the New Pantagruel

Psychological Man: Eros and Ambition in Democratic Desire

by Stephen L. Gardner

In early June 2006, ISI Books is publishing a reissue of Philip Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic. This will mark the 40th anniversary of the book’s 1966 release. An introduction is included by E. Lasch-Quinn, and there are two critical essays to be included, one by Wilfred McClay, and the following essay by Steven Gardner.

Although Freud denied the divine, he did not deny his own divine capacity—to theorize. Before theorizing was distinguished from theologizing, to theorize was considered a way of seeing God. Now it is considered merely a necessity, something men are compelled to do if they are to become god-like. –Philip Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic

This escape into a conceit of freedom, as if there were nothing sacred, poses a nice contrast with the fact that every great revealer, Freud included, must depend for his creative power on the concealing character of his vision, the blindly obedient eye of it. […] The final truth of Freud’s vision is in the one thing he will not see, except in delicately balanced distortions and at safe distances, hidden behind newly acceptable surrogates. –Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist

Introduction

he figure of Freud is unavoidable for anyone who wishes to take Philip Rieff’s “sociology of culture” seriously. The principal object of this sociology is modern “therapeutic culture,” a moral universe bred by modern democracy and dedicated to the supposedly salvific power of personal freedom as an end in itself. Rieff arrived at the notion of the “therapeutic” through a critical understanding of Freud both profound and original. In Freud he detected a cultural revolution etched in the psychic economy of democratic man. Through the prism of his sociology, psychoanalysis discloses a “symbolic order” of religion inscribed in insoluble conflicts of the modern self. But it is a degraded order, religion having lost its medicinal properties in the public realm with the rise of democracy. Instead of curing the modern individual of inner conflicts by integrating him into a substantive community and lifting him above himself to a higher plane of being, it tormented him and made him sicker.

On Philip Rieff’s telling, Sigmund Freud is, in effect, the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, a paradox not as absurd as it sounds. Freud is the theologian not of orthodox belief, needless to say, but of the primordial power of the sacred as it throws its shadow over a modern psyche that can neither accept it nor throw it off. The inescapable power of the sacred is disclosed paradoxically in its decline, in the traces it leaves in the modern psyche. In early exponents of therapeutic culture such as Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, and D. H. Lawrence, Rieff saw a recrudescence of the sacred that even Freud would be powerless to repress. Freud’s genius did not attempt to resolve definitively the contradictions of the modern psyche but merely to reconcile it to them. His schismatic disciples, though, wanted to invent therapeutic religions based on the redemptive power of “emancipated” desire. Rieff thus rescued the inventor of psychoanalysis from his epigones and therapeutic rivals as well as from his detractors—yet not, perhaps, from himself.

The purpose of this essay is twofold. The first is to describe the sociological type that Rieff introduced in his peerless Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) and made the leading idea of his critique of democratic culture in the present volume, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966). Rieff christens this type “Psychological Man” and contrasts it to other major types supplying Western civilization with its leitmotifs: Greco-Roman Political Man, Jewish and Medieval Religious Man, and early modern Economic Man, the predecessor and condition of Psychological Man. The latter is the lens through which Rieff magnifies and examines the cultural revolution brought on by democracy.

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