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In The Psychology of Power, R. V. Sampson argues that the forces of dominance and submission—learned in the home during childhood, extended in marriage through the subjugation of women, and ideologically supported by the “realist” tradition in political theory (Hobbes, Machiavelli, Morgenthau)—energize man's historical inhumanity to man and the present state of international terror and aggression.
With respect to Freudian theory, Sampson may be called a moral revisionist. Where he supports Freud, he does so because of the egalitarian implications of orthodox psychoanalysis:
Infantile love, thus conceived, is not a love between equal people, but a love based on authority. It is the task of maturity to outgrow this relation of subservience into the spontaneity of adult love, at once free and equal.
Where he rejects Freud, he does so because of analytic assumptions about man's instinctual predisposition to aggression. What Sampson will not accept is the assertion that
The aggressive instinct, evident in the will to subjugate the will of another to one's own purpose, lies at the root of every human relationship with the possible exception of the mother's love for her son.
That which in Freud conforms to the political theory of John Stuart Mill and the tradition of Christian pacifism is sustained and that which deviates is rejected.
Having stated the theoretical (moral) limitations of the psychology of power, Sampson shows how the paternal misuse of power damaged the lives of some eminent Victorians: Mill, Butler, and Elizabeth Barrett. Sampson's analyses of the neurotic components in the familial environments of these figures is sound, and one would hardly guess from these pages that he sees himself as departing from Freudian theory.
Where Sampson would like to give something like instinctual priority to moral consciousness, a Freudian would say that moral consciousness and ethical conduct—to the extent that it is rational—is viable. Indeed, renunciation in the service of enli