Life Against Death: The
Psychoanalytical Meaning of History
by Norman O. Brown
Well Done
A shocking and extreme interpretation of the father of psychoanalysis.
Personal Review: Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical
Meaning of History by Norman O. Brown
An awesome book on the psychoanalytical meaning of history. I read that
this book was admired by Jim Morrison in his bio by fellow band member
Ray Manzarek. Books to read come in strange ways. I also read about this
book referenced by the integral psychologist and philosopher Ken Wilber.
This books gives credibility to Freudian Analysis. Nor that it was ever lost,
but there are neo-Freudians which of course differ from Freud and there is
the reductionism when one looks only through one paradigm, regardless of
it's accuracy. This is because there are other modes or of insight that co-
inside and yet contradict some of Freud, but that's the beauty of it all, of

the psychoanalytical analysis paradigm. And this paradigm is one of the
subjective mind, unless you consider Freud to also be biological, then it
would take in objectivity, but only in certain levels and degrees. And so this
book I think expounds profoundly and is a deep book.
OK, this book speaks of Freud's "pleasure principle," "reality principle,"
Oedipus complex," "death instinct," castration anxiety," and while this
outwardly may sound very limited, the issue comes down to one thing,
repression. And whether its sexual, excremental, power or various levels of
blocked emotional energies, the theories employed as to why and are very
valuable in understanding ourselves and others. And this repression is
based on sublimated infantile erotic pleasures beyond into a reality
principle and in many cases death instinct. There are many fascinating
chapters/essays on these ideas. The fact of the matter is we all came from
the womb, all had consciousness of embryonic narcissistic selfhood and
sought pleasure and had to deal with reality. We all had a mother (not
including abandonment) who became our entire world, our need for
pleasure verses pain and desire to possess and it was of a erotic nature.
And we all had to deal with separation aspects as major threats to our
consciousness.. So much of psychoanalysis rings of truth.
Interesting how the death instinct is the desire to get back to the womb, the
incapacity to accept the individuality of life. So it's this form of romanticism,
to get back to the child, to play. Unfortunately it negates life in that it fails to
accept and represses and causes a life view, either socially, politically,
individually & etc. to live a live of undue restraint or hardships with the idea
that this life is all temporary, working towards dying in this life to be
rewarded with the return back to the womb. And so this is a death against
life, a life where the irrational Dionysian play is destroyed and we live in a
purely empirical scientific age of logic and rationalistic work, where living is
logic in work, as opposed to the idea of play, of childlike ability to live in the
present moment, without historicity and guilt and instead the moment
where all action is spontaneous play. But instead we repress our play,
create history from guilt and rationalize a materialist way of living. The
archaic man sublimated his guilt in group activity and had this marvelous
trait of each year erasing his historicity in sharing, but even then it was a
form of sublimation of guilt. Modern man just builds on his history and lives
a capitalistic life based on valueless commodity. Value is measurement,
quantity, no longer quality and art. Money has become our excrement. The
archaic man transferred or sublimated his sexual and infantile narcissistic
energies into a community or shared social system. The modern man
sublimates his into money and things he puts value into.
History seen through the eyes of psychoanalysis can be viewed as the
sublimation of repression. In this, the infant first exists according the
pleasure principle in where is bodily functions take first priority. The reality
principle of course combats this and the young child develops the Oedipus
complex, wishing to completely own his mother, jealous, wishing to
eliminate his father or become the father to himself.

In sublimation, there is the repression of bodily and sexual instinctive
desires into what we know of as culture. And the higher the culture the
greater the sublimation. What has culminated is our era of objective
materialism and empirical science which represses the non-rational nature
of wish fulfillment's, desires and instinctual drives. Brown proposes that we
reestablish our Dionysian roots, the creative, non repressive self where the
use of a money and culture are not the means of escaping the pleasure
principle. Instead we play, erase historicity, loose the guilt and accept our
entire bodies, not just our minds.
The essay on Jonathan Swift, his exposure of what appears to be prideful
human intellectuals and cultural values to come from the anus and
excrement (the as***le and sh*t). And he both Norman O. Brown and
Jonathan Swift link as all ideas as coming from the human body, ideas
used to empower persons, elevate and leave teachings that far outlive the
human being's body, another wards a way to be immortal, as an act of
repression of the anxiety of death, of separateness. The idea of becoming
one's own father - immortality, the Oedipus complex. There is much to this.
And yet in a sense, all "matter" comes from excrement, which is what all
we are made from biologically, the very biological make up that brings forth
our minds and intellectual ideas.
Much, much more to this book, not said here.
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