O. Brown, Norman

Norman O. Brown, (1913-2002), philosopher, social critic, professor of classical languages at the universities of Wesleyan and Rochester and emeritus professor of humanities at the University of California, had a fascination in the early 1950s for Freud’s theories and proposed going beyond psychoanalysis.

In "Life Against Death" (1959, published in this collection under the title Eros y Tánatos) he took that step, driven by “the need to renew thought on the natureand destiny of man”. Thanks to this book he was hailed -along with his friend Herbert Marcuse- as an intellectual leader of the counterculture movement that emerged in the United States in the 1960s, much to Brown’s dismay since he would rather have been known as a researcher and professor than a radical revolutionary.