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The return of the repressed. On Robert N. Bellah, Norman O. Brown, and religion in human evolution
Author(s) -
Bortolini Matteo
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of the history of the behavioral sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.216
H-Index - 26
eISSN - 1520-6696
pISSN - 0022-5061
DOI - 10.1002/jhbs.21995
Subject(s) - period (music) , style (visual arts) , argument (complex analysis) , realism , philosophy , literature , sociology , epistemology , religious studies , art , aesthetics , chemistry , biochemistry
As much as Robert Bellah’s final work, Religion in Human Evolution , has been studied and dissected, no critic underlined the importance of psychoanalysis for its main argument and its theoretical framework. The paper shows the influence exerted by a controversial interpreter of Freud, Norman O. Brown, on Bellah’s ideas, intellectual profile, and writing style in the late‐1960s and early 1970s. While in search for a new intellectual voice, Bellah was struck by Brown’s work and began to make intensive use of his book, Love’s Body , both in his teaching and in his research of the early 1970s, during his so‐called “symbolic realism” period. While Bellah abandoned Brown’s ideas and style in the mid‐1970s, some of the basic intuitions he had during that period still survived as one of the major theoretical intuitions of Religion and Human Evolution .