Love, Hate And Greed Without The Eros And Thanatos Theme


EXPANSIONS UPON THE POEM'S THEME


Norman Brown's book LOVE AGAINST DEATH must have impressed Honors Professors at the University of Michigan a lot in the late 1960's.

Not only was I taught it in a memorable course on "Honors Introduction to Political Science", but later at UVa I met a gal who had graduated a semester early before me in Honors English who had also been much influenced by it.

And presumably that was the source of the use of the term "polymorphous perversity" in Samuel Delaney's autobiographical HEAVENLY BREAKFAST about life in a commune in New York City in 1968-69.

   I have since deduced that it was the antidote that non-psychology professors wanted to give us against the mental infection of Freudian analysis then spreading from a section of Michigan's Psychology Dept.

Brown argued against Freud's Eros vs. Thanatos (Sex-urge vs. Death-wish) dichotomy that Freud had seriously erred when he said that civilization could not be based on people merely enjoying touch, and that it was necessary that people genitalize their physical pleasure with each other.

There has been so much teaching of Freud's solution by pro-sexites, and routine lumping by anti-sexites of everybody who is not with them as far against them, that few people seem to be able to imagine that I basically prefer petting to penetrating perhaps with procreation excepted.

As for THE WAYS AND POWER OF LOVE by Pitirim Sorokin (whom I found myself calling "Piotr", which I think is the familiar of affection form), I was very surprised to meet on a bench in front of Blacksburg's Art Armory a guy who said his father, a professor here, was a specialist on Sorokin.

I had learned of him only through stray references by thought-radicals to that as a great book, and when I checked it out of the Graduate Library Stacks (where it seemed to have sat for years unread) my reaction was that it was going in the right direction but wasn't good enough to recommend to others.

I doubt it will be hard for my readers to think of people mostly dominated by one of these three motivations for living: hate, love, or greed.

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