Philip Rieff "The Triumph of the Therapeutic" (Introduction and Last Chapter)

Toward a Theory of Culture Philip Rieff - 10/24/08

The following is an excerpt from The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud by Philip Rieff (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2006), $18.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

—W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” 1920

Literature and sociology have long supplied eloquent and knowing professional mourners at the wake for Christian culture. After Matthew Arnold, much of modern poetry constitutes an elegiac farewell (mixed with powerful feelings of good riddance) to the religious culture of the West. After Auguste Comte, much of modern sociology has struggled for diagnostic ideas refined and yet wide enough to encompass the spectacle of a death so great in magnitude and subtlety. Now the dissolution of a unitary system of common belief, accompanied, as it must be, by a certain disorganization of personality, may have run its course. The long period of deconversion, which first broke the surface of political history at the time of the French Revolution, appears all but ended. The central symbolism of personal and corporate experience seems to me well on its way to being differently organized, with several systems of belief competing for primacy in the task of organizing personality in the West. Beyond its concern with the dynamics by which Christian culture has been displaced, the present volume will concentrate upon a struggle within the camp of one among these displacing systems of belief; I intend drawing certain implications for the reorganization of Western culture and personality from the divergence between Freud and those of his most powerful successor-critics studied in this book—C. G. Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and D. H. Lawrence. In Freud’s analytic attitude and in the efforts exerted by his successor-critics to go beyond it, to post-communal faiths, there are concentrated some aspects of a theoretical problem that interests me greatly, well beyond the limits of this book: the problem of explaining cultural change. These preliminary studies in the psychohistorical process are not aimed primarily at fellow theorists interested in the problem, but at those troubled readers in whose minds and hearts one culture is dying while no other gains enough power to be born.

As cultures change, so do the modal types of personality that are their bearers. The kind of man I see emerging, as our culture fades into the next, resembles the kind once called “spiritual”—because such a man desires to preserve the inherited morality freed from its hard external crust of institutional discipline. Yet a culture survives principally, I think, by the power of its institutions to bind and loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood—with that understanding of which explicit belief and precise knowledge of externals would show outwardly like the tip of an iceberg. Spiritualizers of religion (and precisians of science) failed to take into account the degree of intimacy with which this comprehensive interior understanding was cognate with historic institutions, binding even the ignorants of a culture to a great chain of meaning. These institutions are responsible for conveying the social conditions of their acceptance by men thus saved from destructive illusions of uniqueness and separateness. Having broken the outward forms, so as to liberate, allegedly, the inner meaning of the good, the beautiful, and the true, the spiritualizers, who set the pace of Western cultural life from just before the beginning to a short time after the end of the nineteenth century, have given way now to their logical and historical successors, the psychologizers, inheritors of that dualist tradition which pits human nature against social order.

Undeceived, as they think, about the sources of all morally binding address, the psychologizers, now fully established as the pacesetters of cultural change, propose to help men avoid doing further damage to themselves by preventing live deceptions from succeeding the dead ones. But, in order to save themselves from falling apart with their culture, men must engender another, different and yet powerful enough in its reorganization of experience to make themselves capable again of controlling the infinite variety of panic and emptiness to which they are disposed. It is to control their dis-ease as individuals that men have always acted culturally, in good faith. Books and parading, prayers and the sciences, music and piety toward parents: these are a few of the many instruments by which a culture may produce the saving larger self, for the control of panic and the filling up of emptiness. Superior to and encompassing the different modes in which it appears, a culture must communicate ideals, setting as internalities those distinctions between right actions and wrong that unite men and permit them the fundamental pleasure of agreement. Culture is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.

A reorganization of those dialectical expressions of Yes and No the interplay of which constitutes culture, transforming motive into conduct, is occurring throughout the West, particularly in the United States and in England. It is to be expected that some instruments appropriate to our inherited organization of permissions and restraints upon action will not survive the tension of fundamental reorganization. But, suppose the tension is driven deeper—so deep that all communications of ideals come under permanent and easy suspicion? The question is no longer as Dostoevski put it: “Can civilized men believe?” Rather: Can unbelieving men be civilized?

To raise again the question of nihilism, as sociologists since Auguste Comte have done, demonstrates a major change in tone: the note of apprehension has gone out of the asking. We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses—except the sense of the past—as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden. Comte would have substituted a religion of humanity for its enfeebled predecessor; Max Weber proposed no substitute religion. Matthew Arnold could still listen for distant echoes of the sea of faith; Yeats knew there was a desert where once that sea might have been. To raise up faith from its stony sleep encourages the possibility of living through again the nightmare history of the last half century. Yeats did not hope for either restoration or parody of the established faiths. Rather, he prayed for a very modern sort of Second Coming, in which men would recover their innocence, chiefly by accepting the fact that it is self-delighting, self-appeasing, self-affrighting—“and that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will.” In our recovered innocence, to be entertained would become the highest good and boredom the most common evil.

The best spirits of the twentieth century have thus expressed their conviction that the original innocence, which to earlier periods was a sinful conceit, the new center, which can be held even as communities disintegrate, is the self. By this conviction a new and dynamic acceptance of disorder, in love with life and destructive of it, has been loosed upon the world. Here literature and sociology converge; for the ultimate interest of sociology, like that of psychiatry when it is not lost in a particular patient, turns on the question whether our culture can be so reconstructed that faith—some compelling symbolic of self-integrating communal purpose—need no longer superintend the organization of personality.

So long as a culture maintains its vitality, whatever must be renounced disappears and is given back bettered; Freud called this process sublimation. But, as that sage among psychiatrists Harry Stack Sullivan once said, “if you tell people how they can sublimate, they can’t sublimate.” The dynamics of culture are in “the unwitting part of it.” Now our renunciations have failed us; less and less is given back bettered. For this reason, chiefly, I think, this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are like Rilke’s panther, forever looking out from one cage into another. Because the modern sense of identity seems outraged by imprisonment in either old church or new cage, it is the obligation of sociologists, so far as they remain interested in assessing the quality of our corporate life, to analyze doctrinal as well as organizational profiles of the rage to be free of the inherited morality, the better to see how these differ from what is being raged against. I shall attend to a few of the exemplarily enraged, and to the sense in which it may be said that they express general sentiments.

If the question “How are we to be saved?” cannot be asked in traditional ways, or need not be asked at all, then it is still the professional obligation of sociologists, who are specially interested in the behavior of collectivities, to investigate the ensuing honest silence in which the communal gods have imitated the most cultivated men. And, indeed, this is the sort of investigation that sociologists have pursued ardently, from the time of Comte through that of Weber to my contemporaries. Perhaps no other problem than that of the changing moral configuration of modern culture has so engaged the interest of sociological theorists.

During the nineteenth century, when sociology helped in a major way to construct the central experience of deconversion toward an anti-creedal analytic attitude, that discipline suffered from a vast overconfidence both about its own advance and about the progress of the culture, which it understood as undergoing varieties of such deconversions. “Progress,” wrote Spencer, “is not an accident, but a necessity. Surely must evil and immorality disappear; surely must men become perfect.” A basic transformation of culture appeared both inevitable and desirable.

Running parallel with and in the opposite direction from the process of deconversion was that process of conversion to a superior system of symbols—Science—which would supply the next predicate for the cultural organization of personality. Comte, for example, understood his own time as one of transition between two cultures. It was more generally proposed by students of our collective condition not merely that the old religious culture was dying but that the new scientific one had quite enough power already to be born. Thus Comte concluded that only because of the “coexistence” of these two cultures did the “grand crisis now experienced by the most civilized nations” persist. Freud was less sanguine. He believed that the crisis of coexistence was probably a permanent mode of the relation between personality and culture.

I question whether the “grand crisis,” our deeper trouble, can be attributed to “coexistence,” as major figures among the nineteenth-century intellectuals, culminating in Freud, insisted. It is less the lingering of the old culture than the emergence of the new that needs diagnosis. In fact, evil and immorality are disappearing, as Spencer assumed they would, mainly because our culture is changing its definition of human perfection. No longer the Saint, but the instinctual Everyman, twisting his neck uncomfortably inside the starched collar of culture, is the communal ideal, to whom men offer tacit prayers for deliverance from their inherited renunciations. Freud sought only to soften the collar; others, using bits and pieces of his genius, would like to take it off. There have been forerunners of this movement—Rousseau, Boehme, Hamann, or Blake. But never before has there been such a general shifting of sides as now among intellectuals in the United States and England. Many have gone over to the enemy without realizing that they, self-considered the cultural elite, have actually become spokesmen for what Freud called the instinctual “mass.” Much of modern literature constitutes a symbolic act of going over to the side of the latest, and most original, individualists. This represents the complete democratization of our culture.

It was in order to combat just such talented hostility to culture that Freud emphasized coercion and the renunciation of instinct as indispensable elements in all culture. Freud was neither an eroticist nor a democrat. His theory of culture depended upon a crossing between his idea of moral authority and an elitist inclination. “It is just as impossible,” he writes, “to do without control of the mass by a minority as it is to dispense with coercion in the work of civilization.” By “mass” Freud means not merely the “lazy and unintelligent,” but, more importantly, those who “have no love for instinctual renunciation” and who cannot be “convinced by argument of its inevitability.” That such large numbers of the cultivated and intelligent have identified themselves deliberately with those who are supposed to have no love for instinctual renunciation, suggests to me the most elaborate act of suicide that Western intellectuals have ever staged—those intellectuals, whether of the left or right, whose historic function it has been to assert the authority of a culture organized in terms of communal purpose, through the agency of congregations of the faithful.

Of course, this suicide is intended only as an exciting pose. Renunciations of instinct, as Freud wrote, “necessarily must remain.” For these renunciations, the individual must be compensated by pleasures at once higher and more realizable than the pleasure of instinctual gratification. In compensation, and in place of where faith once was, men are offered Art and/or Science. It is true that new religions are constantly being born. But modern culture is unique in having given birth to such elaborately argued anti-religions, all aiming to confirm us in our devastating illusions of individuality and freedom. I suspect the children of Israel did not spend much time elaborating a doctrine of the golden calf; they naïvely danced around it, until Moses, their first intellectual, put a stop to the plain fun and insisted on civilizing them, by submerging their individualities within a communal purpose. Now, although there is some dancing again, the intellectuals mainly sit around and think in awe about the power and perversity of their instincts, disguising their rancorous worship of self in the religion of art. Confronted thus with a picture gallery as the new center of self-worship, civilized men must become again anti-art, in the hope of shifting attention toward modalities of worship wholly other than that of self.

In my chapters on Reich and Lawrence, I shall represent some ways in which art and science have come to serve the contemporary aversion to culture. This aversion has grown less naïve, more doctrinal, and therefore more dangerous. For these are doctrines of psychological man—the latest, and perhaps the supreme, individualist—opposed in depth to earlier modes of self-salvation: through identification with communal purpose. Jung is the most interesting case. As a cultural conservative, his psychology is para-religious, striving as it does to re-establish various corporate identities and communal purposes as purely therapeutic devices. In contrast to the conservative Jung, Reich and Lawrence are moral revolutionaries in a more straightforward way: neither proposes to defend common purposes which once persisted through the individualization of those energies called “conscience,” generated for the saving of selves precisely by means of a communal purpose.

The debts incurred by conscience through warped and atrophied communal purposes are now being paid off at a usurious rate of interest. The lingering death of authoritarian love has left behind hatred and violence, twin widows of dead love, free to stimulate in the culturally impoverished or disenchanted energies emancipated from conviction. It is not class or race war that we have to fear so much as deadly violence between the culture classes. But the upper culture classes have already lost this most fundamental of all class struggles by their admiration for the “vitality” of the lower, that vitality being a mirror image of their own earlier dynamism. A social structure shakes with violence and shivers with fears of violence not merely when that structure is callously unjust, but also when its members must stimulate themselves to feverish activity in order to demonstrate how alive they are. That there are colonies of the violent among us, devoid of any stable sense of communal purpose, best describes, I think, our present temporarily schizoid existence in two cultures—vacillating between dead purposes and deadly devices to escape boredom.

A full transition to a post-communal culture may never be achieved. It is a persuasive argument, still, that maintains there are safeguards, built into both human nature and culture, limiting the freedom of men to atomize themselves. Perhaps human nature will revolt, producing yet another version of second nature with which to fend off and curb the vitality of the present assault upon the moralizing functions of our past. Every culture must establish itself as a system of moralizing demands, images that mark the trail of each man’s memory; thus to distinguish right actions from wrong the inner ordinances are set, by which men are guided in their conduct so as to assure a mutual security of contact. Culture is, indeed, the higher learning. But, this higher learning is not acquired at universities; rather, it is assimilated continuously from earliest infancy when human beings first begin to trust in those familiar responses others make to their overtures. In every culture, there stands a censor, governing the opportunity of recognizing and responding to novel stimuli. That governor, inclined always to be censorious about novelty, we may call “faith.” Faith is the compulsive dynamic of culture, channeling obedience to, trust in, and dependence upon authority. With more or less considered passion, men submit to the moral demand system—and, moreover, to its personifications, from which they cannot detach themselves except at the terrible cost of guilt that such figures of authority exact from those not yet so indifferent that they have ceased troubling to deny them.

Now, contradicting all faiths, a culture of the indifferent is being attempted, lately using a rhetoric of “commitment” with which to enlarge the scope of its dynamism. Such a credo of change amounts to a new faith—more precisely, to a counter-faith. This counter-faith intimates the next culture; for faith, or its negative, is always and everywhere the generating and corrupting agent of culture. This is not to say that contemporary culture is corrupt; what appears to some as corruption indicates the generation of yet another culture, for none is immortal. While disassociating itself from the high costs of old doctrinal seriousness and lonely lives, the emergent culture nevertheless produces books and music, art and science, an endless ambiance of fun and boredom—everything in fact, including moral passion and communal purpose, as varieties of an antitypal therapy of self. To call corrupt a culture purchased at lower cost to our nerves, and at larger magnitudes of self-fulfillment, would show a lamentable lack of imagination. The look of the future need not be blank and pitiless. Intelligence may work more efficiently, after all, than compassionate solidarity. Counter-transference may succeed where less calculated loves have failed. If the religious imagination is purblind, and its obstinate visionaries take risks resulting in such personifications of the Parousia as Yeats saw slouching toward Bethlehem, then we will have to make our way to a more pleasant city, using our secular vision of comforts that render all salvations obsolete.

I, too, aspire to see clearly, like a rifleman, with one eye shut; I, too, aspire to think without assent. This is the ultimate violence to which the modern intellectual is committed. Since things have become as they are, I, too, share the modern desire not to be deceived. The culture to which I was first habituated grows progressively different in its symbolic nature and in its human product; that double difference and how ordained augments our ambivalence as professional mourners. There seems little likelihood of a great rebirth of the old corporate ideals. The “proletariat” was the most recent notable corporate identity, the latest failed god. By this time men may have gone too far, beyond the old deception of good and evil, to specialize at last, wittingly, in techniques that are to be called, in the present volume, “therapeutic,” with nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being. This is the unreligion of the age, and its master science. What the ignorant have always felt, the knowing now know, after millennial distractions by stratagems that did not heighten the more immediate pleasures. The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized, now not in the West only but, more slowly, in the non-West. The Orient and Africa are thus being acculturated in a dynamism that has already grown substantial enough to torment its progenitors with nightmares of revenge for having so unsettled the world. It is a terrible error to see the West as conservative and the East as revolutionary. We are the true revolutionaries. The East is swiftly learning to act as we do, which is anti-conservative in a way non-Western peoples have only recently begun fully to realize for themselves.

II.

In the regular acting out of mandatory therapies of commitment built into the charter of his society, man, as a creation of affectionate and censorious authority, once organized for himself modes of willing obedience, or faith, in which he found his sense of well-being and, also, his freedom from that singular criterion. Culture without cultus appears, in almost all historical cases, a contradiction in terms. Within the mechanisms of cult, culture was organized, consisting mainly of ritual efforts to elicit and produce stable responses of assurance to more or less fixed wants—fleshly and spiritual, as it used to be said. There was, then, a standard range of expectations from which reassurance was elicited, even though the responses of the eliciting agencies, rendered “sacred” by their supreme function of organizing a life worth living, might at any moment offer admonitions rather than consolations to the seeker. Thus the sacred socializing agencies composed a moral order.

One main clue to the understanding of social organization is to be found in its symbolic of communal purpose; this, in turn, operates through a social system enacting that symbolic in a way at once admonitory and consoling. Each culture is its own order of therapy—a system of moralizing demands, including remissions that ease the pressures of communal purposes. Therapeutic elites before our own were predominately supportive rather than critical of culture as a moral demand system. Admonitions were the expectable predicates of consolations; that is what is meant, nowadays, by “guilt” culture. Whenever therapeutic elites grow predominately critical then a cultural revolution may be said to be in progress. Ours is such a time. The Occident has long been such a place.

Until the present culture rose to threaten its predecessor, our demand system could be specified by the kind of creedal hedges it raised around impulses of independence or autonomy from communal purpose. In the culture preceding our own, the order of therapy was embedded in a consensus of “shalt nots.” The best never lacked binding convictions, for they were the most bound, mainly by what they should not do—or even think, or dream. “Thou shalt” precipitated a sequence of operative “shalt nots.” Cultic therapies of commitment never mounted a search for some new opening into experience; on the contrary, new experience was not wanted. Cultic therapy domesticated the wildness of experience. By treating some novel stimulus or ambiguity of experience in this manner, the apparently new was integrated into a restrictive and collective identity. Cultic therapies consisted, therefore, chiefly in participation mystiques severely limiting deviant initiatives. Individuals were trained, through ritual action, to express fixed wants, although they could not count thereby upon commensurate gratifications. The limitation of possibilities was the very design of salvation.

To the ironic question “And, being saved, how are we to behave?” Western culture long returned a painfully simple answer: “Behave like your Savior.” Christian culture, like other organizations of moral demand, operated, however imperfectly, through the internalization of a soteriological character ideal carrying tremendous potentials for fresh intakes of communal energy; the highest level of controls and remissions (which together organized systems of moral demands) experienced an historical and individualized incarnation. Such euhemerist processes may have been indispensable to the vitality of the old culture. To adjust the expression of impulses to the controlling paragon, or character ideal, defines the primary process in the shaping of our inherited culture; the arts and sciences define the secondary process, in which exemplary modes of action are extended further, into a central moralizing experience, thus transforming individual into institutional action.

In the classical Christian culture of commitment, one renunciatory mode of control referred to the sexual opportunism of individuals. Contemporary churchmen may twist and turn it while they try to make themselves heard in a culture that renders preaching superfluous: the fact remains that renunciatory controls of sexual opportunity were placed in the Christian culture very near the center of the symbolic that has not held. Current apologetic efforts by religious professionals, in pretending that renunciation as the general mode of control was never dominant in the system, reflect the strange mixture of cowardice and courage with which they are participating in the dissolution of their cultural functions. Older Christian scholarship has known better than new Christian apologetics.

At bottom, only a single point was dealt with, abstinence from sexual relationships; everything else was secondary: for he who had renounced these found nothing hard. Renunciation of the servile yoke of sin (servile peccati iugum discutere) was the watchword of Christians, and an extraordinary unanimity prevailed as to the meaning of this watchword, whether we turn to the Coptic porter, or the learned Greek teacher, to the Bishop of Hippo, or Jerome the Roman presbyter, or the biographer of Saint Martin. Virginity was the specifically Christian virtue, and the essence of all virtues; in this conviction the meaning of the evangelical law was summed up.

Historically, the rejection of sexual individualism (which divorces pleasure and procreation) was the consensual matrix of Christian culture. It was never the last line drawn. On the contrary, beyond that first restriction there were drawn others, establishing the Christian corporate identity within which the individual was to organize the range of his experience. Individuality was hedged round by the discipline of sexuality, challenging those rapidly fluctuating imperatives established in Rome’s remissive culture, from which a new order of deprivations was intended to release the faithful Christian believer. Every controlling symbolic contains such remissive functions. What is revolutionary in modern culture refers to releases from inherited doctrines of therapeutic deprivation; from a predicate of renunciatory control, enjoining releases from impulse need, our culture has shifted toward a predicate of impulse release, projecting controls unsteadily based upon an infinite variety of wants raised to the status of needs. Difficult as the modern cultural condition may be, I doubt that Western men can be persuaded again to the Greek opinion that the secret of happiness is to have as few needs as possible. The philosophers of therapeutic deprivation are disposed to eat well when they are not preaching. It is hard to take Schopenhauer at his ascetic word when we know what splendid dinners he had put on, day after day, at the Hotel Schwan in Frankfort.

The central Christian symbolic was not ascetic in a crude renunciatory mode which would destroy any culture. Max Scheler described that culture accurately, I think, when he concluded that “Christian asceticism—at least so far as it was not influenced by decadent Hellenistic philosophy—had as its purpose not the suppression or even extirpation of natural drives, but rather their control and complete spiritualization. It is positive, not negative, asceticism—aimed fundamentally at a liberation of the highest powers of personality from blockage by the automatism of the lower drives.” That renunciatory mode, in which the highest powers of personality are precisely those which subserve rather than subvert culture, appears no longer systematically efficient. The spiritualizers have had their day; nowadays, the best among them appear engaged in a desperate strategy of acceptance, in the hope that by embracing doctrinal expressions of therapeutic aims they will be embraced by the therapeutics; a false hope—the therapeutics need no doctrines, only opportunities. But the spiritualizers persist in trying to maintain cultural contact with constituencies already deconverted in all but name. Even the Roman Catholic clergy must now confront their own constituencies, as their Protestant and Jewish colleagues have had to do long before. Nevertheless, the religious professionals have reason to hope for survival, precisely because they have come to be aware of their situation and are seeking ways to alter it, in the direction of a fresh access of communal purpose, centered in the Negro protest movement, or in some other movement of protest against the effects of that very dead culture which they think, by protesting so belatedly, to survive.

The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves. Many spokesmen for our established normative institutions are aware of their failure and yet remain powerless to generate in themselves the necessary unwitting part of their culture that merits the name of faith. “Is not the very fact that so wretchedly little binding address is heard in the church,” asked Karl Barth, rhetorically, in 1939, “accountable for a goodly share of her misery—is it not perhaps the misery?” The misery of this culture is acutely stated by the special misery of its normative institutions. Our more general misery is that, having broken with those institutionalized credibilities from which its moral energy derived, new credibilities are not yet operationally effective and, perhaps, cannot become so in a culture constantly probing its own unwitting part.

It may be argued against this position that Western culture was never deeply believing—at least not in the Christian manner which, in a number of its most persuasive varieties, encouraged the seeking after individual salvations at the expense of a collective one. Even so, Christian culture survived because it superintended the organization of Western personality in ways that produced the necessary corporate identities, serving a larger communal purpose institutionalized in the churches themselves. Ernst Troeltsch was correct in his institutional title for the moral demand system preceding the one now emerging out of its complete ruin: a “church civilization,” an “authoritarian and coercive culture.” What binding address now describes our successor culture? In what does the self now try to find salvation, if not in the breaking of corporate identities and in an acute suspicion of all normative institutions?

Western culture has had a literary canon, through which its character ideals were conveyed. What canons will replace the scriptural? None, I suppose. We are probably witnessing the end of a cultural history dominated by book religious and word-makers. The elites of the emergent culture—if they do not destroy themselves and all culture with a dynamism they appear unable to control—are being trained in terminologies that have only the most tenuous relation to any historic culture or its incorporative self-interpretations.

It needs to be noted that in particular on the geographic margins of our moral demand system, and in the Orient, the rejection of religious culture, even in principle, is far from complete. By contrast, the Communist movement may be viewed as culturally conservative, belonging to the classical tradition of moral demand systems. The revolution in the West is profoundly cultural whereas that in the East, withal its defensive doctrine of the cultural as a mere superstructure of the techno-political class system, has been less certainly so. Of the two, our revolution is, I think, the more profound one. Communist culture, no less than the Christian, is in trouble; it cannot stave off a revolution coming out of the West, in part as a repercussion, in that it renounces the renunciatory mode of Communism. The Russian cultural revolution is already being signaled by the liberation, however grudgingly, of the intellectuals from creedal constraints.

The new religiosity is remissive. It represents no mere literary challenge, as in the time of the Enlightenment. The would-be instinctual Everyman and his girl friend are the enlightened ones now; a Freud would be quite superfluous, specially in view of the fact that he sought to find ways other than neurotic of supporting renunciations.

Indeed, Freud has already receded into history. His problems are not ours. The psychoanalytic movement, no less than its rationalist predecessors, has been ruined by the popular (and commercial) pressure upon it to help produce a symbolic for the reorganization of personality, after the central experience of deconversion, of which Freud was the last great theorist, had been completed. Fixed as they are at the historical stage of deconversion, responsible psychotherapists continue to struggle confusedly to discover their own proper attitude toward renunciatory moral demand systems even as the normative character of their abandonment has altered both the theoretical and working conditions of clinical practice. So confused, psychiatrists and clinical psychologists, in their hospitals and consulting rooms, stand almost as helpless as their functional predecessors and sometime cultural opponents, the clergy. But other therapeutic elites are not in a better condition, as I have tried to bring out more elaborately in the final chapter.

III.

Our cultural revolution does not aim, like its predecessors, at victory for some rival commitment, but rather at a way of using all commitments, which amounts to loyalty toward none. By psychologizing about themselves interminably, Western men are learning to use their internality against the primacy of any particular organization of personality. If this re-structuring of the Western imagination succeeds in establishing itself, complete with institutional regimens, then human autonomy from the compulsions of culture may follow the freedoms already won from the compulsions of nature. With such a victory, culture, as previously understood, need suffer no further defeats. It is conceivable that millennial distinctions between inner and outer experience, private and public life, will become trivial. The individual heart need have no reasons of its own that the corporate head cannot understand and exploit for some augmentation of the individual’s sense of well-being. Thinking need not produce nausea or despair as its final answer to the assessment of communal purpose because men will have ceased to seek any salvation other than amplitude in living itself. Faith can then grow respectable again, as one entertainable and passing personal experience among others, to enhance the interest of living freed from communal purpose. The significance Marx attached to the division of labor for the organization of society may have bearing in our emergent culture on the variety of entertainments. To paraphrase Marx and Engels, all morality, be it ascetic or hedonistic, loses its force with a therapeutic outlook.

Like its predecessors, the emergent culture must formulate its own controls, no less than the preceding one defined its own remissions; it is in the process of doing so already. We are, I fear, getting to know one another. Reticence, secrecy, concealment of self have been transformed into social problems; once they were aspects of civility, when the great Western formulary summed up in the creedal phrase “Know thyself” encouraged obedience to communal purposes rather than suspicion of them. Self-knowledge again made social is the principle of control upon which the emergent culture may yet be able to make itself stable. Indeed, with the arts of psychiatric management enhanced and perfected, men will come to know one another in ways that could facilitate total socialization without a symbolic of communal purpose. Then the brief historic fling of the individual, celebrating himself as a being in himself, divine and therefore essentially unknowable, would be truly ended—ending no less certainly than the preceding personifications of various renunciatory disciplines. Men already feel freer to live their lives with a minimum of pretense to anything more grand than sweetening the time. Perhaps it is better so; in cultures past, men sacrificed themselves to heroic and cruel deceptions, and suffered for glories that once mirrored their miseries. Not until psychological men overcome lives of squalor can they truly test their assumption that the inherited ideals of glory are no longer required. Affluence achieved, the creation of a knowing rather than a believing person, able to enjoy life without erecting high symbolic hedges around it, distinguishes the emergent culture from its predecessor. The new anti-culture aims merely at an eternal interim ethic of release from the inherited controls.

Who is to say that these controls are eternal? I do not think so; even Christian theologians no longer say so with any confidence—and some are saying, rather, that new releases are holier than old controls. Yet even among churchmen there are those who understand anew that their religion is nothing if not the organization of communal purpose and the conservation of inherited culture; they therefore place desperate hope in the movement of which Dr. Martin Luther King is chief spokesman. Increasing numbers of churchmen have allied themselves with the Negro religious leader in what they have reluctantly understood must be a common struggle, for the rebirth of their moral demand system, against vastly superior numbers of nominally Christian (or Jewish) barbarians. This slowly reforming Christian cultural elite, apparent fellow travelers of the movement of Negro non-violent protest but in reality its critical aggregate, may yet save the United States from a barbarism long evident in the conduct of their own churches’ members, in ordinary American commercial activity, and in the extraordinary incivilities of the American social manner. Yet there may be little power of Christian renewal in the movement of Negro protest. For the American Negro has been a focus for releasing images in the dominant white culture. Affluent white society, as it grows more affluent, may draw nearer their idea of the Negro as a model enjoyer of the relaxed life, but that idea is profoundly prejudicial to the renewal sought by the religious leadership, black and white.

The present releases, in growing more dominant, must achieve institutional affirmations of the prevalent feeling. Critically to elaborate such affirmations has been the historic function of Western intellectuals. But, not yet able to produce imagery that would mark a trail for many memories, contemporary writers and artists, all those intellectuals slightly ahead of their time, mainly produce moods of solicitude about themselves, as if they could not bear the weight of the freedom from their inherited role upon which they themselves insist. This temper against moralizing has its justifications. The Germans recently manipulated all corporate identities and communal purposes with a thoroughness against which the analytic attitude may be our surest protection.

Under such protection, it may not be possible to organize our culture again as an unwitting dynamic of moral demands claiming the prerogatives of truth, exercised through creedally authoritative institutions. Where family and nation once stood, or Church and Party, there will be hospital and theater too, the normative institutions of the next culture. Trained to be incapable of sustaining sectarian satisfactions, psychological man cannot be susceptible to sectarian control. Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased. The difference was established long ago, when “I believe,” the cry of the ascetic, lost precedence to “one feels,” the caveat of the therapeutic. And if the therapeutic is to win out, then surely the psychotherapist will be his secular spiritual guide.

IV.

However one may judge the validity of the multiple truths at which science and history arrive, my interest is in their social viability. The next culture may be viable without being valid; on the other hand, the old faiths could be judged valid even by those who consider them now no longer viable. In order to attend fairly to the competing beliefs and unbeliefs, one must struggle to use neutral terms. A sociological vocabulary keeps a certain distance from both new permissions and old inhibitions. This distance is the only possible justification for such jargon as I have used in the present volume; except as a device for gaining perspective, sociological jargon is a curse, first of all upon the intellectual lives of sociologists. Sociological writing itself is ineluctably part of the psychohistorical process, engaged as it is in persuasive redefinitions of action that alter the action.

Can the present releases become the predicates of new controls? Viewed traditionally, the continuing shift from a controlling to a releasing symbolic may appear as the dissolution of culture. Viewed sociologically, the dominance of releasing motifs, in which the releasers themselves evolve as new modes of control, with patterns of consumption as our popular discipline, implies a movement of Western culture away from its former configuration, toward one in which old ideological contents are preserved mainly for their therapeutic potential, as interesting deposits of past motifs of moralizing. No imperative can then develop a monopoly on sentiment, because none will be backed by a deeply ingrained system of inner ordinances.

I do not refer to a “sensualist” culture but to one that prepares for adaptability in matters of the “spirit.” There is no special affection reserved in this volume for the superiority usually claimed for “spiritual” over “sensual” concerns. In the emergent culture, a wider range of people will have “spiritual” concerns and engage in “spiritual” pursuits. There will be more singing and more listening. People will continue to genuflect and read the Bible, which has long achieved the status of great literature; but no prophet will denounce the rich attire or stop the dancing. There will be more theater, not less, and no Puritan will denounce the stage and draw its curtains. On the contrary, I expect that modern society will mount psychodramas far more frequently than its ancestors mounted miracle plays, with patient-analysts acting out their inner lives, after which they could extemporize the final act as interpretation. We shall even institutionalize in the hospital-theater the Verfremdungseffekt, with the therapeutic triumphantly enacting his own discovered will.

The wisdom of the next social order, as I imagine it, would not reside in right doctrine, administered by the right men, who must be found, but rather in doctrines amounting to permission for each man to live an experimental life. Thus, once again, culture will give back what it has taken away. All governments will be just, so long as they secure that consoling plenitude of option in which modern satisfaction really consists. In this way the emergent culture could drive the value problem clean out of the social system and, limiting it to a form of philosophical entertainment in lieu of edifying preachment, could successfully conclude the exercise for which politics is the name. Problems of democracy need no longer prove so difficult as they have been. Psychological man is likely to be indifferent to the ancient question of legitimate authority, of sharing in government, so long as the powers that be preserve social order and manage an economy of abundance. The danger of politics lies more in the ancient straining to create those symbols or support those institutions that narrow the range of virtues or too narrowly define the sense of well-being; for the latter seems to be the real beatitude toward which men have always strained. Psychological man, in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic use.

Culture as therapy becomes realizable in part because of the increasing automaticity of the productive system. But without the discipline of work, a vast re-ritualization of social life will probably occur, to contain aggression in a steady state and maintain necessary levels of attention to activity. The rules of health indicate activity; psychological man can exploit older cultural precepts, ritual struggle no less than play therapy, in order to maintain the dynamism of his culture. Of course, the newest Adam cannot be expected to limit himself to the use of old constraints. If “immoral” materials, rejected under earlier cultural criteria, are therapeutically effective, enhancing somebody’s sense of well-being, then they are useful. The “end” or “goal” is to keep going. Americans, as F. Scott Fitzgerald concluded, believe in the green light.

I am aware that these speculations may be thought to contain some parodies of an apocalypse. But what apocalypse has ever been so kindly? What culture has ever attempted to see to it that no ego is hurt? Perhaps the elimination of the tragic sense—which is tantamount to the elimination of irreconcilable moral principles—is no tragedy. Civilization could be, for the first time in history, the expression of human contents rather than the consolatory control of discontents. Then and only then would the religious question receive a markedly different answer from those dominant until recently in our cultural history.

Chapter 8: The Triumph of the Therapeutic

Philip Rieff 1966

There is a whole civilization to be remade. - Camus, Notebooks¹

Lawrence, Reich, and Jung made representative efforts to go beyond the analytic attitude. They exhibit in their writings, various uses of faith in a culture populated increasingly by pyschological men. Each attacked the connection between morality and a culture about which they expressed strong disapprovals.

To speak of a moral culture would be redundant. Every culture has two main functions: 1) to organise the moral demands men make upon themselves into a system of symbols that make men intelligible and trustworthy to each other, thus rendering also the world intelligible and trustworthy; 2) to organise the expressive remissions by which men release themselves, in some degree, from the strain of conforming to the controlling symbolic, internalised variant readings of culture that constitute individual character. The process by which a culture changes at its profoundest level may be traced in the shifting balance of controls and releases which constitute a system of moral demands.

Those who transmit the moral demand system are a cultural elite, exemplifying those demands in their character and behaviour. But an elite cannot merely teach or write of the moral demand system without acting out some part of it. However the labour of exemplary enactment is divided, no culture survives long without its elite, those cadres which demonstrate the particular balance of control and remission in culture itself.

No culture of which we are aware has yet escaped the tension between the modalities of control and release by which every culture constitutes itself. Cultures achieve their measure of duration in the degree that they build releasing devices into the major controls. These are the devices that modern psychotherapy seeks to develop; it is this development which gives psychotherapy its present importance in the history of our culture.

There remains a tension between controls and releases, even when the releases are devised cleverly (or dialectically) enough to allot to the controls their superordinate function. A cultural revolution occurs when the releasing or remissive symbolic grows more compelling than the controlling one; then it is that the inherent tensions reach a breaking point. Roman culture may have been moving toward such a breaking point when Christianity appeared, as a new symbolic order of controls and remissions.

At the breaking point, a culture can no longer maintain itself as an established span of moral demands. Its jurisdiction contracts; it demands less and permits more. Bread and circuses become confused with right and duty. Spectacle becomes a functional substitute for sacrament. Massive regressions occur, with large sections of the population returning to levels of destructive aggression historically accessible to it. At times of impending transition to a new moral order, symbolic forms and their institutional objectifications change their relative weights in that order. Competing symbolisms gather support in competing elites; they jostle each other for priority of place as the organisers of the next phase in the psychohistorical process.

In all cultures before our own, the competing symbols took the form of languages of faith. A language of faith is always revelatory, communicating through some mouthpiece of the god-term a system of interdicts – a pattern of “thou shalt nots,” or taboos. The language of science is not revelatory but analytic; for this reason, the scientist can never claim that his own terms have a prophetic function. His work is non-moral, that is, without interdictory purpose. So far as the therapist casts himself in the role of a social scientist (e.g. Freud), he seeks to analyse interdictory symbolisms, not assert them. Yet, as we have seen, modern therapists must use a language of faith. So far as their languages are “scientific” and yet moralising, they depend upon counter-interdictory symbolism, “heretical” or negative conceptions of the interdictory symbolism itself, releasing rather than controlling. Jung was a prophet of the “subterranean God”, as opposed to the “Heavenly Father.” Reich's energic “Orgone” opposes all “spiritual” principles. A language of faith may be, therefore, controlling or releasing, interdictory or counter-interdictory. It contributes vitally to what Manheim called “collective definitions,” not mere hypotheses or replaceable theories but rather a “source of collective habits and actions.”

A language of hypothesis is culturally neutral. Commitment to hypothesis is made to be abandonable. The scientific psychologist, as clinician, aspires to be neither interdictory nor counter-interdictory. Because the clinical attitude aspires to moral neutrality, its therapeutic effect is culturally dubious. Clinicians continue to vacillate between interdictory and counter-interdictory symbolisms, depending upon a diagnosis of the individual patient's own conditional relation to these symbolisms. No culture has yet produced a third type of symbolic – one that would embrace that historic contradiction in terms: a “scientific culture.” If, and only if, a neutralist symbolic becomes operative, may we speak of a scientific culture. For the present, clinical psychologists often try to produce an interdictory effect with counter-interdictory analytic symbols, an ambivalence Freud himself did not have the genius to overcome, except at the expense of an already weakened interdictory symbolic. Neither Jung nor even more conservative therapists have known how to resolve this ambivalence except by tempering their radical attitude toward culture with an obdurate conservatism toward social order.

Every system of moral demands must operate within some social order. No less its predecessors, the neutralist symbolic would have to create institutions appropriate to its expression, and even enter into shifting class alliances. As in the history of the Christian culture, a symbolic may be carried to power by a class very differently positioned in the social structure from that class in which it originated.

The next culture, with its component symbols, and with institutions embodying these symbols arranged in a normative working order, probably will require, in order to establish itself, (1) a new institutionalised inequality of demand and remission, (2) an ideal character type designated in these studies as the “therapeutic”. Under foreseeable ideological and technological conditions, this emerging moral ideal is unlikely to be a workingman; on the contrary, the therapeutic will be a man of leisure, released by technology from the regimental discipline of work so as to secure his sense of well-being in highly refined alloplastic ways.

The term “inequality” of demand and remission is used advisedly. Every culture has hitherto required that the modalities of control dominate, that expressions of the “unwitting part of it” be disciplined and rendered institutional. Whenever a releasing symbolic increases its jurisdiction to the point where it no longer serves to support the incumbent moral demands, but rather contradicts them, that culture is in jeopardy. Such freedoms were signatures on the death warrant of previous cultures.

At the close of a culture, the releasing modalities themselves begin to look and sound like controls. They are harbingers of the next culture. Some fresh imbalance is required before the succeeding system of culture can be born, bringing into being a new symbolic of expectations, and, moreover, institutions appropriately organised to enact those expectations, translating the high symbolic into rules of social conduct. In the realm of culture, equality of controlling and remissive functions, rather than inequality, is the mother of revolution. When the cross becomes a symbol of power or beauty, suppressing the historical reminder of a particularly brutal instrument of humiliation and death, then its own moral authority, under the Christian rubric of “cross-bearing,” is threatened. Remissive components within some psychohistorical moral demand system may be underdeveloped, or overdeveloped. All symbolic and institutional devices balancing remission and control must be examined within multiple perspectives of historical change before the examiner can arrive at any judgment about the fixed moralities of a culture. But precisely those fixed moralities cannot remain permanently fixed.

There are particular historical moments of imbalance in a dialectical order of controls and releases. The imbalances are subject to “correction” in the very process of maintaining themselves. Thus even the most stable moral demand systems are inherently liable to change. The primary process of cultural change refers to shifting jurisdictions over categories of social action by controlling and remissive symbolisms of communal and individual purposes.

One distinctive characteristic of modern remissive symbolisms, such as have been examined in the preceding three chapters, is that none has yet had the power to organise the erotic illusions that hold together aggregates of men for communal purposes. Doctrines of release in a culture cannot, of themselves, develop into new modalities of purpose unless they are subtly transformed and institutionally elaborated, as for example in the case, now all but closed, of Christianity.

In modern culture, there is a major question about the motor by which new purposive energies might be generated. Only with respect to nature does physical science produce transformative control devices. With respect to culture, it is still unclear whether the social sciences will produce control devices, as Comte hoped, or in what sense they may help create and install fresh convictions of communal purpose. Scientific psychotherapies often consist in attacks upon control-release systems which have failed as motors of communal purpose, according to criteria set up by patient, profession, or society. A judgment by psychotherapy upon itself as a remissive device itself in modern culture depends on how it conceives a preferable control-release system. Yet this is precisely the level of conceptualisation with respect to its functions within a culture which psychotherapy tries, when understood as a science, to avoid.

We have some clues about the functional imperatives of psychoanalysis – desired and realised – in modern culture. Freud considered that his symbols were exempt from the cultural process by which remissive modalities become controlling, although rationally ordered ego controls are intended to operate remissively. Being analytic rather than remissive, the Freudian doctrine was never to be put in systemic service to either interdiction or release, under pain of ceasing to be analytic. Because Freud's doctrine was anti-communal, it could be used as a theoretical basis for elaborating a strategy of self-realisation for the therapeutic. Americans, in particular, have managed to use the Freudian doctrine in ways more remissive than he intended, as a counter-authority against any fresh access of communal purpose.

By mid-century, the controls and the remissions from those controls have grown so nearly equal that the one works no better than the other. More precisely, the old established controls are enunciated so vacuously, and in such hollow voices, that they sound like remissions,' and the remissions have become so elaborately stated, by some of the most charming voices in our culture, that they seem rather like controls. Such are the contrarieties of a revolutionary epoch. No one knows the internal voice, or external look, of the new devices of control and release that will succeed our failing ones. That even Freud expected them indicates the hold of the inherited configuration of culture over even the most radically enquiring minds.

On the other hand, a heavily remissive psychotherapy may become a permanent institutional fixture of modern culture – a kind of secular methodism for those who remain obstinately uncomfortable in their pleasures. Structurally induced conditions, such as the decline of an ethic of work, may, like individual neuroses, seek their own pathological resolution. The new saving symbolic may never arrive, although from time to time, in various places, its arrival has been announced and new remissions experimentally tried. What appears now fairly certain is that the control-release system inherited from an older, mainly agrarian, culture into our technologically advanced, urban one cannot renew itself. Whether or not an innovation will occur is likely to be determined by the requirements of affluence accumulating in the hands of the therapeutic himself. With their secondary needs automatically satisfied, men may no longer need to have something in common, as an end, to love. The organisation of indifference may well succeed the organisation of love, producing a culture at lower cost to individual energies. Indeed, by this reorganisation the interior life would cease to press its sickening claim to superiority.

The strange new lesson we have begun to learn in our time is how not to pay the high personal cost of social organisation. The revolution continues in a remissive direction, beyond that rationalism Max Weber called “disenchantment,” toward the dissolution of old systems or moral demand, with their requirements of almost total social co-operation in order to survive hard reality in a world characterised by scarcity. The present swing in the direction of release may not be orbital but more extended and historically more permanent, based on the automaticity and ease with which an infinity of created needs can now be satisfied.

Remissive motifs other than sexual have dominated earlier phases of the psychohistorical process, expressing the ideological breakup of great communities, but always at the same time preparing the ground for fresh internalisations of control. But the modern cultural revolution has built into itself a unique prophylaxis: it is deliberately not in the name of any new order of communal purpose that it is taking place. On the contrary, this revolution is being fought for a permanent disestablishment of any deeply internalised moral demands, in a world which can guarantee a plenitude produced without reference to the rigid maintenance of any particular interdictory (and counter-interdictory) system. This autonomy has been achieved by Western man from common and compelling mobilisations of motive. Stabilising the present polytheism of values, there is the historic deconversion experience of the therapeutic, proposing an infinity of means transformed into their own ends.

Interdictory systems are still deeply rooted within us, of course. A cultural revolution does not occur as a discernible event, or as a plurality of events, nor does it occur swiftly within a few years, as does a political revolution; only afterwards, when the revolution itself has been incorporated into the new system of controls, do such mythic condensations of cultural change occur. Moreover, in significant ways, a cultural revolution may run with or against the indicated direction of political change. For example, the first Christian culture revolution accommodated itself from the beginning to the ruling classes of its time. Christian doctrine began by distinguishing between culture and politics, concentrating its efforts at change upon the former, thus preparing a theoretical way for the Constantinean accommodation.

Cultural revolution is usually distinguishable from political revolution, which may assault the social order and leave the moral demand system fundamentally unaltered. Our cultural revolution has been made from the top, rather than the bottom. It is anti-political, a revolution of the rich by which they have lowered the pressure of inherited communal purpose on themselves. Seen in this way, the Negro protest movement in the United States will have to become more profoundly cultural if it is to succeed politically. Yet the American Negro is himself limited in his demands by the successful revolution of the rich. Being an American, the poor Negro believes that he too can live by bread alone. What the Negro asks, essentially, is a place at the American trough. But to gain that place, he is constrained to ask for something more than his share of places. His moralisings become an embarrassment, for they hint at the acquisition of something greater than a place in a vaster suburbia.

Indeed, cultural revolutions before our own have asserted some limit on the race for status and satisfaction, and have promoted interdicts to limit and displace the dynamics of acquisitive appetite. Western culture has been dominated by an ascetic modal personality. Even the Calvinist bourgeois was to have his capital as if he had it not. Ours is the first cultural revolution fought to no other purpose than greater amplitude and richness of living itself. Is this not what is meant by the “revolution of rising expectations”?

Our revolution is more Freudian than Marxist, more analytic than polemic, more cultural than social. There is no reason why, as the reluctant leader of moral revolutionaries, Freud should have threatened the social order. Of course, he knew that a revolution, to be thorough, must transform the property relations in society. Nevertheless, his diagnosis of our “communal neurosis” takes no account of property relations. Culture, not the social order, takes the point of Freud's analytic attack, as it does of Jung's reconstructions in terms of religious psychology. Attacking the culture, such insights as the subjects of this volume propose could be adapted as safeguards against all inherited therapies of commitment. For the culturally conservative image of the ascetic, enemy of his own needs, there has been substituted the image of the needy person, permanently engaged in the task of achieving a gorgeous variety of satisfactions.

What is the logic of choice by which one symbolic begins to displace another? How do god-terms change? The present volume is not meant to be a history of our cultural revolution. That work will have to be done in monographic bits and pieces. We are too close to the subject. Moreover, a theory of the psychohistorical process has not yet been worked out. What has been atttempted here, rather, is a tentative prospect of the revolution, drawing first some implications from various attacks on the failing cultural super-ego. Nor is this meant to be a defence of that inherited culture. Under the circumstances of a shifting balance of controls and releases, the classical internalisations of social authority, as an unconscious conscience, may be indefensible anyway. That is has been so ardently defended indicates not the ternal necessity of an unconscious conscience but rather that the initial cost of the modern cultural revolution has been a feeling of symbolic impoverishment.

The religiously inclinded therapists are themselves engaged in the absurd task of trying to teach contented people how discontented they really are. Many would-be patients are recovering, it seems, from a pervasive feeling of impoverishment, so emphatically stated in the literature of the nineteenth century and of the first half of the twentieth. One main lesson is being more and more widely learned: that all compelling symbols are dangerous, threatening the combined comfort of things as they are. Even the religiously inclined grow more diffuse in their self-demand, praising “faith in life.” And those without even this general faith – as, for example Samuel Beckett, with his effort to be an artist working ultimately with a silent mankind, because the “silent God” has been used up – are hailed as most religious because they can find nothing to obey or await. All binding engagements to communal purpose may be considered, in the wisdom of therapeutic doctrines, too extreme. Precisely this and no other extreme position is stigmatised as a neurotic approach to paroxysms of demand for a more fundamental revolutionary dogma. It is in this sense that the contemporary moral revolution is anti-political; more precisely, it serves the purposes of the present anti-politics, representing a calm and profoundly reasonable revolt of the private man against all doctrinal traditions urging the salvation of self through identification with the purposes of community.

In its reasonableness, the triumph of the therapeutic cannot be viewed simply as a break with the established order of moral demand, but rather as a profound effort to end the tyranny of primary group moral passion (operating first through the family) as the inner dynamic of social order. Crowded more and more together, we are learning to live more distantly from one another, in strategically varied and numerous contacts, rather than in the oppressive warmth of family and a few friends.

A culture of contacts is, at last, an historically accomplishable fact. Everything conceivable can be made universally available. Variety has become a term of control as well as remission. Confronted with the irrelevance of ascetic standards of conduct, the social reformer has retreated from nebulous doctrines attempting to state the desired quality of life to more substantial doctrines of quantity. The reformer asks only for more of everything – more goods, more housing, more leisure; in short, more life. This translation of quantity into quality states the algebra of our cultural revolution. Who will be stupid enough to lead a counter-revolution? Surely, even the rich are now emancipated enough from ascetic symbol systems to concede more of everything to everyone, without serious loss to themselves. They cannot be threatened by a doctrine that merely asks for more, for this presupposes that quantity determines the quality of life – and this very assumption expresses the religion of the rich.

To ever-diminishing restrictive effect, lip service is still being paid to the ascetic principle that “more” does not translate into “better”. Nevertheless, our suspicions fade that the quality of life may not be a synonym for the standard of living, after all. At least, a high standard of living, in our post-ascetic culture, is considered the permitting condition for attaining a higher quality of life. That “more” equals “better” has been an idea supported by the failure of the Russian revolution to say anything more original. Carried though it was by the Marxist-Leninist doctrine, that most recently ascendent variety of the Western commitment therapy, the Russian revolutionary movement attracted many of the religious by its promise to change fundamentally the self-serving character of modern social relations. Militant socialism developed in its most powerful variety as a secular version of militant asceticism. Viewed in terms of its place in the history of culture, the Russian revolution carried a conservative bias, even in its apparently releasing initial phase, preaching the ethic of self-salvation through identification with communal ends in secular terms. The present course of the Russian Communists appears set toward an ironic convergence of a culture growing less conservative and politics growing less radical. An understanding of the dynamics of such a convergence would illuminate at once the study of both culture and politics.

Cultural revolutions may be viewed more as a typical recurrences rather than as unique occurences. Like a planet, a culture may move around in an elliptical course, slowly changing its moral direction. In this classical view, all revolutions are repetitions; certainly, there is nothing surprising in the advent of a revolution. It is to be expected, like a change of seasons. But there is another view: that a culture may reach a definite close. This may well be the closing time of ascetic culture in the West; releasing modalities have enlarged their jurisdiction, demobilising moral motivation, opening up possibilities suppressed during the long tutelary struggle of that culture against nature. In fact, Western culture may now be so divorced from nature that revolution has lost its earlier cyclical implication. A truly unique revolution would be one that would not generate any compelling therapies of commitment. In our urban technological culture, it seems both archaic and dispensable already to organise men into compassionate communities by what Freud called “erotic illusions.” Instead, the therapeutic is more adapted to organisation into administrative units, with what used to be called “indifferentism,” or, more recently, “nihilism,” as the general rubric describing social emotion. Not trained in a symbolic of obedience – indeed, entertaining the category merely as a convenience – Western man could be free at last from an authority depending upon his sense of sin. Even now, sin is all but incomprehensible to him inasmuch as the moral demand system no longer generates powerful inclinations toward obedience or faith, nor feelings of guilt when those inclinations are over-ridden by others for which sin is its ancient name.

Compassionate communities, as distinct from welfare states, exist only where there is a rich symbolic life, shared, and demanding of the self a hard line limiting the range of desires. The symbolic impoverishment of the Western communities cannot be corrected by analysis, nor by analyses of other analysts. Rather, the present correction of this impoverishment amounts to an effort to change the criteria of impoverishment. Perhaps the issue thus formulated can help us judge more accurately the continuing changes in the character of our culture.

The history of a culture – and of its social organisation – may be written as a dialectic of the shift from evaluative to expressive symbolisms. Ethical despair becomes, in such a history, a transitional feeling. Earlier transitions have been felt as painful. In the degree that an ethos of control (that is, an evaluative symbolic) loses force, just so does a pathos of release (that is, an expressive symbolic) revenge itself in social analogues of individual symptoms. But from the classical sublimative organisation of motive, our culture has veered toward an expressive-impulsive organisation. The way in which the inherited culture was structured by internalised love and externalised hatred describes the ambivalence in its therapies of commitment. Opposing commitments depend upon the same dual therapeutic modes.

Parelleling those commitments that are the symbolic structure of community is the social structure. No therapy before the analytic has produced salvations or cures except through a social system penetrated by organisational commitments – these commitments legitimising the order of vocation and personal relation from which the sense of community is derived. We are privileged to be partipant observers of another great experiment by Western humanity upon itself: an atttempt to build upon the obsolescence of both love and hatred as organising modes of personality.

In every vital community there has been a cultural elite, sometimes distinct from political or social elites, carrying doctrines of communal purpose as its motivating characteristic. The test for the cultural elite has been its capacity to express, in a symptomatic language of faith, the self-effacing moral demands. Western society nowadays scarcely even pretends to produce a cultural elite in the sense indicated; it boasts many highly educated and gifted people, but none are therapists of commitment.¹¹ No successor therapists to the religious professionals have emerged. It is conceivable that therapists of commitment grow less and less necessary to the imaginations modern men have of each other.

A cultural elite may have either a critical or supporting relation to the upper classes, politically or economically defined; historically, that relation has been supporting in the main. By “cultural elite” are not meant intellectuals, necessarily; rather, such an elite may be either anti-intellectual or fiercely intellectual, aesthetically sophisticated or hostile to the arts. The significance of these or other characteristics can only be established when the contents of the moral demands shaping the elite's general plan of life and its impress upon the social class structure have been studied. That intimate connections develop between social classes (that is, aggregates defined in terms of property and status), on the one hand, and culture classes (that is, aggregates defined in terms of moral demand), on the other, has been a proposition accepted in general by liberals and conservatives alike, as well as by democratic and aristocratic theorists. It is characteristic of power to be associated with culture. To rule is to become exemplary or, at least, to sponsor cadres practicing the praise of rulers as far as decorum, in that culture, would allow.

Yet, there have been periods in history when a cultural elite, opposing refinement with aesthetically coarse moral demands, has risen in critical passion from both the lower social orders and from disaffected members of the higher.¹² Culture in its primary sense, a moral demand system, is not the equivalent of a technical education or of aesthetic refinement. To take yet another step in the development of this historical perspective: Culture classes have been ambivalently related to social classes throughout history. The upper social classes rarely preserve a strict moral demand system. Associated with them, an elite culture class grows less distinct. Moral reform, no less than social, must push up from below. Even in Nietzsche's pejorative variation on this theory, the dialectic holds: the cultivated, with their high arts and literature, are too comfortable to deploy righteous indignation; and the lowly are sunk too far into their peculiar resorts of comfort. Moralising belongs to the ambitious middle range of the Western social structure, if it may be properly located anywhere at all. But the proper locus is more ideological than structural, it seems. Not class position but creedal preoccupation, as an alternative to refinement and aesthetic perception, is the driving force of moralising movements. In all the writings of Calvin there is scarcely a reference to the beauty of the landscape surrounding Geneva. He was far too busy regulating the manners of Genevans, including the exact length of the ladies' skirts.

That social and culture classes may be ambivalently related is, of course, an empirical generalisation, and thus subject to a run through the gauntlet of historical objections. But, until practically our own time, this generalisation can be substantiated over and over again. Some evidence of sustained opposition between social classes and culture classes may be sited.

In the seventeenth century, some artisans and sections of the lower middle social classes in Western Europe developed powerful motifs of control, complete with normative institutional modes for exercising those controls, as in the case of the English Puritans or the Dutch bibliolaters. The leadership of these movements entertained the ambition of a cultural elite, offering their resolutions of ambiguous moralities as fresh options for the organising of consensus. On the other hand, at times a group or movement competing for elite status would withdraw from the struggle to alter the culture system, so as to maintain the purity of the moral demand for itself alone. This describes the basic difference between sects of withdrawal and sects of militancy in Western cultural history. Yet even sects of withdrawal may preserve a certain militancy and aspirations of catholicity. By maintaining their community as a whole as an exemplary institutional embodiment of their proclaimed moral demand system, the withdrawn sect would preach a prescriptive remedial lesson to the society external to it; this society is treated pejoratively as “the World”, an immoral system of remisssions, as opposed to the correct conduct of life.

So far as it offers counter-interdicts, aiming first at release from (or radical reform of) the established moral demands, a challenging elite¹³ appears deviant or even downright immoral to the cultural establishment which is carrying out the maintenance functions of the dominant demand system incorporating the official scientific wisdom of the period. Yet, by offering modes of release, a challenging cultural elite may become the spiritual preceptor of the moral demand system that is thus being born. There is a hint of this ambition in Freud, when he proffered, as a successor to both the established psychiatrists and to the pastors of the older dispensation, the psychoanalyst in the role of “secular spiritual guide”.

Who are those who now are spiritual preceptors? The affluent and powerful often have not been the morally supportive class. What happens if an entire society grows rich, technologically loaded with bribes, and is dominated by preoccupations that may be best defined as anti-creedal? What cadres offer a powerful rationale of abandonment of the disintegrating cultural super-ego?

Certainly, Freud hoped the psychoanalyst would be the one to have some legitimate claim to spiritual preception. Yet Freud was reluctant to tamper radically with the cultural super-ego. As we have seen,¹⁴ his orthodox successors have become even more strictly client-centred.

In the sequence of Western spiritual preceptors, the psychotherapist came before the professional revolutionary. Committed Communists claimed they possessed a spiritual perception that was in fact the propaedeutic necessary to the creation of a new moral order. And before the Communists, there were, of course, the Christians. Indeed, the entire effort of Christian socialism can be best explained as an attempt to renew the spiritual perceptions of the Christian doctrine by tranfusions from outside – from a competing and hostile therapy of commitment. The tragicomic fate of Christian socialism was that it became more aesthetic than ascetic. In another respect, the failure of Christianity resembles that of Communism: both have been wrecked by success; neither could resist incorporation into social orders that were partly their own creation. In the doctrine of the Church, however, Christianity still preserved its capacity for spiritual perception. That the Church is, supposedly, in but not wholly of this world supplied a critical principle of renewal which is basic to all Christian therapies of commitment. The Church, as an institution, is vital only inasmuch as its symbolic is detached from the established social order, thus preserving its capacity for being the guardian critic of our inherited moral demand system.

The Leninist doctrine of the Party maintained no doctrinal reserve about the social order, over which it developed a stewardship in theory and practice more complete than that ever claimed or practiced by the churches. No director of the faith has proved less perceptive spiritually than the professional revolutionary turned Party functionary. Having lost the nimbus of resistance to the precedent social order, he operates more in terms of bureaucratic self-interest than in those of communal purpose. More precisely, Party interest becomes identical with communal purpose. The Gletkins have no gods, and usually cannot be driven therefore to personal despair by a Party which devours its own members. For those in search of new gods, after 1914-1919, the attractive pull of the professional revolutionary was accounted for, probably, by a residue of his earlier charisma as a spiritual preceptor proposing, in his political acts and thought, a new moral order. Nowadays, that charisma is rarely to be found, because the Communist moral order appears anything but new. As a Party functionary, the Western or Russian Communist no longer represents a cultural elite. Nevertheless, the Marxist political functionary remains culturally conservative – he is a “Hebraist”, as compared with the “Hellenes” that dominate the national politics of the West.

There persists a revolutionary impulse throughout the West; but it is cultural rather than political, and therefore more difficult to describe than the political revolutions of the East. That revolutionary impulse is in evidence not only in the writings of those specimen therapeutics examined in preceding chapters but in the writings and conversations of significant numbers of the educated. One British technologist has enunciated the doctrine of the therapeutic in a language so simple and clear that it is well worth while to quote him at length, to stand for countless other utterances heard and read: “Any religious exercise is justified only by being something men do for themselves, that is, for the enrichment of their own experience.” Attached as he is to the word “Christian,” the writer even seeks to make Jesus out to be a therapeutic, as Lawrence and Reich did before him. “Jesus,” we learn, “used the word 'God' to . . . refer to the vital energy of personal life itself, the energy of love.” Living in a culture no longer religious, “people who centre their lives on ritual, sacrament, and constant reference to some supposed plan underlying experience are just as cut off from vital personal contact with others . . . as is the individual neurotic.” The technical psychological term, this writer concludes, following Freud, for “such a way of living,” carried over from the previous culture, is “paranoid fantasy-obsession.”

What, then, should churchmen do? The answer returns clearly: become, avowedly, therapists, administering a therapeutic institution – under the justificatory mandate that Jesus himself was the first therapeutic. For the next culture needs therapeutic institutions. “Society as a whole needs patterns of community life which will help ordinary people to fulfill themselves in much the same sort of way that psychiatrists help those who are specially troubled. Building up such community life would surely be a directly Christian activity, in my sense; but the training for those who are needed for it would be rather different from any sort of training clergy at present receive.” The writer understands that churchmen will be able to become professional therapeutics “only if they break away radically from almost all, if not all, of their traditional religious pursuits.” Here speaks the therapeutic, calmly confident that community life no longer needs “some supposed plan underlying experience,” that is, no longer needs doctrinal integrations of self into communal purposes, elaborated, heretofore, precisely through such “supposed plans.” It is in “traditional religious puruits” that such plans are reinforced and the self integrated into a saving corporate purpose. Without such incorporating plans, the self has found fulfillment in an even more elusive condition.

Both East and West are now committed, culturally as well as economically, to the gospel of self-fulfillment. Yet neither the American nor the Russian translations of the gospel can be transformed into a spiritual perception. Both the United States and the Soviet Union are cultures of the new-rich – the United States, perhaps, even more so that the Soviet Union. Though it has begun to catch up culturally, the Soviet Union remains the more conservative system, with the Party, directly descended from the Church, striving to maintain a doctrine which asserts, at once, its social viability and truth. The Communist therapy of commitment must contend precisely with the new-rich of its own creation. In the United States, the rich have already adopted, it appears, the character structure of the therapeutic. No exemplary social stratum, above, restrains its elaborate and infinite sense of personal need. On the contrary, the Soviet Union and the United States are engaged in a common race to appeal to, and increase, the new-rich.

The leisured, or non-working, classes are the main resource from which the therapeutic, as a character type, is drawn. Emancipated from an ethic of hard work, Americans have grown morally less self-demanding. They have been released from the old system of self-demands by a convergence of doctrines that do not resort to new restrictions but rather propose jointly the superiority of all that money can buy, technology can make, and science can conceive.

Certain naïve ascetic doctrines, which once did contain spiritual perceptions of great depth, such as that of holy poverty, now embarrass the churches, competing as they do for pride of place in a culture of affluence. Such perceptions are practically taboo subjects, specially among Americans, except negatively, when clergymen complain that they do not receive salaries commensurate with their status as professional men. Nor does the present ferment in the Roman Catholic Church seem so much like a renewal of spiritual perception as a move toward more sophisticated accommodations with the negative communities of the therapeutics. Grudgingly, the Roman churchmen must give way to their Western laity and translate their sacramental rituals into comprehensible terms as therapeutic devices, retaining just enough archaism to satisfy at once the romantic interest of women and the sophisticated interest of those historical pietists for whom the antique alone carries that lovely dark patina they call faith.

The religious psychologies of release and the social technologies of affluence do not go beyond release and affluence to a fresh imposition of restrictive demands. This describes, in a sentence, the cultural revolution of our time. The old culture of denial has become irrelevant as a manipulable experience to a world of infinite abundance and reality. Carrying along inapplicable residues of “mystery” culture into the present scientific one, the ascetic labors in vain before the triumphant therapeutic to define a positive spiritual perception – except rejection of the therapeutic ethos. On the other hand, the therapeutic has arisen out of a rejection of all therapies of commitment, precisely by persuading halfway the recalcitrant among those who submitted to the old commitment therapies that hey have acted out denials of knowledge and pleasure that not longer contribute to their spiritual health but, rather, to their mental dis-ease. So recently deconverted, the once-committed is unlikely to preach seriously against himself, except in terms of a historical drama, so that the therapeutic may enjoy his triumph. The obsolescent old-model man, representing a dying culture of scarce goods and absent gods, is losing popularity, even as a subject of didactic art. Ingmar Bergman's tormented souls are a bore, even more so that Antonini's; at least the movie-Italians have progressed beyond the fantasy-obsessions of a disintegrating moral demand system for which Bergman has developed his image of the “spider-God.” The anxieties of the ascetic were fit subjects for the art of, say, William Hale White, or George Eliot. The boredom of the therapeutic fascinates Antonini, Fellini, and the nouvelle vague – because they cannot escape the dying clutch of the old culture. American novels still agonise about pleasure as a way of life – but it is the agonising, not the pleasure, which seems fraudulent.

In summary, each major contending cadre requires analysis in terms of its relation to contemporary character ideals. The deconverted is affected as much as the recalcitrant by the withdrawal of motive from economic and political life as the permitting condition of any spiritual perception that may develop to alter, toward a more operable imbalance, the present balance of controls and remissions. Thus far, no fresh carriers of a renunciatory symbolic have appeared able to establish themselves as serious claimants to a cultural elite status in Western society. Such a claimant may appear tomorrow, to capture the public modes of obedience; the dynamics of modern culture, however, militate against this possibility. There can develop no new (or renewed) system of interdicts from the therapeutic parody of a moral demand system; in consequence , all attempts at connecting the doctrines of psychotherapy with the old faiths are patently misconceived. At its most innocuous, these psychotherapeutic religiosities represent a failure of nerve by both psychotherapists and clergymen.¹⁷ Finally, the professionally religious custodians of the old moral demands are no longer authoritative; although they still use languages of faith, that mode of moral communication has lost its ties with either the controls or the remissions valid among their adherents; preaching, which once communicated revelatory messages, is a dead art, wrapping empty packages in elaborate solecisms. The preachers have little of either controlling or releasing functions and retain therefore little power seriously to affect or alter the emergent control system. It is in this sense that the Christian and Jewish professionals have lost their spiritual preceptorships. Any functional equivalents to the old internal interdicts, whatever they may be, struggling to stabilise themselves and as yet without institutional conveyances, take on meaning insofar as they prove capable of providing a trained prudence to the therapeutic, anxious to increase his psychological capital without incurring dangerous risks. ¹⁸

After the clergy, the political revolutionaries, and the psychoanalysts – there remain the artists and the scientists, as serious aspirants to the title of secular pastoral guide.

The scientists are a curious case. By tradition and training they are intractably modest. Claims to spiritual perception rarely occur explicitly in their work. Profoundly as that work has affected modern culture, the scientists have been non-combatants in the culture class war. With rare exceptions, they still accept the Ritschlian distinction between statements of fact and judgments of value. They make fact statements; the task of making value judgments belongs to other specialists, those elites that won exclusive custody over culture even as they gave up pretending they had authoritative knowledge of nature.

Notice the context within which Albrecht Ritschl, following Kant, had made his famous distinction. In Ritschlian theory, value judgments can only be made in reference to a communal perspective. According to Ritschl, Christian perceptions make sense only within the framework of a historic Christian community. The modern scientist has had quite another conception of himself; qua scientist, he has tried to extricate himself from all moral demands except those imposed upon him by the internal logic of his transformative endeavor directed against the natural world, all designed to overcome those gross miseries and necessities nature imposes upon mankind. The scientific community aspires to be supra-cultural, and is not qualified therefore to supply a creedal dynamic to that new laity, the non-scientists. In this sense, the scientific endeavor in its entirety, representing as it does the effort to create a non-moral culture, embodies the moral revolution. With a commitment that is strictly vocational, the scientist personifies the latest phase in the Western psycho-historical process, one that refrains from laying down guidelines of moral intervention for the society as a whole. Whatever his professed intention, the scientist acts, therefore, as a spiritual preceptor to modern man. The therapeutic has everything – and nothing – to learn from the scientist, for in the established sense of the word, the scientist, as such has no culture.¹⁹

The modern artist, too, has had the role of a spiritual preceptor thrust upon him. And, indeed, because modern artists move in the direction of release, there is a religious pretension inherent in the work of the moderns, reacting as they do to a situation in which nature has been taken out of their purview by science and technology. They have deliberately created alternative rea

lities to those put in jeopardy by science. The inherent interest of modern art is not chiefly in experimenting with the representation of some microscopic reality, or in some correspondence with a presumed macrocosm, but, more importantly, in the production of a picture that would suggest, within its frame, the multiple and alternative realities through which the modern may enliven an existence divorced from both nature and faith. The artist represents what we are trying to become, the shape we are trying to take in our effort to escape the pressures of timeworn inwardness while also escaping the bondage of new internalities. It is for his professional effort at unfixed externalisations, valid first to his own psychological economy, that the modern artist has been handed a spiritual preceptorship. By exploring the range of presentable realities, quite apart from the “natural” or the “socially acceptable,” the modern artist has broken his vocational connection with moral demand systems, beginning with that of the middle classes. In achieving an impersonality no less impressive than that achieved by modern science, painting, in particular, augured the emancipation from the classical moral demand system, rejecting the person as an object of aesthetic interest and concentrating on the self-fulfilling function of the work of art itself. Thus the art work has become, in a strict sense, a therapeutic mode.

To this quality of impersonality in our future togetherness, reference was made repeatedly, throughout the present volume, beginning with the Introduction. Freud had proposed this rejection of attachment to an inner experience no less than Lawrence. The latter wrongly accused Freud of encouraging a new outbreak of that sickly modern religiosity by which modern men turn further in upon themselves, either under the cover of Christian psychologising or under that of humanism. This further turning in is precisely the opposite of what the present volume intends to convey by the therapeutic. His sense of well-being operates under the aegis of a technology aimed ultimately at his own emotions, so as to destroy the tension between the inner and outer life.

If yesterday's analytic thrust is to become part of tomorrow's cultural super-ego, it must take on an institutional form, defend itself not only as true but also as good and dig into personality as a demand system. Yet it is precisely this that the new arts and social sciences, in their very nature, cannot accomplish. They cannot create the ardent imaginations necessary to the forming of new communities; although they may prepare the way for a new public mode of existence, for the present they make life all the more private. Like the old cultural super-ego, the negative communities of the next culture, so far as we can discern them in this respect, rarely utter hosannas; therapeutics, not yet settled in their mode, speak to each other mainly in harsh tones. Our spiritual preceptors practice their unkindnesses upon each other. A spiritual perception must have built into its releasing insight a vision of new stability, a promise of some settling pattern or supposed plan, and not merely the energy to reject the prevailing cultural super-ego; that latter sort of wisdom comes more and more “naturally” in contemporary culture. The “id” has always had the “energy”; the cultural “super-ego” has aged into a fussy critic of the energetic. This moral revolution is occurring by default, not so much under the leadership of id-energy doctrines as under the bankruptcy of super-ego energies. It is the importance of the cultural super-ego rather than the potency of the id that is the crucial fact of our time. For this reason, however, “nothing” can succeed the imperative mood – nothing except the therapeutic mood itself.

Historically the Christian spiritual perception, which had attacked the established moral demands of its time, took on an institutional form, and, moreover, had a revolutionary effect on some aspects of the social system – for example, on the status of women. At the same time, the Church was incorporated into the social system and survived, powerful and yet defeated in its ideal intention by that very incorporation. Something similar may happen to the present revolutionary effort to transform the culture. Psychotherapy may be arrested at its present stage by a reconciliation with contemporary remissive religiosity, sanctioned mainly as a post-religious science of moral management. This seems to be the present state of psychotherapy in America.

There is ambiguity in the very function of psychothereapy as the chief among those arts interpreting the deconversion experience of Western man to himself. To investigate all instances of failed mastery of moral energy raises the possibility of controlling the moralising process itself. Among those who followed Freud were some more willing to entertain the possibility of such moral revolution. The range and quality of these varying theories, Jung's included, cannot be easily dismissed. Each constructed an explicit doctrine of release from the failing old controls upon some aspect or other of their intellectual encounter with Freud. None worked out the doctrine consequentially enough to become founder of a new dispensation.

At this time, cultural revolutionaries can be described mainly in terms of their ideas about the culture against which they are reacting. Revolutions have been known to press in either direction, toward control or release. Most revolutions restore an imbalance of controls and releases at a new point. It is a telling indication of Freud's own ambivalence that the revolutionaries who most interested him were the great protagonists of control, not of release. Freud's revolutionary attack on the European Christian culture as a system of moral demands makes more sense, however, when understood in the context of his larger theory of the dynamics of culture as a system of unwitting renunciations. Seen thus, his therapeutic interest is revolutionary, a tremendous argument for expressive remissions from failed controls, restabilising the moral demands that are culture at a fresh locus of imbalance between controls and remissions. In this aspect, Freud represents the climax of the nineteenth-century tradition of scientific prophecy as a functional substitute for religious prophecy. His was the subtle climax of a rationalism in which a more modest moral demand system could use a prophylactic analysis intended to prevent an oppressive elaboration of those controls, which are always irrational precisely in their destructively reactive production of counter-imbalancing (that is, neurotic) remissions. Freud's analytic intricacies thrust the culture toward an apparent simplicity of controls, while elaborating the range of remissions., thus exactly reversing the normative order. Proscriptive symbols give way to prudential ones' but the prudent man cannot, as Freud thought, take his morality for granted – for that security derives from the proscriptive dynamics upon which he had trained his great analytic weaponry. What is moral is not “self-evident”, as Freud declared in a letter to James Putnam. What is moral becomes and remains self-evidently only within a powerful and deeply compelling system of culture.

The new releasing insights deserve only a little less respect than the old controlling ones*. One may expect official clamour for a renewal of the old demand system, which may well have no further plans of self-integration, but function instead to disguise a terrifying ignorance of the distinction between our present inwardness and ancient faith. The therapeutics must be understood precisely in their efforts to go beyond the analytic attitude, as the articulate representatives of a sharp and probably irreparable break in the continuity of the Western culture. None of their doctrines promises an authentic therapy of commitment to communal purpose; rather, in each the commitment is to the therapeutic effort itself. As Jung insisted, the therapeutic cannot claim more than a private value for his moral science. The therapy of all therapies is not to attach oneself exclusively to any particular therapy, so that no illusion may survive of some end beyond an intensely private sense of well-being to be generated in the living of life itself. That a sense of well-being has become the end, rather than a by-product of striving after some superior communal end, announces a fundamental change of focus in the entire cast of our culture – toward a human condition about which there will be nothing further to say in terms of the old style of despair and hope.

Notes

1. That he tried seriously and with high artistry to clarify a post-Christian symbolic that could combat the emergent anti-culture, measures the great contemporary importance of Albert Camus as a writer. Camus accepted the possibility that spiritual preceptorship in modern culture had fallen to the literary intellectual. Without a language of faith, Camus wrote in a mood far more “conservative” than that of many advanced and enlightened Christians, who have a genius for accepting almost any position, so to say, that is grossly anti-Christian or simply vulgar – especially in sex and art. On sexual life, Camus wrote, in his Notebooks, that it “was given to man, perhaps, to turn him aside from his true path. It is his opium. In it everything goes to sleep. Outside it things take on life again. At the same chastity puts an end to the species which is, perhaps, the truth. Sexuality leads to nothing. It is not immoral, but it is unproductive. One can give oneself to it for a time when one does not wish to produce. But chastity alone is connected with personal progress. There is a time when sexuality is a victory – when it is released from moral imperatives. But it quickly becomes a defeat afterwards – and the only victory is won over it in its turn: that is chastity.” On poverty, Camus is nearer the classical tradition than the modern therapeutic. “What can a man better desire than poverty? I have not said misery nor the hopeless toil of the modern proletariat. But I do not see what more can be desired than poverty linked with an active leisure.” (See “A Writer's Notebook,” Encounter, Vol. 24, No. 3, March, 1965, pp 28-29)