Life Against Death - Critical Evaluations

Critical Evaluations

Podhoretz writes that 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."

Robinson sees Brown's exploration of the radical implications of psychoanalysis as in some ways more rigorous and systematic than that of Marcuse. He also finds Life Against Death more elegantly written than Eros and Civilization, attributing this to Brown having a background in literature and the classics rather than philosophy and political theory. Yet while admiring the rigor and imagination of Brown's arguments, he believes that his analysis of the genesis of sexual differentiation unwittingly subverts its purpose of showing that a nonrepressive organization of sexual life is possible. Robinson argues that if tyrannical sexual organizations result from inability to accept separation or death, and if this flight from separation is in turn based on the fact of prolonged infantile dependence, then sexual repression is a biological inevitability. Brown thus, despite his objectives, offers "a counsel of despair", since his analysis of sexual repression fails to offer a theoretical rationale for a nonrepressive civilization. Brown was unable to either explain the historical rise of repressive civilization or to provide a solution to the problems of modern living. He believes that while Brown's work is psychologically more radical than that of Marcuse, it is politically more timid, and fails to transform psychoanalytic theory into historical and political categories. He deems Marcuse a finer theorist than Brown, and believes he provides a more substantial treatment of Freud. Robinson also finds the subtitle of Life Against Death, "the Psychoanalytical Meaning of History", to be "pompous and misleading".

Joel Kovel, who writes that Life Against Death shows that Luther's personality was to a considerable extent based upon anal fantasies and that Luther achieved some of his spiritual breakthroughs while defecating, also finds the work comparable to, but less successful than, Eros and Civilization. Liam Hudson assesses the two books differently from Robinson and Kovel, finding Eros and Civilization more reductively political and therefore less stimulating than Life Against Death. Stephen Frosh finds Eros and Civilization and Life Against Death to be among the most important advances towards a psychoanalytic theory of art and culture, although he finds the way these works turn the internal psychological process of repression into a model for social existence as a whole to be disputable. Myron Sharaf criticizes Brown for misinterpreting Reich, writing that while Brown presents Reich's view as being that the pregenital stages would disappear if full genitality were established, Reich actually believed that society represses both pregenital and genital sexuality, leading to the failure of some persons to reach the genital level and the vulnerability of others to regress to pregenital levels. Reich's view, according to Sharaf, was that given full genital expression, pregenital impulses and conflicts do not disappear but simply lose their significance and their power to disrupt healthy genitality.

Richard Webster writes that, like Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther, Life Against Death suggests numerous similarities between Lutheran Protestantism and classical psychoanalysis. Webster believes that the resemblances Brown found between Protestantism and psychoanalysis are scarcely disputable. However, he writes that, "Some of those who are members of a Protestant church, or who hold any form of religious belief, may take comfort in discovering that the revealed truths perceived by Luther are in harmony with the analytic hypotheses produced by Freud. Those who possess greater intellectual caution, however, or those who hold no religious beliefs, may well feel some scepticism in the face of such an easy congruence of ancient faith and modern reason. They will be prompted to ask to what extent we should regard psychoanalysis not as a scientific approach to human nature but as a disguised continuation of the Judaeo-Christian tradition." Webster describes Brown's work, like that of Marcuse, Jacques Lacan, and several other modern thinkers, as "a doomed and tragic attempt to reconstruct at the level of the intellect a sensual identity which has been crucified at the level of the spontaneous and vital body."