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… after all, analysis does not set out to abolish the possibility of morbid reactions, but to give the patient's ego freedom to choose one way or the other. FREUD (3).
Morality is a product of threat and promise. The human condition continués to make experiences of threat in the infant inevitable and forces him to seek compensating promises of consolation, restitution, and deliverance. These threats and promises are compounded by the pressures of culture (parents and society) and by the inventive powers of human fantasy. The aim of psycho-analytic therapy and theory is to help the person reduce the inner burden of those fantasy threats and promises which he himself discovers to be objectionable. With these awarenesses fresh, he can make freer, more realistic choices and decisions in his actual life of love and work. This is Freud's accomplishment and the special ethic of his life-work.
Professor Rieff has studied all twenty-three volumes of Freud's writings in search of moral implications and their applications to some concerns of the sociologist: politics, religion, art, authority, ideology, science-making, personal and social ethics, and 'the emergence of psychological man'. Rieff incisively demonstrates the influence of Freud's ethic of ego freedom upon current attitudes in these problem-areas. Social progress, which has made psycho-analysis possible, has also provided new personal freedoms of choice; yet Rieff stresses the pathology in the social scene. He exposes popular trends that treat the ethics of the psycho-analytic therapy setting as though they applied totally to all life situations. His success here is a contribution, a partial fulfilment of one of Freud's hopes and predictions, that his theory of therapy for individual development may serve as a 'substructure' for building the humanistic sciences—wherever man's intention, his impulse, fear, wish, or ambition, is reflected.
From 1905 to his death in 1939, Freud frequently made forays into humani