Philip Rieff's

The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud*

m A R e v i e w - -

This book is nearly as hard to read as the title. I t is a cool book, describing with breathtaking accuracy a moral rev- olution, but the author isn't really upset. He isn't even present. He's up there in the trees, smi l ing- -or is it a s c o w l ? - like the Cheshire cat. The book is hard to read; it 's like trying to drink concen- trated orange juice straight out of the can. I t 's not refreshing, but it 's just as nourishing. And this is a moralistic book in an age in which being moral- istic is not a cool thing. By moralistic, I mean it cares about what is happening to us and it dares to give advice. Or does it? It is a revolutionary book and it is, I think, a masterpiece.

The first chapter, or really the chap- ter before chapter one, is introductory, and it has the proper and ironic title, "Toward a Theory of Culture." I sup- pose a title like that is needed for his fellow sociologists. But Rieff is out for bigger game than just another theory of culture; he is really claiming to be of- fering a vision of what is happening to us as a whole. I think he succeeds as well as anyone working today.

Readers of Freud: The Mind of Mor-

* Published by Harper and Row, 1966, pp. 261, $5.95.

W I L L I A M H A M I L T O N Pro]essor o] Theology

Colgate Rochester Divinity School

alist will be unable to forget the elusive description Rieff gives us at the end of that book- - the psychological m a n - - a s he called him then. The present book confidently announces what the earlier one played with, hinted at. The psycho- logical man is here; he is all of us, or at least most. This is the meaning of "therapeutic" in the book's title. It does not refer to a technique for analysis; it refers to the man made by the Freudian revolution. It refers to modern man, though Rieff wisely refrains f rom re- ferring to that particular chimera.i

Who is the " therapeut ic"? He is the man who has to live without faith, With- out therapies of commitment, w i thou t - - as Christians may s a y - - a n uhimate con- cern that gives final meaning to his existence. He lives in the time of the "honest silence" of the gods, in the time when the children of our era have un- dergone a deconversion experience that is bound to last. To use language that he does not (but that he ought not to object to as that sort of eager the61ogiz- ing he so dislikes), Rieff is talking about

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men who are trying to live in the time of the death of God.

Rieff's special interest as a sociologist is how we can live together in the time of no gods, no faiths, no cures. And his further interest as a critically reverent student of Freud is to ask how we can live together within the demand for in- stinctual renunciating that our society asks of us. (One of the most fascinat- ing subterranean strands in this book is the hidden deba te Rieff is apparently carrying on with what he calls the neo- Reichean polemicists like Norman Brown. Brown is never attacked directly, but he is engaged indirectly on nearly every page, and with the publication in the fall of 1966 of Brown's new book, this debate is likely to become an ut- terly central one in our intellectual life.)

We are the therapeutics, the post- Freudian men, the psychological men, the godless ones. We need to find a way of living with many commitments, and with a loyalty to none (here he takes on Tillich, surely). We are the knowing ones, not the believing ones, and we need to find ways of enjoying life with- out "erecting high symbolic hedges around it." We are those who must live without moral absolutes, without symbol (contra Tillich as well as the recent Nor- man Brown), and without myth (contra the pious reaction to Bultmann). "Psy- chological man," Rieff writes at the close of this remarkable introductory section, "in his independence from all gods, can feel free to use all god-terms; I imagine he will be a hedger against his own bets, a user of any faith that lends itself to therapeutic u s e . . . Perhaps the elimi- nation of the tragic sense--which is tan- tamount to the elimination of irreconcil- able moral principles--is no tragedy."

Morally, Rieff says that Freudian therapy has been teaching

the patient-student how to live within the contradictions that combine to make him into a unique personality; this it does in contrast to the older moral pedagogies, which tried to re-order the contradictions into a hierarchy of superior and inferior, good and evil, capabilities. (p. 55)

What we have instead, Rieff says, is a crowded and disordered group of con- tending moral claims, each of which has something to be said for itself. Morally, our ideal is to be honest with ourselves rather than loyal to a cause. Attaching oneself too passionately to one thing is to forego the power to be helped by some other thing our passion may have blinded us to. The therapeutic is the cool moralist more interested in mitigat- ing the daily miseries of life than saving or redeeming the universe, more inter- ested in useful and helpful coping, than with curing. The deconverted man knows that there are no cures, that the devil leaves only for a season, that the demons exorcised always find a way back.

The main body of the book is based on this formative vision of man and his moral situation today. Readers should have their attention called to a striking and sensitive critique of the psycho- analytic profession (pp. 98-104), and to three remarkable chapters on Jung, Reich, and D. H. Lawrence. Rieff looks at each of these men with more affec- tion and understanding than is usual from a Freudian, and he sees each of them as men of wild and undoubted courage who tried to give men a therapy of commitment or a faith. They failed not because men do not long for a faith (they do), but because the analytical world from which each of them pro- ceeded does not permit the gift of faith or healing. At the close of his chapter on Reich, there is a beautiful passage that is characteristic of Rieff's sensitive, tightly-packed, and elusive literary and moral style:

52 pASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY/NOVEMBER 1965

�9 . . it is well to be reminded that love is the ultimate power. We are in grave danger of forgetting this, now that doc- trines of love must run a gauntlet of fatally clever objections. Psychotherapists specially need reminders. Perhaps, once adequately remindad, therapists will cease trying to repress, as Freud did, their own religious impulses. They are bound to be- come better therapists, or at least less damaging ones.

In his religiosity, Reich gave up trying to understand altogether. Finally, Reich offers the ecstatic attitude as superior to the analytic. This messiah of the body is not to be pitied f6r his martyrdom, any more than he is to be laughed at for his doctrine. For, leaving Freud at the edge of the last desert, littered, as Reich saw, with dying gods and murder machines, he es- caped as few men do, into the very heaven of an idea. (p. 188)

Phi l ip Rieff 's " t he r apeu t i c " m a n is not new, but it is impor t an t bo th to praise Rieff for his p ionee r ing por t r a i t and to in t roduce h im to his brothers�9 Chris t ians will be unable to read this book wi thout be ing r eminded of Bonhoeffer ' s m a n come of age, and it appears that both Bonhoeffer and Rieff have developed their por t ra i t s par t ly in react ion to Til- lich. The avant-gardis t , the college stu- dent, and the lover of J o h n Cage and the Beatles will recognize in Rieff 's ( an t i - ? ) hero someth ing of McLuhan ' s cool man. As I am wr i t ing this review, 1 not ice in the " N e w Y o r k Times Book R e v i e w " of Sunday, May 1, 1966, the fo l lowing words by Dav id Cort at the close of an ar t ic le on M c L u h a n :

The cool or oral or electronic man, whether in the jungle or at the TV set, will have no distant goals, small sense of perspec- tive of time as duration, no detachment, will want a role in life rather than a job of work, will take himself very seriously, and will be deeply involved, though calmly, in the lives of others. He will have 'nothing to say' and he will be constantly saying it.

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Protestant churches (he rendered several years of valuable and subversive consul- tative service to the National Council of Churches) and about Protestant theol- ogy (cJ. his knowledgeable preface to the paperback edition of Harnack's Out- line). In and out of this book runs his knowledge, and he is very ambivalent about Christians. (One wonders whether i( would be permissible to return to him the advice he gave the psychotherapists and suggest that he too cease trying to repress his admirable and lucid religious instincts.) Rieff usually feels inclined to call the churches to the task of urging men back to the pre-analytie world of faith , cures, and passionate loyalties. But when they do this, they are appar- ently irrelevant and trivial. (Is this what he wants them to be?) But when they, in a sudden anguish of relevance, try to portray the world as he does--we must try to live without faith, without gods, without therapies of commitment-- they are praised for their courage and damned for their cowardice. When Rieff writes about Tillich or Bishop Robinson or John Wren Lewis, it is clear he doesn't like them to be doing what they are do- ing, Here Rieff is like a number of in- teliectuals--one thinks of Walter Kauf- mann, t tans Jonas, and Norman Brown. (It is an irony that Rieff, the master ironist, would like to find one bed he and Brown can share.) He doesn't like

faith, and he doesn't think modern man should try for it, but he doesn't want his Christian friends saying that sort of thing. They should keep calling for it, keep on being irrelevant, for only by be- ing irrelevant can they be faithful, Christian, brave.

I guess what I am saying is that per- haps Christians should read this book with love and with a smile. When Rieff gives us advice, watch him like a hawk. A fine example comes in his chapter on Jung, where he tells us that here is a fine, religiously open psychoanalyst for Christians to follow, just the thing Chris- tians have been looking for. Of course, he notes, after you've followed him, Jung will cut you to pieces, since the God you'll have to buy into will be no longer the Christian one. Perhaps, Rieff smil- ingly adds, Freud's strong God who doesn't exist, is more Christian than Jung's weak one who does.

But Rieff's advice to over-cultured Christians is the comic interlude in this book, and it is merely the place to rest and refresh yourself, before you plunge once more into the book's substance. I cannot avoid the statements with which I began. This is a deeply moral book; it is a masterpiece, for it tells the truth about us all in a way that cannot be bettered, duplicated, or imitated, save by the poets.

I T IS our heritage from Freud that the all-or-none distinction between mental illness and mental health has been replaced by a more humane conception

of the continuity of these states. The view that neurosis is a severe reaction to human trouble is as revolutionary in its implications for social practice as it is daring in formulation. The 'bad seed' theories, the nosologies of the nineteenth century, the demonologies and doctrines of divine punishment--none of these provided a basis for compassion toward human suffering comparable to that of our time . . . Freud's sense of the continuity of human conditions, of the likeness of the human plight, has made possible a deeper sense of the brotherhood of man. - JEROME S. BRUNER, "Freud and the Image of Man," in Freud and the 20th Century, Meridian Books

5~ PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY/NOVEMBER 1966