The Culture of Critique series  

"In an article published in Commentary — itself an indication of the extent to which psychoanalytic social criticism had penetrated Jewish intellectual circles, Goodman (1961, 203) asks “What if the censorship itself part of a general repressive anti-sexuality, causes the evil, creates the need for sadistic pornography sold at a criminal profit?” (italics in text). Without adducing any evidence whatever that sadistic urges result from repressing sexuality, Goodman manages to suggest in typical psychoanalytic style that if only society would cease attempting to control sexuality, all would be well.

The disastrous conflation of sex and love in the writings of Freud and his disciples is also apparent in the literary world. Using the example of Leslie Fiedler, Cuddihy (1974, 71) emphasizes the fascination of Jewish intellectuals with cultural criticism emanating from Freud and Marx — whichever one seemed to work best for a particular author at a particular time. Courtly love was unmasked as sublimation — a ritualized attempt to avoid the coarseness of sexual intercourse with a female. And Dickstein (1977, 52) notes regarding Norman Mailer, “Gradually, like the rest of America, he shifted from a Marxian to a Freudian terrain. Like other fifties radicals he was most effective, and most prophetic in the psychosexual sphere rather than in the old political one. . . Where repression was, let liberation be: this was the message not only of Mailer but of a whole new line of Freudian (or Reichian) radicalism, which did so much to undermine the intellectual consensus of the cold war period.” "