Depth psychology has demolished the optimistic faith of democrats in the rationality of a free citizenry, by discovering that the average citizen (in… - Philip Rieff

Analytic therapy is thus a form of re-education; Freud specifically called it that. It is re-education so far as it eliminates those symptoms through which the patient has tried, mistakenly, to resolve the contradictions in his life. Therapeutic re-education is therefore at once a difficult and yet modest procedure. It teaches the patient-student how to live with 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. To become a psychological man is thus to become kinder to the self as a whole, to the private parts of it as well as to the public ones, to the once inferior as well as to the formerly superior. While older character types were concentrating on the life task of trying to order the warring parts of the personality into a hierarchy, modern pedagogies, reflecting the changing selfconception of this culture, are far more egalitarian: it is the task of psychological man to develop an informed (ie., healthy) respect for the sovereign and unresolvable basic contradictions that make him the singularly complicated human being he is.

Freud was overimpressed, it now appears, with the monolithic repressiveness of culture, and unable to perceive that our own culture might become highly permissive in the sphere of private sexual morals—the better to enforce its public repressions. The combination of a repressive political order with a permissive moral order is not unheard of in human history.

The collegiate young are being re-educated before they have been educated. From our collegiate ranks, the therapeutic will appear a re-educated man, one who can conquer even his subtler inhibitions; his final know-how will be to irrationalize his rationality and play games, however intellectualized, with all god-terms in order to be ruled by none. In their moral modestly therapeutics will be capable of anything; they will know that everything is possible because they will not be inhibited by any truth. Far more destructively than earlier interdict-burdened character types, the therapeutic will be the warring state writ small; he may be even cannier, less sentimental, stronger in ego, shifting about his principles and impulses like so many stage props.