Send in the Couch Brigades: A Palimpsest of Freud, Phillip Rieff, and the Sandinistas

In my first two years of college, I was very much under the spell of Freud and Hofstadter/Weber. I was convinced that all political and social conflicts could be reduced to questions of sex and status. (Actually, I was probably much more under the spell of high school than anything else.) Anyway, my roommate David Hughes, who was more political and more of an activist than I—as in, he was political and he was an activist, whereas I was neither—summarized my worldview thus: “In your eyes, Nicaraguans don’t need the Sandinistas [this was the mid-80s]; we should just send in the couch brigades.”

Sometimes I think the entirety of my intellectual career has been little more than an extended attempt to extricate myself from that worldview. And probably the most important book for me along the way has been Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, which, to this day, remains the best book ever written on Freud.