You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The psychological man of the twentieth century emerges as a character type and a determinant of a new Western society. Rieff distinguishes cultural revolution from political revolution in that the latter may alter the social but leave the moral demand system essentially unaltered. The author attempts to draw a tentative evaluation of the cultural revolution which at present is being waged in our part of the world. This study would eventually lead to the development of a sociological theory of culture.
The spiritualizers of the nineteenth century have been succeeded by the psychologizers who place human nature against social order. Psychologizers offer no new scale of values to substitute for all those systems of belief or religion that the author calls cultic therapies of commitment. The modern dissolution of religions as compelling ideologies has brought about a certain disorganization of personality. Literature, sociology and psychoanalysis are deeply involved with the issue of reorganizing the personality without having to resort to a faith (some compelling ideology or set of values of self-integrating communal purpose).
Men have outgrown the old deceptions of good and evil or immorality, as these were defined. These faiths have therefore lost their therapeutic value. The psychological man is trying to develop techniques the only purpose of which is the attainment of a sense of well-being which would not be dependent upon any kind of superior communal striving.
Cultic therapies of commitment offer salvation through limitation of men's possibilities. They have never been interested in searching for new openings into experience. In the classical Christian culture, abstinence from sexual relationships was at the center of its values. Virginity was the specifically Christian virtue. What is revolutionary in modern culture pertains to releases from doctrines of therapeutic deprivation. From renunciatory controls our culture has shifted its main focus to the importance of