ANGEL IN ARMOR

by Ernest Becker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1968

In this quaint collection of ""post-Freudian essays on the nature of man,"" Professor Becker at his bravura best places ""the consummate moral allegory for our time,"" The Exterminating Angel, ""directly in the tradition of Rousseau, Emerson, and Nietzsche."" Passing over the absurdity of calling the Bunuel film a ""consummate"" anything, we are left with that peculiar linkage, that ""tradition""--Nietzsche reviled Rousseau and Emersonian individualism had little to do with either-which so typifies the high-sounding complexity of Professor Becker. He is a man incapable of making necessary distinctions. Like Erich Fromm, another slot-machine dispenser of uplifting generalities in pedantic disguise, our humanist author (he is a social psychologist devoted to the ""Personalist"" school of philosophy) counsels against Freudian reductionism and narrow scientific specialization and presents ""a Rousseauian plea for total organismic experience as the basis for real sanity."" Unfortunately, while Becker has interesting things to say about fetishization, repression, alienation, paranoia, and so forth, his commentary is inevitably clouded over with eighteenth century simplifications (""Human evil is self-created, not animal-inspired"") and poetic injunctions which can mean everything or nothing (the mental patient must ""immerse himself in a long and total growth experience. . .""). Further, to praise Reich's character armor notions and not consider his orgasmic pan-sexualism (while challenging Freud's) or his theory of primary masochism is, here and elsewhere, typical of Becker's spotty procedure.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Braziller

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1968

Categories: NONFICTION