SOURCE: "MacLennan's Early Novels: Life Against Death," in The Immoral Moralists: Hugh MacLennan and Leonard Cohen, Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1972, pp. 37-52.

In the following excerpt, Morley discusses MacLennan's treatment of puritanism and sexuality in Barometer Rising, Two Solitudes, and The Precipice.

In his study of the psychoanalytical meaning of history [Life Against Death, 1970], Norman O. Brown describes Freud's theory of the dualism which underlies human conflicts, a dualism which Freud sees in terms of two basic instincts driving men towards life or death. This dualism is grounded in the very nature of life. Freud describes the instincts in terms of a "pleasure principle" and a "reality principle." The latter is the cause of repression, the pillar on which Freud's theory of psychoanalysis rests. Brown finds the source of Freud's pessimism in this hypothesis of an irreconcilable conflict between human instincts: between Eros or sexual love, seeking to preserve...