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Two decades ago, it may be recalled, Herbert Marcuse elaborated a “defense” of Freud's original, radical exposure of the roots of human conduct—based on libido theory, repression, the unconscious, infantile sexuality, and the Oedipus complex—against successive generations of psychologists who had abandoned this position in favor of a pallid sociologism which served to mask an essentially conformist posture.4 The neo-Freudians and then the post-Freudians reversed the direction of theory, shifting Freud's priorities from the emphasis on theory as a tool of cultural analysis and criticism to an emphasis on the practical, immediate virtues of therapy.
In this view, the fundamental disharmony between the individual and the social order, so central to Freud's sociohistorical work, evaporates in a therapy of adjustment in which the responsibility for personal neurosis is the individual's, while the society is absolved of complicity. Freud's hopes for therapy were limited, after all, by his awareness of the harshness of everyday life: Freud could convert hysterical misery into common misery, and no more. For no matter how much insight one gains through analysis, it is still necessary to act in an irrational and needlessly brutal world. The emphasis on personal responsibility and therapy sustains the irrationality of the whole; transcendence is repudiated in favor of an accommodation to the given.
Now Russell Jacoby has returned to this theme, and on one level his book can be read merely as a repetition of Herbert Marcuse's earlier argument, brought up to date and rendered more inclusive. As such it merits little attention, because the argument is