"Brown's work will grow in importance as the poverty of the Enlightenment
comes to be more and more widely acknowledged."--Christopher Lasch
Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, 2d, ed., with an Introduction by Christopher Lasch (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U. Press, 1959, 1985) ("We must be prepared to analyze clinically as a neurosis not only the foreign culture we dislike, but also our own." Id. at 10.).
Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1967, 1990) ("Freud's myth of the rebellion of the sons against the father in the primal, prehistoric horde is not a historical explanation of the origins, but a supra-historical archetype; eternally recurrent; a myth; an old, old story." Id. at 3. "Fraternity comes into being after the sons are expelled from the family; when they form their own club, in the wilderness, away from home, away for women. The brotherhood is a substitute family, a substitute woman--alma mater." Id. at 32.).
Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1991) (From "Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind: "[M]ysteries are unpublishable because only some can see them, not all. Mysteries are intrinsically esoteric, and as such are an offense to democracy: is not publicity a democratic principle? Publication makes it republican--a thing of the people. The pristine academies were esoteric and aristocratic, self-consciously separate from the profanely vulgar. Democratic resentment denies that there can be anything that can't be seen by everyone; in the democratic academy truth is subject to public verification; truth is what any fool can see. This is what is meant by the so-called scientific method;: so-called science is the attempt to democratize knowledge--an attempt to substitute method for insight, mediocrity for genius, by getting a standard operating procedure. [Query: Is that not the heart of today's so-called "best practices"?] The great equalizers dispensed by the scientific methods are tools, those analytical tools. The miracle of genius is replaced by the standardized mechanism. But fools with tools are still fools, and don't let your Phi Beta Kappa key fool you. Tibetan prayer wheels are another way of arriving at the same result: the degeneration of mysticism into mechanism--so that any fool can do it. Perhaps the advantage is with Tibet: for there the mechanism is external while the mind is left vacant; and vacancy is not the worst condition of the mind. And the resultant prayers make no futile claim to originality or immortality; being nonexistent, they do not have to be catalogued or stored." Id. at 1, 3-4.).
