Abstract

In his Eros and Civilization Marcuse seeks assurance in Freud of the possibility of a non-repressive society. He finds such assurance, this paper argues, only by misinterpreting the Freudian concepts of "reality" and "repression." By reducing reality simply to the perversity of nature and the consequent need to work, Marcuse ignores the essential social aspect of Freud's "reality," and the primarily sexual and interpersonal repression resulting from it. Marcuse sees such repression as unnecessary, mainly because he sees as its only source the unnatural organization of necessary repression, i.e., that unpleasure resulting from the need to work. The social organization necessitated by the exercise of sexual prerogative, which Freud emphasizes, Marcuse ignores. Given Marcuse's non-Freudian emphasis on nature, a non-repressive society seems possible, but at the same time history, that total, cultural milieu of man permeated by unnatural, "surplus" repression, becomes completely contingent and unintelligible.