Life Against Death

This is Sophie.

I am still really confused about chapter 14 The Protestant Era in Norman O'Brown's Life Against Death.  I know we discussed the chapter in class, and that did help clarify things a bit for me, but I feel more confused the more I get through the chapter.

O'Brown discusses Eros and the death instinct, but I am still confused as to how exactly these fit together along with the Devil and anality.  He also analyzes Luther's views of religion and compares them to Freud's views of psychoanalysis.  He argues that "Luther, like a psychoanalyst, penetrates beneath the surface of life and finds hidden reality" (231).  He suggests that religion and psychoanalysis both say that things are not what they seem to be.  Both of these come back to the unconscious.

There were parts of the chapter that I understood, but I felt it very difficult to put everything together to figure out the larger meaning in O'Brown's work.