ABSTRACT
Norman o. Brown's study of Swift, 'The Excremental Vision', is taken from his book Life Against Death: the psychoanalytical meaning of history (1959). As its subtitle implies, this book is not primarily a work of literary criticism, but a commentary on and a development of the ideas of Sigmund Freud (see above, pp. 35-42), especially his later work such as Civilization and its Discontents (1930). Freud had argued that 'civilization' was based on the repression and sublimation of erotic energy, and implied that although this process involved some loss, it was desirable, or at least inevitable. Brown, however, argues that since civilization is self-evidently neurotic and on the verge of self-destruction, man should abandon civilized values and seek the 'resurrection of the body'- a manoeuvre that might be described as turning the weapons of Nietzsche upon Freud. In Brown's view, psycho-analysis should be, not a therapy for returning deviants to a normative state of resigned frustration but a method for probing 'the universal neurosis of mankind'.
