Collection: Norman O. Brown

Norman O. Brown (1913–2002) was an American philosopher and classicist whose psychoanalytically inflected cultural criticism, particularly Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959) and Love’s Body (1966), proposed a radical rethinking of repression, the body, and human liberation that made him a significant intellectual presence for the American counterculture and the New Left. Drawing on Freud, Marx, and mystical traditions, he argued for the recovery of polymorphous bodily experience against the death-denying structures of civilisation. He taught at Wesleyan University and the University of California, Santa Cruz.