ABSTRACT
Marcuses Eros and Civilization goes to the heart of utopian theory. It is in the unconscious that we have preserved a time when freedom and happiness were not yet separated by the civilizing demands of repressive sublimation. Thus the future does not erase the past; or else we should have no ground for it. Rather, both our future and our past are structured by our memory, which functions on the two levels of knowledge and morals to provide a critical standard of institutional freedom and happiness: If memory moves into the center of psychoanalysis as a decisive mode of cognition, this is far more than a therapeutic device; the therapeutic role of memory derives from the truth value of memory. The reality principle restrains the cognitive function of memory its commitment to the past experience of happiness, which spurns the desire for its conscious recreation.
