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It has been fashionable in recent years for critics of psychoanalysis to disparage what they regard as its covert political biases. In particular, certain feminists and litterateurs have condemned what they construe to be Freud's authoritarianism, misogyny, and commitment to the political status quo of "bourgeois" Western society, while others such as Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown have sought to enlist Freud in the camp of leftist radicalism.
It is rare, however, for a piece of psychoanalytic writing to reveal its author's political prejudices in naked, unabashed form, or to use psychoanalytic ideas in the open espousal of reactionary social views. This, however, is just such a book—one that deserves careful scrutiny as an object lesson in the ingenious manipulation of ideas in the service of ideology.
The author, identified as a Lecturer in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, is clearly conversant with at least the classical psychoanalytic literature, and has dedicated this volume to the late Anna Freud. He attempts nothing less than a psychoanalytic inquiry into the evolution of culture and into its present status as it has been affected by technological change. He musters evidence from a number of sources, including primatology, anthropology, and mythology, as well as psychoanalysis, to support a thesis which is, in effect, an elaboration and evolutionary extension of Totem and Taboo—i.e., that the critical developments in the history of human culture were the results of traumata associated with particular technological advances, each of which led to major changes in family organization and childrearing patterns that had critical effects on the development of the structures of the mind.
He proposes, that is, a "polytraumatic" theory of human social evolution which, he modestly suggests, may be as significant a contribution to science as the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. It would, I think, be best to quot