My paper analyzes the resurgence of psychoanalytic theory after the Second World War through the work of the classicist writer Norman O. Brown. Brown represented one of many postwar intellectuals who discarded Marxist discourse for the language of psychoanalysis, arguing that cultural politics needed to take priority over class analysis. Believing that capitalist hegemony in the postwar era rested not simply upon class domination but on the much larger psychological and cultural foundation that justified it, Brown turned to psychoanalysis to reinvigorate leftist politics after the „superannuation of the political categories which informed liberal thought and action in the 1930s.‰ I situate Brown‚s work within the postwar discourse about the stability and fate of the nuclear family. Worried about the cultural contamination of the individual psyche by governmental authorities, social agencies, organizational demands, and popular culture, many postwar critics reasserted the primacy of the nuclear family as a safeguard against moral corruption. Arguing that the only way to safeguard the individual ego from outside cultural and social forces was through proper oedipal development, many postwar critics worried that the loss of the social function of the family would destroy any foundation for autonomous development. The profound importance of the oedipal complex to proper human development was reiterated over and over again within intellectual circles and popular culture. In response, Norman Brown challenged this turn in psychoanalytic thought, arguing instead that the important moment in psychological development was the pre-oedipal situation. Brown‚s attack on the structure of the nuclear family and the character of its internal relations helped produce an alternate understanding of identity formation, opening up new forms of sexuality and gender understandings that deeply influenced the social movements of the 1960s, including the gay liberation movement, modern feminism, and the counterculture as a whole.

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