The Sons of Liberty: Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body

Norman O. Brown (1913-2002) and his work fall into many categories. Born in Mexico in 1913 to a British father and a German-Cuban mother, he was educated at Oxford University where his tutor was Isaiah Berlin. Interested in Marx, Brown earned a doctorate in classics at the University of Wisconsin and later became a professor at Wesleyan University. After the defeat of left-leaning Henry Wallace for President in 1948, Brown became disillusioned with politics. He then turned toward Freud to comprehend the failure of political hopes (Norman O. Brown, “Memoirs,” in Jerome Neu, ed., In Memoriam: Norman O. Brown, 2005). His Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959) and Love’s Body (1966, all quotes from this volume unless otherwise specified) brought the Freudian left to unexpected places. In the millennial climate of the late 1960s, his works combining erudition, penetrating insight, and a contradictory liberationist mysticism, became counterculture bibles. In the 1960s Brown was a scholarly, reserved, Freudian Dionysius; a mild mannered Anglo-American Nietzsche.

He is thus an odd candidate for inclusion as a psychohistorian; Brown is neither a psychologist nor a historian. Life Against Death is psychoanalytic, but ahistorical. Then there is “Liberty,” the first chapter of Love’s Body, where Brown makes a brilliant Freudian deconstruction of John Locke’s liberal republicanism. This essay alone establishes the value of Brown’s work for psychohistory. Using psychoanalytic tools, this classics professor explains the emotional dynamics beneath the political rhetoric of equality. He uses Freud’s discredited primal horde theory of the male sons’ murder of the tyrannical father to illuminate the dynamics of

Page 32

politics.

“Freud,” Brown writes, “seems to project into prehistoric times the constitutional crisis of seventeenth-century England” (p. 3). Locke’s philosophy is often cited as justification for political revolt. It is the second of his Two Treatises of Government that garners the most attention. The Professor turns to the neglected first treatise, Locke’s polemic against Robert Filmer’s Patriarch, or The Natural Power of Kings. Locke justifies the dismissal of the monarch and the supremacy of Parliament. In Freudian terms, the sons are overthrowing the father. While this may appear to be another variation on Oedipal rebellion, here brothers are not acting individually but collectively against the father. It is liberty against patriarchy. Brown says, “To vindicate liberty is to vindicate…the sons…against paternal despotism…Liberty means sonship” (pp. 4-5). The revolt against paternal rule contains the usual Oedipal rage. The murderous impulses behind this fraternity make them “brothers in crime…equal as sinners” (p. 15). What is billed as a moral enterprise, a republican revolt against unjust authority, also contains criminal intentions. Ethical justifications disguise guilt over forbidden aggression.

These political rebellions are often in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Brown sees an “inner contradiction.” While sonship “and brotherhood are espoused against fatherhood,” how can there be fraternal unity without a father? “Locke’s sons, like Freud’s, cannot free themselves from father psychology” (p. 5). The result is that paternal authority sneaks back in, often through the actions of some of the brothers, who frequently take on the father’s attributes.

Once the father is gone, fraternal cooperation does not last; the sons may well battle among themselves in a “dispute over the inheritance of the paternal estate” (p. 4). In the rivalries of his offspring, the seemingly deposed symbolic

Page 33

father-ruler returns with a vengeance. In what is a commentary on his own political radical past, Brown writes: “The history of Marxism shows how hard it is to kill the father; to get rid of the family, private property, and the state” (p. 8).

In electoral systems of government, beneath surface civility and collaboration, competition between political rivals often contains brutal sibling rivalries; variations on Jacob and Esau’s struggles to be Isaac’s successor. Without a father to oppose, equality does not remain fraternity for very long. “Equals are rivals; and the dear love of comrades is made out of mutual jealousy and hate” (p. 17). Factions arise among the proverbial brothers, and appear as organized political parties. To Brown, such political organizations “are antagonistic fraternities” (p. 29). Vicious impulses and political life are not easily distinguishable. Violent urges arise out of the very foundation of human culture within the family. As well as union within family life, there is also “unconscious hostility,” and “taboos which prescribe, sexual separation, mutual avoidance; the castration complex. Without an understanding of the seamy side of sexuality there is no understanding of politics” (p. 11). Brown’s Freudian analysis shows how antagonism and transgressions are intrinsic to politics; the chances of democratic consensus, collaboration, and cooperation being sustained are not high.

Locke has different expectations. He sees “freedom from absolute, arbitrary power” as integral to human being. “The natural liberty of man,” Locke writes, “is to be free from any superior power on earth,” and to be subject to “no other legislative power but that established by consent in the commonwealth” (John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 1947, p. 132).

This cooperative social compact is not consistent, Brown believes, with other human drives. Human “natural inclination, according to Hobbes and Freud, is murder” (p.

Page 34

16). Sexual desire leads to taboos, to male hostility toward the father; these domestic desires and conflicts are then projected into the political arena, an alliance of sons to topple patriarchal rule periodically ensues, and results in an endlessly repeated cycle of rivalry and hostility. Politics is a theatre on whose stage primal murderous impulses are symbolically and often actually reenacted. Brown transfers the Oedipal family romance to political struggles to understand the complicated fate of liberty.

While Brown’s dark explication of Freudian doctrine does not explain the affectionate bonds of family, civic, and political life, it can be used to understand some of the perennial ferocity of our public dramas. Some might say Brown’s work is more political psychology than psychohistory. However, I believe that what Brown applies to the political revolt against paternalism of 17^th-century England extends to other non-governmental strands of modern life. These are part of what historian Fred Weinstein and sociologist Gerald Platt years ago called the wish to be free (Fred Weinstein and Gerald Platt, The Wish To Be Free, 1969).

Where filial piety and reverence for authority were once the order of the day, they are not dominant anymore. Seeking autonomy and escaping from restrictions laid down by those in power occur in a variety of venues. Luther’s Protestant Revolution challenged the morality and authority of the Church elders. Medieval guilds restrained trade and aspiring capitalists sought to undo their monopolies. Economic liberty was championed over unjust impositions. The early advocates of modern science campaigned against revelation and rationalism; they called for reliance on verifiable experiments rather than church doctrine. In academic life, we often witness one generation of scholars revising the findings of their forefathers.

In family life, parents once arranged marriages. By

Page 35

the beginning of the 19^th century, sons and daughters in much of the West obtained the right to choose their own spouses and sought other ways of escaping parental control. In American political life from the Sons of Liberty to Barack Obama’s hopes that brothers and/or sisters of both political parties could unite against the dominance of special interests, the melodramatic symbolism of good sons and daughters rebelling against bad parental authority has been a recurring motif. Brown’s Freudian analysis then can illuminate the animosity and rivalry beneath the calls for democratic unity. The transformational impulse, which is in part a generational revolt against authority, is present in religion, politics, culture, family, economics, science, and academia.

There are lessons for both psychoanalysts and historians in this account of Norman Brown’s Love’s Body. For psychoanalysts, the meaning of the Oedipus complex is not just within the family of origin and later romantic entanglements. Oedipal dynamics are projected onto all sorts of social phenomena. How the Oedipus complex is manifested depends on a wide variety of socio-cultural mores that vary from time to time and place to place. For the historian, there is also much to learn. There are greater connections between the public and private domains than may be evident and the influence comes from both directions. Historians want to attribute changes in domestic life to social causes. They are less likely to look at the interconnection between perennial psychological issues and changing social realities. An understanding of psychology is needed to comprehend certain types of historical phenomenon. History and psychology, like history and other disciplines, are interdependent. Extending the lessons learned from Freud and Brown can be vital to a renewed psychohistory, the insights of past masters can lead to new ways of looking at perennial and contemporary issues.

Page 36