Brown, in which the author offers a radical analysis and critique of the work of Sigmund Freud, tries to provide a theoretical rationale for a nonrepressive civilization, explores parallels between psychoanalysis and Martin Luther's theology, and draws on revolutionary themes in western religious thought, especially the body mysticism of Jakob Böhme and William Blake.

Brown later called parts of Life Against Death "quite immature" and wrote of his Love's Body (1966) that it was written to confuse any followers he acquired due to the book and destroy its positions.

"Brown begins his Life Against Death with the riddle that haunts all romantics: Why does man who is born into a garden of innocent delight create a culture in which he is alienated from himself, his fellows, and nature?

[5] Seeking a passage to a "post-Marxist world", Brown began his turn to psychoanalysis partly because he had become disenchanted with politics after the failure of Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential candidacy.

Commenting that he had inherited from Protestantism a conscience which dictated that intellectual work should be directed toward ending or minimizing human suffering, Brown addressed the book to everyone ready to consider new ideas and possibilities.

[7] Brown proposed a synthesis of psychoanalysis, anthropology, and history, calling the analyst Géza Róheim's efforts in that direction pioneer work of significance second only to Freud's.

"[9] According to the historian Paul Robinson, Radicals such as Reich and Róheim represented a minority current of opinion within psychoanalysis, which by the 1940s was viewed as fundamentally conservative by the European and American intellectual community.

The left-wing psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had argued that several aspects of psychoanalytic theory served the interests of political reaction in his The Fear of Freedom (1942), an assessment confirmed by sympathetic writers on the right.

They saw Freud's greatness in his metahistorical analysis of "the general neurosis of mankind", argued that modern man is sick with the burdens of sexual repression and uncontrolled aggression, attempted to make explicit the hidden critical trend in psychoanalysis that promised a nonrepressive civilization as a solution to the dilemma of modern unhappiness, and accepted the most radical and discouraging of Freud's psychological assumptions: the pervasive role of sexuality and the existence of the death instinct.

Brown concluded that the last chapter of Life Against Death was disfigured by the misleading idea that the world could be 'a pastoral scene of peace and pleasure, luxe calme et volupté, Baudelaire's utopian image invoked by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization'.

[29][30][31] Sontag wrote that Life Against Death and Eros and Civilization represented a "new seriousness about Freudian ideas" and exposed most previous writing on Freud in the United States as irrelevant or superficial.

Though she considered Brown's "commitment to Protestantism as the herald of a culture which has transcended sublimation ... historically dubious", she wrote that by placing his ideas in the framework of Christian eschatology Brown raised issues of great importance and opened the possibility of a "psychoanalytic theory of history which does not simply reduce cultural history to the psychology of individuals", working out an original point of view that was simultaneously historical and psychological, and forcing a reconsideration of the meaning of eschatology.

[22] Friedenberg wrote that Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization (1961) shared a "kinship in mood if not in tone or method" to Life Against Death and its "strident paean to the primal id.

"[26] Kimball described the book as a "dense, learned academic tract that blends Freud, Marx, idealist philosophy, and mysticism East and West in a preposterous but intoxicating brew."

However, it added that following the publication of Love's Body, some important critics belatedly reviewed Life Against Death and The Observer placed it "on two outstanding-books lists."

Though she credited Brown with providing a dual account of drives and object relations, she wrote that he "consistently underplays this component of his work" in Life Against Death.

[33] Beard wrote that Life Against Death, with its "apocalyptic companion" Eros and Civilization, "provided one of the most influential blueprints for radical thinking in the decade which followed."

[42] Paul Robinson credited Brown and Marcuse with systematically analyzing psychoanalytic theory in order to reveal its critical implications and of going beyond Reich and Róheim in probing the dialectical subtleties of Freud's thought, thereby reaching conclusions more extreme and utopian than theirs.

"[44] The social psychologist Liam Hudson described Life Against Death as a "strange, fertile work" that presaged a collapse of the popular "infatuation with hard science".

[49] The historian Russell Jacoby called Life Against Death one of the boldest efforts to revitalize psychoanalysis, but believed that the work failed to "disturb its theoretical sleep.

[53] The philosopher José Guilherme Merquior described Life Against Death and Foucault's Madness and Civilization as similar calls "for the liberation of the Dionysian id.

"[54] The political scientist Jeffrey B. Abramson credited Brown with providing the only account of preambivalence that highlights "the Freudian concept of identification and its significance as a desire to be at one with another person."

However, he criticized Brown for "seeking to achieve a final state of satisfaction that would end the self to be satisfied", a conclusion that he considered "nihilistic" and close to the views of Spinoza.

She maintained that in Life Against Death and Love's Body, "the deeply learned and classically trained Brown made an unsurpassed fusion of literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, and politics."

She credited Brown's books with making a major impact on American culture in the 1960s, writing that along with Arnold Hauser's The Social History of Art (1951) they helped her to see Foucault as foolish.

She credited Brown with making daring use of Freudian ideas and described Life Against Death as "one of the great nonfiction works of the 20th century", "what Michel Foucault longed to achieve but never did", and "a tour de force of North American thought."

[61] The author Richard Webster compared Life Against Death to the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther (1958), noting that both works suggested similarities between Lutheran Protestantism and classical psychoanalysis.

'"[65] The philosopher Todd Dufresne compared Life Against Death to Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd (1960) and noted that its sales figures reflected its influence: over fifty-thousand copies had been sold by 1966.

He questioned to what extent its readers actually understood the work, suggesting that many student activists might have shared the view of Morris Dickstein, to whom it meant, "not some ontological breakthrough for human nature, but probably just plain fucking, lots of it".

[66] The historian Dagmar Herzog wrote that Life Against Death was, along with Eros and Civilization, one of the most notable examples of an effort to "use psychoanalytic ideas for culturally subversive and emancipatory purposes".