression causes the universal neurosis of man, . . . there is an intrinsic connection between social organization and neurosis."
"Man is the animal which represses himself and which creates culture or society in order to repress himself." 

"Neurosis is an essential consequence of civilization or culture."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 10

"The doctrine of the universal neurosis of mankind, . . . The pattern of history exhibits a dialectic of neurosis."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 12
"The bondage of all cultures to their cultural heritage is a neurotic construction."
"The core of the neurosis of individuals lay in the ‘memory-traces of the experiences of former generations.'"  Norman O. Brown   Life Against Death  p. 13
"Psychoanalysis must treat religion as a neurosis."
"Freud speaks of religion as a ‘substitute-gratification'– the Freudian analogue to the Marxian formula, ‘opiate of the people.'"
"Man is distinguished from animals not simply by culture, but also by a desire to change his culture and so to change himself."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 15
Freud praises Marxism for ‘its clear insight into the determining influences which is exerted by the economic conditions of man [reality principle].'"  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 17
"Marx defines the essence of man as labor and traces the dialectic of labor in history till labor abolishes itself."
"Freud suggests that beyond labor at the end of history is love."
"Love has always been there from the beginning . . . the hidden force supplying the energy devoted to labor and to making history."
"Repressed Eros is the energy of history and labor must be seen as sublimated Eros."
"Men are not satisfied by the satisfactions of their conscious desires; men are unconscious of their real desires."
"Marx needs a psychological premise [the doctrine of repression] to explain the unceasing bent for technological progress sustaining the dialectic of labor in history."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 18
"Psychoanalysis offers a way out of endless ‘progress', a way out of the human neurosis, a way out of history."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 19
"If historical consciousness is transformed into psychoanalytical consciousness,"
"the grip of the dead hand of the past on life in the present would be loosened,"
"and man would be ready to live instead of making history, to enjoy instead of paying back old scores and debts,"
"and to enter the state of Being which was the goal of his Becoming."
"Our repressed desires are the desires we had, unrepressed, in childhood; and they are sexual desires."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 23
"Neurotic symptoms"
"pleasure denied by reality"
"sexual satisfaction denied by reality."
"The pattern of normal adult sexuality is a cultural phenomenon."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 24
"Mans sexual organization and social organization are interconnected."
"The critical institution in the transition from ape to man is parenthood, with the prolonged maintenance of children in a condition of helpless dependence."
"Family organization is the nucleus of all social organization."
"While adult sexuality serves the socially useful purpose of breeding children, it is for the individual in some sense an end in itself as a source of pleasure – according to Freud, the highest pleasure."
"Adult sexuality, restricted by rules, to maintain family and society, is a clear instance of that subordination of the pleasure-principle to the reality principle which is repression; and therefore leads to neurosis."
"Parental care promotes a dependent attitude toward reality and inculcates a passive (dependent) need to be loved . . . subsequently exploited to extract submission to social authority."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 25
"Capitulation enforced by parental authority under the threat of loss of parental love . . . can be accomplished only by repression."
Capitulation "constitutes a trauma from which the individual never recovers psychologically."
The energy or desire with which the human being pursues pleasure is the pleasurable activity of an organ of the body."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 26
"Infants are absorbed in their own bodies; they are in love with themselves."
"Infants know no guide except the pleasure-principle."
"Infants have a richer sexual life than adults."
"The discarded elements of infantile sexuality [all body parts] are, judged by the standards of normal adult sexuality, perverse [erotic activities] . . . if they are pursued as substitutes."
"Children are polymorphously perverse. . . . by the standards of normal adult sexuality."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 27
"Normal adult sexuality, judged by the standard of infantile sexuality, is an unnatural restriction of the erotic potentialities of the human body."
"In man, infantile sexuality is repressed and never outgrown; repression, (and consequently neurosis) distinguishes man from the other animals."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 28
"Freud sees conflict in the genital act itself."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 29
"Orgasm is purely genital and post-pubertal."
"Fore-pleasure is the preliminary play with all parts of the body, and represent a perpetuation of the pure polymorphous perverse play of infantile sexuality."
"The immortal child in us is frustrated, even in the sexual act, by the tyranny of genital organization."
"Infantile sexuality is the pursuit of pleasure obtained through the activity of any and all organs of the human body [touching, seeing, muscular activity, pain, etc.]."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 30
"Parental discipline, religious denunciation of bodily pleasure, . . . have all left man overly docile, but secretly in his unconscious unconvinced, and therefore neurotic."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 31
"[Children] have not acquired that sense of shame which, according to the Biblical story, expelled mankind from Paradise, and which, presumably, would be discarded if Paradise were regained."
"Neurotic symptoms, with their fixations on perversions and obscenities, demonstrate the refusal of the unconscious essence of our being to acquiesce in the dualism of flesh and spirit, higher and lower."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
  pp. 31, 32
"Childhood remains man's indestructible goal."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 32
"Freud takes with absolute seriousness the proposition of Jesus: ‘Except ye become as little children, ye can in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven.'"
"According to Freud, the ultimate essence of our being is erotic, and demands activity according to the pleasure-principle."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 33
"The Protestant mystical theolo[gian], Jacob Boehme, places man perfection and bliss, not in a Potestant future life, but in the transformation of this bodily life into joyful play."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 34
"Underneath the habits of work in every man lies the immortal instinct for play."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 36
"The foundation on which the man of the future will be built is already there, in the repressed unconscious; the foundation has to be recovered."
"Death is the reality in which human beings cannot come to terms."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 38
"Sexual instinct seeks union with objects in the world."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 40
"Eros [love of objects in the world; child's love for mother] is the foundation of morality."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 41
"The essence of love of the mother is the need to be loved."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 43
"Eros is fundamentally a desire for union (being one) with objects in the world [unification]."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 44
"The aim of Eros is union with objects outside the self . . . [while it is at the same time] self-loving."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 45
"[Pleasure (sex) and self-preservation (dependence upon others) – leisure and guaranteed sustenance; the antagonists which must be re-synthesized to restore childhood]."
"Ego searches for a world to love. . . . restlessly searches for an object that can satisfy its love."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 47
"[Self-actualization] – self-perfection (narcissism) of the human individual is fulfilled in union with the world in pleasure."
"Human perfection consists in an expansion of the self until it enjoys the world as it enjoys itself."
"In Freud's writings after 1920 the antithesis of the sexual and self-preservation instincts is replaced by the antithesis of Eros and the aggressive- destructive-death instinct. *Love and hate, love and aggression, love and the will to power."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 53
"Freud's later writings attribute to the ego a basic tendency to ‘reconcile,' ‘synthesize,' ‘unify' the dualism and conflicts with which the human being is beset."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 54
"Sublimation is essentially an attempt to relate the organic and superorganic levels . . . To rediscover the animal in man."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 137
"If the psychoanalytical theory of sublimation is rejected, psychoanalysis has nothing much to offer to the science of culture."
"Love of money is a sublimation of anal erotism."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 138
"The inherent necessity of this relationship is naturally not clear even to myself."
"Sublimation involves the desexualization of the aims of the sexual instinct [as well as] socialization."
"The repression of normal adult sexuality is required only by cultures which are based on patriarchal domination."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 140-141
"The abolition of repression would only threaten patriarchal domination." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 141
"But if the theory of infantile sexuality is retained, the abolition of patriarchal domination will not solve the problem."
"Psychoanalytic therapy is to replace repression with sublimation. Not all the libido can be sublimated."
"Human consciousness can be liberated from the parental complex only be being liberated from its cultural derivatives, the paternalistic state and the patriarchal God." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 151
"What we call ‘conscience' perpetuates inside of us our bondage to past objects now part of ourselves: the super-ego ‘unites in itself the influences of the present and of the past.'" Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 162
"Dionysus does not observe the limit, but overflows; for him the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 175
"Dionysus affirms the dialectical unity of the great instinctual opposites: reunifies male and female, Self and Others, life and death."
"Dionysus does not negate any more."
"Freud saw that in the id there is no negation, only affirmation and eternity. The instinctual reality is Dionysian drunkenness ‘We can come nearer to the id with images, and call it a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement.'"
"Hegel was able to see the dialectic of reality as ‘bacchanalian revel, in which no member is not drunk.'" Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 176
"Dionysus without the Dionysian ego threatens us with that ‘genuine witches' brew,' ‘that horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty, which is the revolt of the Dionysian against the Apollonian [masculinity/rules].'"
"The only alternative to the witches' brew is psychoanalytical consciousness – Dionysian consciousness."
"If there is a universal neurosis, it is reasonable to suppose that its core is religion." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 239
"If there is a psychoanalysis of money it must start from the hypothesis that the money complex has the essential structure of religion." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 240
"Marx had compared the money complex with the religious complex, as two forms of human self-alienation." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 241
"Freud, Hegel, and Nietzsche are, like Marx, compelled to postulate external domination and its assertion by force in order to explain repression." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
  p. 242
"To take the path of psychological explanation means that the money complex is to be derived from the religious complex."
"The money complex is inseparable from symbolism; and symbolism is the mark of the sacred."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
  p. 246
"The real essence of money is disclosed by a theory of ownership – i.e., power. All power is essentially sacred power. Power is in essence a psychological category."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
  p. 251
"The science of use-value would have to be based on a science of human nature, able to distinguish real human needs from (neurotic) consumer demands . . . Money making as unnatural perversion."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
  p. 253-254
"There is something in the human psyche which commits man to nonenjoyment, to work (nonleisure)."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 256
"What then underlies the drive to produce a surplus? The act of satisfying a need, and making an instrument to satisfy a need, provokes a new need."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 259
"Capitalism ["accumulation of wealth"] is destroyed in . . . enjoyment."
"Only a science of enjoyment can deliver us."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 260
"To subdivide a man's faculties is to kill him; intelligence is alienated into the process as a whole while the individual specialist becomes stupid and ignorant."
"Division of labor has nothing to do with happiness. The division of labor [grew] out of the realm of economic surplus."
"Economic surplus with prestige and privilege connects with the domain of the sacred. We no longer give the surplus to God; surplus is in itself now our God. [? First fruits]."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 261
"There is a seeming clue in the connection between the principle of nonenjoyment and the devotion to the sacred."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 262
"The principle of nonenjoyment, the compulsion to work and to produce an economic surplus, is contained in the need to give."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 264
"Gift exchange is a primal act of social solidarity. The basic psychology of human social organization may be contained in the psychology of giving."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
  p. 265
"The psychology of economics is the psychology of guilt. Money is condensed wealth; condensed wealth is condensed guilt. Money is human guilt."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death
  p. 266
"Nietzsche begins by defining man as the ‘animal that can promise.'"
"The ability to promise involves the loss of the natural animal forgetfulness of the past, which is the precondition for healthy living in the present."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  pp. 266-267
"Through the ability to promise, the future is bound to the past."
"It is what makes man responsible; it is his conscience."
"Christianity as a theology of unpayable debt (guilt)." 
Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 267
"Freud commented that only through the solidarity of all the participants could the sense of guilt be assuaged." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 269
"We must return to Freud and say that incest guilt created the familial organization."
"Freud did not abandon the illusion that Adam really fell."
"We on the other hand cling to the position that Adam never really fell."
Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 270
"The illusion that the debt is payable; the gods exist to make the debt payable." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 271
"The intermediate term between psychoanalysis and time is religion." "In dealing with time [we] are dealing with a religion." Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 273
"Whorf opened the eyes of American anthropologist to the cultural relativity of the time sense."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 274
"The intermediate term between psychoanalysis and time is religion." . . . "In dealing with time [we] are dealing with religion." . . . "Newtonian time was a religion."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 274
"'In the unconscious there is not time.'" Freud
"'In the id there is nothing corresponding to the idea of time.'" Freud
"A healthy human being, in whom ego and id were unified, would not live in time."
"Time is, like money, neurotic and correlative with instinctual repression."
"The guilty conscience is formed in childhood by the incorporation of the parents and the wish to be father of oneself."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 276
"Only the abolition of guilt can abolish time."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 278
"The individual is emancipated in the social group."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 279
"The psychology of giving is intimately feminine;" "the psychology of possession and taking is masculine."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 280
"The new guilt complex appears to be historically connected with the rise of patriarchal religion (for the Western development the Hebrews are decisive.)"
"What we call ‘character' is really a disorganization or malfunctioning of the body. . . . mascular rigidities protect itself from erotic exuberance."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 291
"What the child knows consciously and the adult unconsciously, is that we are nothing but body."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 293
"Life is of the body and only life creates value; all values are bodily values."
"In the id, says Freud, there is nothing corresponding to the act of negation."
"The true life of the body is also the life of the id."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 294
"True capitalism, as Marx said, is destroyed in its very foundation if we assume that its compelling motive is enjoyment instead of the accumulation of wealth."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 303
"When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals."   Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 304
"Government will give way to management. Power must be open, fluid and free . . . Not to possess power but to radiate it." Henry Miller   Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 305
"Therefore the question confronting mankind is the abolition of repression – in traditional Christian language, the resurrection of the body. . . [i.e.] the life instinct, or sexual instinct."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 307
"The life instinct also demands a union with others and with the world around us based not on anxiety and aggression but on narcissism and erotic exuberance."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 307
"In the words of Thoreau: ‘We need pray for no higher heaven than the pure senses can furnish, a purely sensuous life. Our present senses are but rudiments of what they are destined to become.'"  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 308
"Our human body would become polymorphously perverse."
"Dionysian – consciousness which does not observe the limit . . . which does not negate any more."
"Boehme's position in the Western tradition of mystic hope of better things is central and assured."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  pp. 309-310
"Backward Boehme is linked, through Paracelsus and alchemy, to the Christian gnosticism and Jewish cabalism."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 310
"Forward Boehme is linked, through his influence on the romantics Blake, Novalis, and Hegel, with Freud."
"Psychoanalysis is the heir to a mystical tradition which it must affirm."
"Boehme and Freud have too much in common to be able to dispense with each other."
"Boehme, like Freud, understood death as a positive force either in dialectical conflict with life (fallen man), or dialectically unified with life (in God's perfection)."
"Boehme's insight that all life is life in the body . . . [his] inability to accept a body which dies. No Protestant theologian has gone further;"  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 311
"Taoism does not accept death as part of life."
"The heirs of Boehme are Blake, Novalis, Hegel, and Goethe."
"The ‘magical' body of occidental mysticism, and the ‘diamond' body of oriental mysticisms, and, in psychoanalysis, the polymorphously perverse body of childhood."
"Psychoanalysis declares the fundamental bisexual character of human nature;"  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 312
"Boehme insists on the androgynous character of human perfection;"
"Taoist mysticism invokes feminine passivity to counteract masculine aggressively."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 313
"Psychoanalysis is necessary in order to differentiate the new ‘purified' animism from the old naïve animism."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 315
"Whitehead and Needham are calling for a science based on an erotic sense of reality."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 316
"Alchemy might be said to be the last effort of Western man to produce a science based on an erotic sense of reality."
"The resurrection of the body is a social project . . . a practical political problem."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 317
"The statesmen of the world are called upon to deliver happiness instead of power, when political economy becomes a science of use-values instead of exchange-values."
"a science of enjoyment instead of a science of accumulation."
"To find social theorists who are thinking about the real problem of our age, we have to go back to the Marx of 1844."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 318
"Psychoanalysis, mysticism, poetry, the philosophy of organism, Feuerbach, and Marx – the unseen harmony is stronger than the seen."
"Psychoanalysis, mysticism, poetry, the philosophy of organism, Feuerbach, and Marx."
"Common to all of them is a mode of consciousness that can be called the dialectic imagination."
"By ‘dialectical' I mean an activity of consciousness struggling to circumvent the limitations imposed by the formal-logical law of contradiction."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  pp. 318-319
"Whitehead constantly draws attention to the dialectical patterns in mystical thought."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 319
"The basic structure of Freud's thought is committed to dialectics." "His finest insights are incurably ‘dialectical.'"  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 320
"The key to the nature of dialectical thinking may lie in psychoanalysis, more specifically in Freud's psychoanalysis of negation."
"There is first the theorem that ‘there is nothing in the id which can be compared to negation,' and that the law of contradiction does not hold in the id."
"The dream does not seem to recognize the word ‘no.'"  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  pp. 320-321
"There is an important connection between being ‘dialectical' and dreaming."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 321
"Formal logic and the law of contradiction are the rules whereby the mind submits to operate under general conditions of repression."
"The ‘dialectical' consciousness . . . a manifestation of Eros . . . that Dionysian ego which does not negate any more."  Norman O. Brown  Life Against Death  p. 322

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