A Reply

...Here an interesting point comes up: is an irrationalist less true to his vision if he gives rational arguments in favor of irrationality...

...If Efron had understood this, he would have tried to show that what Freud says on the origin of moral norms was not advanced as a proof of any kind...

...Now this is surely a funny way of saying that man is essentially well...

...But psychoanalysis cannot possibly find a place within the behavioral sciences, and in all the discussions between behavioral scientists and analysts, it has been the analysts who have been routed...

...I COMMUNICATIONS think even after Efron's correction this question stands...

...In fact, he did, several times, and in the relevant chapters...

...I suggest that sublimationtheory Freudians are not unlike surplus-value Marxists...

...Obviously, it is not permissible under all circumstances, for in that case all one would have to do to win an argument would be to beg the question...

...Brown's book in a chapter preceding the chapters he devoted to sublimation, and in a chapter subsequent to these...

...I wonder what kind of empirical evidence it would be possible to give for this statement on page 293 of Mr...

...Why didn't Norman O. Brown...

...Levey, the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, and Herbert Marcuse, in dealing with Freud's theory of sublimation have directly named his relevant and most important text on the subject...

...So on this matter I do not admit to correction...

...4) It was no surprise to me that Efron should come up with a defense of circularity, and it was no surprise to me after having talked with him that his defense should amount to little more than to say it has been defended...

...Brown in the relevant chapters, and is only identified in his reference notes at the back of the book as follows: BW (Sex...

...The theory obviously has polemical value for an attack on existing institutions even as Marx's theory of surplus value had during the thirties, and those who are today interested in attacking contemporary institutions are reluctant to have the weaknesses of the theory exposed, even as radical Marxists during the thirties were unwilling to concede what was weak in the theory of surplus value...

...I make this admission right at the start, for after this one pointless point, I mean to concede him nothing...

...In any case, I made no claim to dispose of sublimation...

...And while each of us can make some contribution to language, I think we can only do this by accepting its authority...

...This analogue to the doctrine of original sin indeed gives history no other content than neurosis, and can envisage any salvation from disease only in an apocalyptic breakthrough from history...

...these works of Freud are directly named in Brown's chapter on sublimation...

...it is in us, and in us all the time...

...Nor did I say anything to imply that I have any objection to any idea, the truth of which could be shown...

...By whom...

...Brown as some kind of empiricist...

...Brown did not take up the ideas in that essay anywhere in his book, nor has Mr...

...Brown referred to other writings of Freud, which do not directly deal with the theory of sublimation, he spelled out the titles boldly: "On Negation," The Interpretation of Dreams, The Ego and the Id...

...Finally, I suggested there is the judgment of literature, which in my opinion tells us more about humanity than do the sciences, and I associated the existentialist notion of man as that being for whom the world is always a transcendental problem, with the judgment of man which has been presented in our literature...

...If we may distinguish three distinct periods in Freud's work (Rapaport does) then I should say the sublimation-theory Freudians belong to the second of these periods, a period Freud went beyond in his 1926 essay: "The Problem of Anxiety," where, as Rapaport says "The ego appears as an independent agent of great power and authority...

...Brown's own statement of his doctrine in Life Against Death: "Neurosis is not an occasional aberration...

...2) Efron claims that I claim to have disposed of the theory of sublimation, having picked up a "bargain hunter's" criticism of it from Max Scheler and Dr...

...But how then does this doctrine differ from the anthropological one cited by Max Scheler...

...The question brought up in my article was whether Freud was guilty of circularity, as Scheler claimed, and whether Freud's circularity in this particular instance could be justified...

...Here let me cite something said to me by Sidney Hook who is something of a Deweyan, not a European, and certainly not an anti-empiricist...

...Efron shown that he did...

...Efron goes on: "'in ultimate essence,' man then is not diseased...

...moreover, I did not have the space to quote as much from his article as I should have liked to...

...In any case, circularity seems unavoidable when we try to prove that which serves as the foundation of our proof...

...One would also be begging the question in using irrational arguments to defend irrationality...

...Due to a logical error, the method ofmodification of the energy involved in the exampled artistic sublimation is not described, but instead, that of reaction-formation substi tuted...

...And in what sense can tlls view of Mr...

...On the other hand, when Mr...

...In fact it was...

...The titles do not have to be deciphered from his notes...

...Freud's essay "On Negation" is cited in Mr...

...This is all I was obliged to say in my article...

...But I also implied that Mr...

...But I can see no reasonable sense in the assertion that history and psychoanalysis can each be the foundation of the other...

...And tradition is curiously not unlike a biological force...

...Brown did not even quote from Freud's essay...

...But on the other hand, and this I am perfectly COMMUNICATIONS willing to grant, there are indeed circumstances in which circularity is permissible and indeed inevitable...

...But this is because there is an impossibility of proving what you are trying to prove...

...if one could always be circular, nothing could be disproved...

...Levey's criticisms of the theory, I simply indicated that it is far from being a clear one, and that it could hardly provide a basis for farreaching generalizations about man and society...

...Nicolai Hartmann put it well: "Tradition is to civilization as heredity is to the species...

...Certainly it is saying man as he has been, and as he is known to himself to have been, is sick...

...Brown does not really know what he says half of the time and possibly Efron is not bothered by the fact that what Mr...

...Levey's comment on the continuity of Freud's ideas of sublimation between 1905 and 1923: In brief, during the period 1905 to 1923, Freud continued to example sublimation as artistic sublimation, described the method of modifica tion as displacement and offered no clinical data to demonstrate the source of the energy, the method of its modification or the validity of the premise of constitutional disposition...

...Levey's ap proval of Freud for having succeeded "in es tablishing some degree of order in the known facts concerning sublimation...

...By Bentley and Dewey, he says...

...In my article I did say that Norman O. Brown in the chapters on sublimation in his Life Against Death never took up the ideas Freud expressed in the one work he devoted to sublimation, his important essay, "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex...

...It is easier to call me a name that to meet Dr...

...He consistently described the energy as sexual and non-repressed...

...Brown said man is a disease, whereas, according to Efron, Mr...

...Brown's be regarded as scientific, empirical doctrine...

...But in any case, Freud must have known them...

...Now possibly Mr...

...Certainly I do not object to any notion about man which can be demonstrated to be true and which has no other authority behind it than that it was demonstrated...

...FIRST of all I must grant Art Efron something, for there is one matter on which he is partly right—not really right, not meaningfully right, not even half right—but however pointlessly, he is, in any case, partly right...

...I never pretended to be making a full-dress analysis of the theory, something, in any case, beyond my competence...

...My assumption, though, is that when we speak of the origin, nature, and destiny of man, we are speaking of a matter about which there is no body of doctrine which can be proved as true...

...5) Finally, on the value of tradition in our judgment of the origin, nature, and destiny of man...

...Relying on Dr...

...Brown says half of the time contradicts what he says during the other half...

...In these instances the title is directly given in the text, as it is in one of the two relevant chapters...

...Well, there is a book—it was actually written by Bentley, though Dewey also signed it in which there is some defense of circularity...

...When Efron showed me his quote from it, I told him the quotation was unconvincing and shady, since the book was not actually written by Dewey, and I suggested to him that he himself analyze those circumstances under which circularity is permissible, and those under which it is not...

...Efron objects to social tradition, in which I see some liberation from all biologisms, including the "new" one of Norman O. Brown...

...I do think myself competent, though, to recognize valid arguments against the theory, and Dr...

...Is it because the title "Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex" had already been mentioned, in an earlier chapter, one not devoted to sublimation...

...it is not just in other people...

...Levey's text: There would be no indication today for a critical summary of what Freud wrote in 1905, butfor the fact that the later literature about the theory of sublimation has remained essentiallyunchanged, and does not report any verificationbased upon observed facts...

...We can no more reduce ethics or customs to biology than we can reduce biology to physics...

...Here is Dr...

...Brown...

...So Efron is sim ply trying to mislead his readers when he sug gests that I did not fairly represent Dr...

...If all that we know about man tells us that throughout history he has been ill, then how can one remain faithful to empirical evidence and say that in man's "ultimate essence," whatever that be, he is well...

...his disease is caused by his failure to develop historically in accordance with his essence but he cannot desert that essence...

...I shall cite again from Dr...

...I did not fail to quote, though, Dr...

...But so were other titles by Freud...

...Let me add that other writers on the theory of sublimation such as Dr...

...Brown: I can see no objection to illuminating history with insights gained from psychoanalysis, or to illuminating psychoanalysis with insights gained from history...

...Moreover, we are speaking about a matter of which there are rival notions—there are the judgments of the natural sciences, of philosophy, of the Judaeo-Christian faith...

...Brown's Life Against Death: "What the child knows consciously, and the adult unconsciously, is that we are nothing but body...

...or, to put it another way, the doctrine of the universal neurosis of mankind is the psychoanalytic analogue of the theological doctrine of original sin...

...Now as to Mr...

...During this period, the concept of sublimation, from neglect to demonstrate with clinical evidence and from lack of an atti tude of tentativeness, could be evaluated scien tifically as a descriptive summary of empirical conclusions not yet connected with any of its several propositions by evidence .. . Evidently the Freudian theory of sublimation has its difficulties, something one would never suspect if one limited one's reading to the amateurish paradoxes of Mr...

...The problem may be expressed as follows: if one could never be circular, nothing could be asserted...

...Hook pointed out that if you give a reasonable argument for using reason in argument you are both begging the question and entitled to beg it...

...Brown on the subject in Life Against Death or Herbert Marcuse's ideological conjectures in Eros and Civilization...

...A redundant factor of cultural valuation is emphasized...

...One must, therefore, estimate the original formulation of the theory of sublimationto be a confused and inconsistent recapitulationof empirically known facts, and one for whichno clinical evidence was offered...

...Harry B. Levey...

...Now all Efron has had to say about this is what Bentley and Dewey have said, to wit, that there is circularity "in the knowledge," whatever this may mean...

...3) According to Efron, I distorted Norman 0. Brown's argument in Life Against Death because I said that Mr...

...Levey's argument, and Efron has chosen (I think wisely) the easier course...

...The amusing fact is that from the point of view of the natural sciences, of which the behavioral sciences form a part, man is nothing but body...

...It was this essay of Freud which inspired the contemporary ego-analysis of Erikson and Hartmann...

...what I said stands...

...The reason I was mistaken is this: the essay is not mentioned by Mr...

...He even implies Levey likes the theory somewhat better than my quotes would show...

...Now in fact Mr...

...The only possibility of retaining some of the Freudian insights is to regard them as part of those historical studies which regard man not as body at all, but essentially, if not exclusively, as mind...

...Levey's arguments are even more damaging than I claimed...

...Why this curious procedure...

...Efron claims that Freud did change his theory of sublimation and between 1905 and 1915...

...Levey's attitude toward the theory, insofar as it was not altogether unfavorable...

...Brown COMMUNICATIONS in fact argued that "the ultimate essence of our being remains in our unconscious secretly faithful to the principle of pleasure, or as Blake called it, delight...

...But in any case here is Mr...

...He also notes that Max Scheler could not have known of these changes...

...The infantile erogenous zones are predicated to be the source of energy, but no proofis offered...

...I stand by that judgment, and I assert further that the judgment of man we have in literature is as far beyond the creation of any single intelligence as would be the creation of language...

...The theory as formulated is based upon an unproved premise ofabnormally strong sexual constitution...

...Apparently Efron regards Mr...

...Founding, in any case, is not proving...

...So man is not a deserter from life as he is held to be in the German anthropology cited by Max Scheler, and which I claim has so much in common with the theory of Mr...

...To found, as Paul Ricoeur finely said, is "to elevate to intellectuality," something which to my mind Norman O. Brown has , done neither for psychoanalysis nor for history...