Freud was overimpressed, it now appears, with the monolithic repressiveness of culture, and unable to perceive that our own culture might become high… - Philip Rieff

Surely the romantic and now permanent revolution against the ancient regime of reason is against a regime largely invented by the revolutionaries themselves.

[T]his transitional civilization is becoming one vast suburbia

The higher dividends are essentially symbolic in nature. They are, in Freudian terms, the cultural equivalents of dividends which might be experienced more directly—if only a culture could stand the strain of immediate satisfactions. By setting a limit on the functional value of the higher dividends for most men, Freud declared that the religious question, in its inherited form, as a self-abnegation achieved with moral artistry, was no longer worth asking. This total rejection of the religious question gives even Marxism a pious look. By such a rejection psychoanalysis contributes to that symbolic impoverishment which is the only poverty a culture, as distinct from either a society or an individual, may suffer. ...Heretofore, the saving arrangements of Western culture have appeared as symbol systems communicating demands by stoning the sensual with deprivations, and were thus operated in a dynamically ambivalent mode. Our culture developed, as its general technique of salvation, assents to moral demands that treated the sensual part of the self as an enemy. From mastery over this enemy-self there developed some triumphant moral feeling; a character ideal was born. Every man was thus born twice, the second time as a creature aspiring to a moral artistry trained by deprivations. In sum, the classical character ideals were all personifications of a release from a multitude of desires. ...Not only our Western system but every system of integrative moral demand, the generative principle of culture, expressed itself in positive deprivations—in a character ideal that functioned to commit the individual to the group. Culture was thus the establishment and organization of restrictive motives. Men engaged in disciplines of interdiction. The dialectic of deprivation and remission from deprivation was in the service of those particular interdicts by which a culture constituted itself. ... The dialectic of perfection, based on a deprivational mode, is being succeeded by a dialectic of fulfillment, based on the appetitive mode.