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The author is Associate Professor of Religion and Psychological Studies at the University of Chicago. In his search for a model of the ‘good man’ in a world of change, he examines,
compares and comments on the works in this field of four men which have made an impact on their compatriots in recent times. These are Phillip Rieff, Norman Brown, Erich Fromm and Erik Erikson. All are described as psychoanalytically oriented ethicists.
Browning looks for the answers to four questions: what is the attitude of each to man in relation to himself, to his social world, to time, and to the other (the stranger). He starts with a non-favourite, Rieff, and ends with Erikson, whom he sees as giving form to the later developments in psychoanalytical thought.
Rieff's vision is of ‘psychological man’, and is based more on his reverence for Freud's ‘exemplary cast of mind and character’ than on the particulars of his doctrine. His good man turns out to be inward-looking, valuing conscious control through insight and the ‘technical reason’ of the ego. He uses human relationships and religious symbols for comfort and balance and is apolitical. He lives in a ‘prudent present’ and learns little about ‘the other’ whether stranger, child (including the child in himself), ancestor or primitive. This good man appears to have hardened into an ‘adult’ in a vacuum and is ‘non-generative’ in consequence.
Brown's good man is ‘Dionysian man’ and is no more liked by the author, as being a regressive phenomenon, particularly from the point of view of the Protestant ideal of progress. Suffering from separation and the threat of death, he is intent on his desire for union with the mother and the acceptance of death. His relationships involve the quest for the lost body of the mother, for which political involvement is a substitute. All religions are disguises for the true religion of the resurrected body, thus the past is recaptured in order to live in the eternal present, and the ‘other’, however diffe