Norman O. Brown on Modern and Archaic Economics (and Karl Polanyi)

To understand modern economics and money is to understand its relation to archaic [pre-modern] economics and money. But such a historical, and because historical also philosophical, approach to money is precisely what is lacking in the entire range of modern economic theory. 

Classical modern economic theorists, assuming the basic rationality of economic activity, assumed likewise that archaic economic activity was a core of secular rationalism in an otherwise rude and superstitious milieu. They assumed that economic activity was always and everywhere essentially the same in the fundamental motivation; economic activities were governed by economic motives-- that is, by economizing calculation. Assuming the psychology of economizing calculation, they correctly postulated its sociological correlate, the institution of ownership (property). Again from the psychology of economizing calculation, they deduced the division of labor and its institutional correlate, exchange in a market. 

But it is a safe generalization to say that the postulates of classical economic theory have no relation whatsoever to the anthropological facts. Archaic economics is not governed by economizing calculation. We can safely follow Karl Polanyi, the only economist who faces the facts and the problems they pose, when he says, "It is on this one negative point that modern ethnographers agree [in archaic economies we find]: the absence of the motive of gain [profit seeking]; the absence of the principle of laboring for remuneration [wage labor]; the absence of the principle of least effort [efficiencies]; and especially the absence of any distinct institution based on economic motives [free markets]. 

Excerpted from Life Against Death, 1959, "Filthy Lucre," pages 242-244. 

Psychoanalysis Rule No. 1 (maybe): The Child is Father to the Man. The Child is Father to the Man.

 

Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959):

The primal act of the human ego is a negative one-- not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child's body from the mother's body. 

Sigmund Freud: One might even believe that this first love relation of the child is doomed to extinction for the very reason that it is the first, for these early object-cathexes are always ambivalent to a very high degree; along side of the child's intense love there is always a strong aggressive tendency present, and the more passionately the child loves an object, the more sensitive it will be to disappointments and frustrations. In the end, the love is bound to capitulate to the accumulated hostility. 

Objective dependence on parental care creates in the child a passive, dependent need to be loved, which is just the opposite of their dream of narcissistic omnipotence. Thus the institution of the family shapes human desire in two contradictory directions [need to be loved and narcissistic omnipotence], and it is the dialectic generated by this contradiction which produces what Freud calls the conflict of ambivalence.

The aim of psychoanalysis-- still unfulfilled, and still only half-conscious-- is to return our souls [sublimations] to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves, and thus to overcome the human state of self-alienation. 

*No doubt, Freud was a male chauvinist and often comically exaggerates win-lose binary sexual conflicts but come on psychoanalysis is the Moby Dick of modernist intellectual systems. A colossus inspiring great work in the arts, literature, philosophy and history, even some great work he might not have agreed with. Brown believes in the unity of opposites; I'm still not sure Freud really does. 

"Dreams are wish fulfillment fantasies; neurotic symptoms are substitutes for forbidden pleasures, but as compromises they never satisfy. Art, on the other hand, not being a compromise with the unconscious either in the cognitive or in the libidinal sense, affords positive satisfaction, and cannot be simply classed, as in Freud's later formulations, with dreams and neurosis as a "substitute gratification." This I take to be the meaning of the contrast between dream and wit stated in Wit and the Unconscious: that one [dreams/neurosis] guards against pain, while the other [wit/art] seeks pleasure." -Norman O. Brown, 1959