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IC's Top 25 Philosophical and Ideological Conservative Books
No. 9 - Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud
by Dr. Enrico Peppe
15 July 2005

Enrico Peppe When a firm religious faith is battered (I would affirm Christianity as the firmest), some other faith replaces. 

Rieff has been under-appreciated by the Right. Right Minds, (edited by Wolfe) gives it some press:
With the dissolution of 'Christian culture,' the emergence of 'psychological man' has signaled the triumph of a relativistic ethos which is ultimately a substitute for true spirituality.

Dr. Rieff (1922 - ), easily one of the finest cultural critics extant, taught at Brandeis, Berkeley, Harvard, and Munich. Until his retirement in 1992, he held the Benjamin Franklin Sociology chair at the University of Pennsylvania.

My love affair with the Right, simplistic as it was in my early teenage years, was given nourishment by a strange sense of fear that the Left engendered -- that of a lack of ground, a rootlessness, if you will, an ennui, a weltschmerz of despair.

Quite scary for a young one. My concern hasn't changed. My embrace of the Right has taken on the libertarianism of a Mises, of a Rothbard, however. I have learned that love of freedom does not have to veer toward the craziness of abject anarchism.

The Rock that is Christian Culture endures, irrespective of Rightist shadings.

And so, a little-known book by a great scholar must be solidly embedded in IC's top ten (of twenty five) philosophical and ideological conservative books.

Rieff explicates the dangers of the writings of Freud, Jung, Reich and Lawrence (always with the highest respect for manifest implicit brilliance). Morality is sine qua non as the cohesive force in culture. When a firm religious faith is battered (I would affirm Christianity as the firmest), some other faith replaces.

Pattison, in a startlingly cogent piece, states:
Rieff...notes that psychoanalysis was instrumental in demolishing moralistic standards and rejecting religion...this contributed to the symbolic impoverishment of...our...culture and to the establishment of negative communities that require no commitment and offer no integrative symbolic.

The four geniuses Rieff takes to task (and that they were, though through misfortune, they weren't privy to the net and IC!) missed the point: the functions of culture surround the organization of moral demands we make upon ourselves through symbol systems.

Pattison:
...through symbols...we..."organize the expressive remissions by which men release themselves in some degree from the strain of conforming to the controlling...readings of culture that constitute individual character. The process by which a culture changes at its profoundest levels may be traced in the shifting balance of controls and releases which constitute a system of moral demands."

The "shifting balance" Rieff assails led in the early 20th century to a deep suspicion about good and evil. This descends to "anti-culture."

The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized...Our cultural revolution does not aim, like its predecessors, at victory for some rival commitment, but rather at a way of using all commitments, which amounts to loyalty toward none.

My "angst" toward the Left is engendered more by its social foolishness than by its foray into economic folly (Marx is seriously flawed, but fun to read).

Rieff is ripe for IC reading for the following reasons, all which point toward the destructive nature of the Leftist Mind
(the reasons are couched in three statements I have heard as stated by my enlightened brethren throughout the years):

1. "I've lived my life. I've done it my way. I feel no shame."

Michael Lewis calls this a "cognitive-affective program designed to reduce shame." Rieff correctly pinpoints the above types of expressions of shamelessness as the destruction of the forbidden (i.e., what society holds as abominable choice).  Sundry permutations of choiceworthy thoughts (as actions) distinguish communities that value the sacred over the profane. What is left without feelings of shame are residues and shadings of incomplete humanity -- throwaway embryos.

2. "No matter what I've been through, I've been true to myself."

Dear and loyal IC reader, your reviewer is in his mid-sixties and yet can't figure out what the hell this means. Rieff helps me out a bit since he blames the therapeutic (read: "secular") mind as that which feels the notion of an outside Creator as a lot of truck. What matters to the true-to-myself-er is personal peace and maybe a Beamer. Clinton found his peace in a speech he gave a year or two ago (for plenty of Beamer bucks, I suppose).

Clinton:
I feel much more at peace than I used to.  And I think that, as awful as what I went through was...even, sometimes when you think you've got something behind you and then it's not behind you, this sort of purging process...it can bring you to a different place.

I am convinced a goodly portion of the assemblage held back a tear.

3. "God is within me."

Granted, there is a good bit of traditional theology in this (immanence versus transcendence and all that). For the Enlightened, however, the statement reverts to a "New Age" Pleasure Principle that has been in vogue for a few millennia -- adjustable morality! Here, one finds the right therapy for the legitimization of sin.

And so God is ersatz within. God, the traditional arbiter of shared standards of judgment in conduct, morals, aesthetics, and peace is thrown off as shackle. The Therapist-Manipulator is authority for that which is complicated -- authority in the hypnotic guise of choice and freedom.

Rieff must be read!

The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud is available on Amazon.com.

IC's Top 25 Philosophical and Ideological Conservative Books.

Dr. Enrico Peppe is a retired educator who runs the website, "The Third Way."  He spends an inordinant amount of time reading and thinking about the conservative movement, studying Catholic theology and listening to Sinatra and Miles Davis.  Forever a committed Rightist, he married the beautiful Deborah on July 4th, 2004.

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