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Poets have often used the imagery of the curative and purity-restoring act of touching the earth. For psychoanalysts, such an act has always
taken the form of returning to clinical work. Without it, we are in danger of being carried away by the impulse to theorize a poetic vision of man and his mission. Browning's book makes such an attempt to envision the 'good man' by extracting principles of ethics from the writings of Philip Rieff, Norman Brown, Erich Fromm, and Erik Erikson. A sympathetic reading of his effort reveals the enormous difficulties he encountered. Trying to obtain a psychoanalytic view of morality and the virtuous man, he bases his work on writers who, in at least three instances out of four, have left clinically validated psychoanalytic theory behind them and ventured into a kind of freewheeling theorizing.
Philip Rieff is a sociologist and humanist who apparently feels that he can approach psychoanalytic theory as if it were a smorgasbord from which he can pick those tidbits that please him. He creates a theoretic construct of 'psychological man' based on a theory of society as it is now and on his utopian vision of how it should be. In his future civilization, the psychotherapist and his rich patrons will be the elite who will develop a new culture, a new symbolism, and a new and better character type. The latter, based on Rieff's idea of psychoanalytic insights, will be 'psychological man'.
In order not to be weighed down in his flight of fancy, Rieff discards such excess baggage as ego psychology, parts of instinct theory, and a few other aspects of 'Freudian mythology'. He concludes that present-day man (called Economic Man) has been strangling all decent political and public life in the Western world and that he will be replaced by Psychological Man. As Browning describes his characteristics, he will be
… dominated by ego, consciousness or technical reason. He will be honest and decent although not slavishly dominated by his supereg