Freud's Disciple

LOVE'S BODY by Norman O. Brown. 276 pages. Random House. $5.95.

When someone asks Norman O. Brown to summarize his theories, he points to a colored print of Hieronymus Bosch's 15th century triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which hangs in his office. The first panel is an idyllic study of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The centerpiece shows an orgiastic wrangle of naked men and women. The third panel is a wildly surrealistic version of Hell in which a lizardlike demon sits in judgment, defecating doomed sinners into a hole in the ground.

Most people would say that Bosch was depicting 1) man before the Fall, 2) man sinning, and 3) man paying for his transgressions. But Author Brown, 52, a professor of classics and comparative literature at the University of Rochester, is not most people. He argues that Bosch was an Adamite, a member of the heretical sect that practiced coitus reservatus--sex without orgasm--in homage to the innocent eroticism that Adam knew before the Fall.

That being the case, says Brown, the third panel may really depict Bosch's version of the here and now, while the center scene illustrates the joyful, uninhibited sensuality that the Adamites wanted mankind to practice.

Sexual Golden Age. Brown goes along with Bosch. He believes that mankind's greatest enemy, the skulking killer of laughter and freedom, is sexual repression. He first propounded this thesis in a 1959 book called Life Against Death. That book was largely ignored by both critics and the public. But this new volume, Love's Body, a series of revelatory comments enlarging and elaborating on the same theme, should do much better. For one thing, a few important critics have belatedly reviewed Life Against Death, and the London Observer has placed it on two outstanding-books lists. Now, with more than 50,000 copies in print, it ranks alongside David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd and J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring as one of the underground books that undergraduates feel they must read to be with it.

In Love's Body, Brown cites a long catalogue of thinkers, from Roheim (Aphrodite: or The Woman with a Penis) to Zimmer (On the Significance of the Indian Tantric Yoga), to make his point that mankind is largely unaware of its own desires, is hostile to life, and is bent on self-destruction. Brown's cultists usually interpret his mystical ruminations as an attack on the accepted Christian concepts of history and behavior, but Brown really seems to advocate the complete abolition of 20th century civilization. If all trappings of civilization were put aside, he believes, all repressions would go with them. Man could then attain a golden age of sexuality--not just of the genital variety, which in itself, he believes, imposes a kind of tyranny--but of the uninhibited, innocent sexuality that, according to Freud, controls man's actions from womb to tomb.

Eternal Eros. Pure Freudians are rare nowadays, but Brown is so worshipful that he applies Freudian interpretations where Freud never reached. He justifies this by seeing Freud as a Columbus who had time to go so far on uncharted seas and no farther. Some times Brown makes slight alterations in Freud's pioneering map when he feels it is necessary, but more often he exalts him. Says he in Love's Body: "There is only one political problem in our world today: the unification of mankind. That they may be one--ut unum sint. This is Christ's last prayer before the Crucifixion, which is also the last prayer of the late Pope John; it must be set beside Freud's prayer in Civilization and Its Discontents."

Wrote Freud, in 1930: "Men have brought their powers of subduing the forces of nature to such a pitch that by using them they could now very easily exterminate one another to the last man. They know this--hence arises a great part of their current unrest, their dejection, their mood of apprehension. And now it may be expected that the other of the two 'heavenly forces,' eternal Eros, will put forth his strength so as to maintain himself alongside his equally immortal adversary." Adds Norman Brown: "Freud and Marx and Pope John: the thing is to bring them together."

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