[T]his transitional civilization is becoming one vast suburbia - Philip Rieff

The alternatives with which Freud leaves us are grim only if we view them from the perspective of some past possibility. …The grimness is relieved by the levity of being free from the historic Western compulsion of seeking large and general meanings for small and highly particular lives.

[To Freud], [t]he ascetic was limited, and often broken, in his organizational usefulness by a naïve dedication to principle.

Since no firm social standards for treatment have yet been erected, some grave ambiguities persist regarding the question of just who should be treated. There may be a kindness that is neurotic, if it develops out of unconscious compulsions, and a cruelty that is normal, if it is freely and consciously determined upon. So far as sainthood is determined by unconscious and uncontrolled motives, it is neurotic; so far as sinning, as usually understood, is determined by conscious and rational choice, it is normal. One difficulty with the criteria of rationality and consciousness is that Eichmann, for instance, might well be considered quite without need of treatment. He knew what he was doing; indeed, he wanted to be a great success in his career. Freud was honest enough to discover that there was no inherent relation between normality and the norm, such as had been established, in the age of political and religious man, through the mediating myth that there were natural laws. The analytic attitude has discovered no natural harmony of goals, no hierarchy of value inscribed upon the universe.