Review Philip Rieff the Triumph of the Therapeutic

The Triumph of the Therapeutic
by Philip Rieff.
ISI Books (Wilmington, Delaware)
325 pp., $eighteen.00 paper, 2006.

"For the last time psychology!" Kafka urged, already amid a Western civilization doomed to repeat the mistakes of psychological man. Once it was believed that to learn from history was to engage in a saving human activity; since Freud, nosotros learned that our histories, public and private, were instead archeologies of errors. Deep within us, taught Freud, a permanent tension betwixt unconscious desire and conscious culture made neurosis the narrative of life. Not until Philip Rieff published The Triumph of the Therapeutic, at the height of the 1960s, was the Freudian legacy in America held to account, and damningly and so. Now, in fitting tribute, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) has reissued Rieff'southward seminal work. The fresh edition comes complete with new essays by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn and Stephen Gardner, with a closing word by Jeremy Beer.

The reprint, inaugurating ISI's "Backgrounds" serial, is well worth the xl-yr wait. The bracketing authors join a yearlong rediscovery of America's about obscure critical genius, making for a remarkable new resurgence of involvement in Rieff's intellectual legacy. It comes at precisely the proper time. Rieff'southward pocket-size oeuvre—iv books and a collection of shorter pieces—volition nearly double in size over the next two years with the publication this twelvemonth of 2 new works and a 3rd in 2008. With several decades of almost complete silence behind him, in sick health, Rieff told me last May he had felt it was fourth dimension to publish again. As a result of that decision, he shall be possibly the most prolific posthumously published thinker of modern times.

And this, too, comes merely at the right moment. Rieff's cardinal preoccupation—the plummet of the social order maintained by Western culture—is the crisis of our fourth dimension, and a community of resurgence versed in his insight may yet save united states from the interminable vulgar banality of what our psycho- therapeutic civilization has get.

Among this growing community one finds ii types of feeling thinkers: religious and academic. Presently the church and the ivory tower go along a rot from inside and from the top that no longer surprises many traditionalists just disgusts and discourages them all. Only some theologians and sociologists, enlightened that civilization retains the ability to speak with authority toward an adherence to moral social club, work to reconquer the terrain that has been lost to the relativist nihilism of the age.

These faithfulhave anticipated ISI'south re-release of Triumph. Theology and sociology, inherently (in their historicity) bourgeois disciplines, overlap where conservatism faces a key question of how to best live in the nowadays earth. In a order where genuine community seems withered and perverted, and where the wisdom and habit of the traditional culture is often repudiated by popular publicity, is the moral dissident to fight or flee? Put more specifically, is it our duty to struggle to appoint a culture that has soured to our taste, or are we better off abandoning, in Rieff's term, the anti-culture that surrounds us?

Jonathan Imber, Professor of Sociology at Wellesley, is known every bit one of Rieff's preeminent students. He recognizes the profound ambiguity of cultural alter that faces theologists and sociologists alike—indeed, that faces all of us. Every bit Rieff has written, Imber remarks, forrad-looking sociologists like Saint-Simon and Comte conceived of and "even named" the "new ruling elite" of the time to come utopia equally "sociologist-priests." The dilemma, he continues, lies "where sociology seems to have settled . . . between a rhetoric of advocacy and an belittling apprehending of minds like Rieff'due south." According to Rieff himself it was Freud who made of the analytical attitude a model for the repudiation of cultural control. But what thinker is not an analytical, and which one of us trying to decide how to live in the globe tin can practice so without thinking it through? The dilemma reaches to our heart.

Imber insists nonetheless that "theology and sociology are not simply a affair of some elaborate segmentation of labor. A sociology without a theory of culture is just an arm of the bureaucratic state." For Imber, the despairing interpretation of Rieff as a prophet of despair is "nonsense." He suggests that "some of the most recent observations nearly Rieff and the view of our present culture, by such notables as Richard John Neuhaus," are besides quick to lose organized religion in "the civilisation of organized religion" itself.

"Despair," says Imber, "is the nonsense of the intellectuals. Hope, when it is not dizzy, is much more than difficult to keep a grip on." Imber explains that he knows firsthand how Rieff "endured tremendous bouts of despair," simply points to "his affection for students, his insistence on guiding them, his involvement in them—all this is almost what we Jews phone call 'dor v'dor' from generation to generation. That is all about hope. He knew that best of all, and I look [. . .] some will recognize the stakes of renewal in all of it."

One who also has recognized Rieff'due south renewing spirit is Ken Myers, executive producer of Mars Hill Audio and former editor of This Earth, where he worked with Neuhaus in the runup to First Things. A veteran of National Public Radio as Arts and Humanities editor, Myers seeks through Mars Colina Sound to "aid Christians who want to movement from thoughtless consumption of modern culture to a vantage point of thoughtful engagement." This is to be no flight from civilisation into tight corners of imitation community. Though Rieff wrote in Triumph that the "well-nigh congenial climate for the training of the therapeutic has been in a waning austere culture similar that of Protestant America," Myers believes that the dilemma of engaging the culture without being lost in it (and to it) can exist fought and eventually won. For the civilization is teeming with what Rieff calls "negative communities"—at the expense of positive ones.

Positive communities, explains Rieff, "are characterized by their guarantee of some kind of salvation of cocky," with conservancy significant "an experience which transforms all personal relations past subordinating them to agreed communal purposes." Negative communities, by dissimilarity, "nigh automatically by a self-sustaining engineering, do not offer a type of collective conservancy;" instead they inform and let always-irresolute lifestyles. Allegiances that seem like communities are fleeting, grounded only in whim, no more than or less enduring than the desires that phone call them into beingness. The analytic attitude of Freud, Rieff writes, "adult precisely in response to the need of the Western individual, in the Tocquevillean definition, for a therapy that would not depend [on] a positive customs; at its best, analytic therapy creates negative communities."

"Freud," he concludes, "taught lessons which Americans, prepared past their own national experience, acquire easily: survive, resign yourself to living inside your moral means, suffer no costless failures in a futile search for ethical heights that no longer exist—if they e'er did." That quintessential American questing for new customs, forged from individual striving, provided an all-too-fertile soil for the growth of negative communities.

Having worked toward an answer for years, Myers wishes he'd had the do good in seminary of assigned passages from Triumph. Rieff'south "idea of an anti-culture," says Myers, "his observation that cultural institutions have been mechanisms of restraint and are now mechanisms of release," are key to understanding "the consequences of modernity"—how deeply people have "captivated many of the root causes" of our cultural disorders "without even being aware of it." Repentance, Myers asserts, is deeply countercultural. The greatest claiming is to become people to move, in the reconciliation of the soul, to an idea of the culture that surrounds them as a legacy of implied obligations rather than a series of style statements fashioned into commodities.

At that place is enough in Triumph alone, much more in Rieff's whole corpus, to educate a generation on the transformation of culture into an anticreed of acted-out fashions. But Rieff is a notoriously thick author; he has been chosen gloomy in the mainstream press, and Richard Brookhiser compared reading his latest, My Life amidst the Deathworks, to chewing brawl bearings. Density is the cost of gravity when it comes to social thought, however, and nary a philosopher worth his readers' while has emerged pristine from decades of estimation upon misinterpretation. The very real danger exists that Rieff, for reasons of style as well equally content, will be appropriated for ends that miss the mark of his own dead aim. Myers is most pessimistic about Rieff'south wisdom being carried over into a common formulation of culture "as a kind of inert phase set, where what actually matters is the script or the quality of the actors." In fact, he insists, "cultures are like ecosystems"—and it is impossible to put Rieff'southward insight to use without grasping his central insight about what culture is.

Fortunately Rieff is clear equally crystal on this betoken. "To speak of a moral culture," he writes in one of the many aphorisms nowadays in Triumph, "would be redundant." Culture is a received inheritance of moral precepts, reflected in the doings and not-doings that make up a social lodge. In the present anti-culture, however, the doings concur all the trumps, and all the sources of restraint—guilt foremost amidst them—are junked as oppressions.

This is by any standard a perversion and exaggeration of Freud. Rieff explained Freud's analytical mental attitude as "a doctrine adult for the private wants of private men," that "shifts with the individual." In Freud'south day and for some fourth dimension later, an "anti-doctrine" was enough to assist individuals hedge privately confronting the demands of a culture that could no longer convince. But information technology seemed only a matter of time before the concluding demand of privacy collapsed forth with all the others, and the right to publicity tore therapy out of the hands of Freud and threw information technology to the swine of the perpetual grouping grope. Welcome to postmodernity, where the schizoid plurality of private identity and the desire of the all-you-can-eat cafe line is vomited back out into the public square, that in the modern era first invaded the private mind and soul with its mediated exhortations and sales pitches which played increasingly to the base instincts themselves.

We are left with the irreducible question of how to live. Myers understands, in his words, that Rieff "wasn't advocating whatsoever remedial program." But he remains certain that "damage control" is "a good Christian vocation." Imber's sociological approach sees the problem this manner: "in belatedly Western culture, it is the elites who play with burn down. [Rieff] e'er said that nosotros teachers were obliged to accost the fires, but non exist burned by them. And this may lead to a way of understanding theology/sociology."

Much of this spirit—the fused declaration of living that comes from Rieff'southward theological and sociological inheritors—is present in ISI's edition of Triumph. Stephen Gardner, for example, takes Rieff'south assay of Freud a step farther. Gardner declares that romanticism, "the 'natural religion' of autonomous civilisation," was afforded by Freud "one of its nigh sophisticated intellectual justifications and forms. The fundamental exigency of democratic culture is the merits to originality, individuality, or genius. In a world of equality, anybody must distinguish himself in order to count. [. . .] Freud'southward somatic theory of unconscious libido serves the romanticism of democratic culture in ii means: first, it ascribes this originality or individuality to virtually anybody, in the unconscious 'verse' of their desires; and 2d [. . .] it underwrites Freud's own merits to genius."

Though compelling, Gardner's analysis reveals how a reading of Rieff can run a risk subtly shifting away from the original insights. Rieff emphasizes in his first and most bookish book, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, that "Freud transformed what the Romantics had held as the vice of reason—its power to blight spontaneity—into a therapeutic virtue." Rather than baptizing the license of the Romantics, "Freud agrees [but] this far: made conscious, the unconscious wish is irremediably tamed. Simply by the act of existence brought to consciousness, Freud presumes, the spontaneity of desire will be weakened."

We now live in the age of spontaneous desires, stiff as ever, stoked and stroked by an emotional and identity bolt marketplace. Rieff's exposition of the intended triumph of the therapeutic charts a course that never happened: "With the decline of a civilization of authority, the therapeutic requirement shifted toward an action which would take identify, first, within the circle of personal relations; after this first level of private reeducation had been successfully negotiated, the public life could so exist contradistinct. A new kind of customs could be constructed, one that did not generate conscience and internal command but want and the rubber play of impulse." As well immature from the get go, too weak for Freud's ascetic medicine, the children of the West found themselves unable to do therapy successfully in individual. Personal relations, past the 1970s and 1980s, became publicized on a massive scale; public re-education happened before private re-education cohered, and the resultant crisis in the cultural condition of the public life became a central question of social gild. Culture—morals—became political.

And in the headlong retreat of judgment that has been, once again, forced upon standards of private behavior by public policy, "quantity has become quality. The respond to all questions of 'what for?'," Rieff declares in Triumph, "is 'more.' . . . Western culture is irresolute already into a symbol system unprecedented in its plasticity and absorbent capacity. Nothing much tin oppose it really, and it welcomes all contradiction, for, in a sense, it stands for cipher."

Near the terminate of Triumph, Rieff attempts to "summarize the nature of those changes which haveall but destroyed our inherited culture without having produced another to have its place." Only a scattering of pages in, he warns the reader of his object with a judgement that causes the heart of an individual cutting off from existent community against his ain wishes to jump: "These preliminary studies in the psychohistorical process are not aimed primarily at young man theorists interested in the problem, merely at those troubled readers in whose minds and hearts one civilisation is dying while no other gains enough power to be born."

That mission—to rediscover, together, the lessons taught by disgust as well as desire, and hope beyond despair—is the calling of our time. For feeling intellects of Myers' and Imber'due south ilk, theologians and sociologists akin, the return to Rieff's vital legacy ushered onward by ISI's new edition of Triumph is more than welcome. For whatever American still searching, as Americans have, for answers that can bear the weight of the questions at the heart of how to live, the reappearance of Philip Rieff'southward beacon of agreement is like the axle of a lighthouse coming into view on dark and choppy seas. Our going forward toward that calorie-free, and all truthful lights, is, in fact, a going back—a reconquest of culture and community for the wisdom of life to which, in its resolute promise, some innocence may render again.

James K. Poulos is an essayist and doctoral candidate in Regime at Georgetown. His weblog is Postmodern Conservative.

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Source: https://kirkcenter.org/reviews/philip-rieff-modern-prophet/

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