Lionel Abel Replies

First of all I must grant Art Efron something, for there is one matter on which he is partly right—not really right, not meaningfully right, not even half right—but however pointlessly, he is, in any case, partly right. I make this admission right at the start, for after this one pointless point, I mean to concede him nothing.

In my article I did say that Norman O. Brown in the chapters on sublimation in his Life Against Death never took up the ideas Freud expressed in the one work he devoted to sublimation, his important essay, “Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex.” Now in fact Mr. Brown did not take up the ideas in that essay anywhere in his book, nor has Mr. Efron shown that he did. So on this matter I do not admit to correction; what I said stands. But I also implied that Mr. Brown did not even quote from Freud’s essay. In fact, he did, several times, and in the relevant chapters. The reason I was mistaken is this: the essay is not mentioned by Mr. Brown in the relevant chapters, and is only identified in his reference notes at the back of the book as follows: BW (Sex). On the other hand, when Mr. Brown referred to other writings of Freud, which do not directly deal with the theory of subli...