On the several sources of Freud's conservatism: Some comments on the work of Horowitz and Marcuse

Abstract

A wealth of commentary has focussed upon the life and work of Sigmund Freud; yet, among his critics and sympathizers alike, the task of assessing Freud's place in intellectual history has always been most difficult?and rather stubbornly re? mains so, even from our present vantage point?in the area of his sociological writings. In part, at least, this problem seems to stem from a rather curious, even paradoxical feature of Freud's work itself: the fact that he frequently found it nec? essary to base his theories of human behavior upon a still deeper "vision" of the past (and ultimately of the evolution of the species) that was itself a theory of so? cial origins. Certainly this sometimes hidden reliance on social theory (however foreign in form by current standards) is best known in terms of Freud's Totem and Taboo study of 1912-1913: his grand but, one almost feels obliged to say, flawed hypothesis about the origin of the family, kinship, and religion. Somewhat less appreciated, however, is the fact that a good many of Freud's other core ideas, including a number of his key clinical concepts?those that, by definition, deal with individual psychodynamics?were also heavily dependent upon this same theory of the origin of society. The theory of the oedipus complex, for example?both Freud's argument about its onset and dissolution?is a prominent illustration of this as are, with varying degrees of emphasis, his views on superego development, the constitution of the ego, the disposition towards neurosis (including particular forms such as obsessional illness), sublimation, repression, and many other psychoanalytic concepts. Almost from the beginning then (and clearly from the year 1912 onwards), psy? choanalysis has been wedded to a kind of' 'depth sociology' ' of its own which has made it doubly difficult to evaluate Freud's writings on culture and society, either in their own right or as an often concealed scaffolding for his psychological work. One result of this, we would suggest, is that the attitude of many social scientists towards Freud has been both uncertain and, in quite the strictest sense, ambiva? lent?in fact, powerfully ambivalent. On the one hand, the social science commu? nity has shown a truly extraordinary fascination with Freud's theory of culture, even its most chided and controversial aspects. In the last two decades, for exam? ple, writers as diverse as John Whiting, the late Margaret Mead, Robin Fox,