"The psychoanalytic liberation of memory explodes the rationality of the repressed individual. As cognition gives way to re-cognition, the forbidden images and impulses of childhood begin to tell the truth that reason denies."
Marcuse is concerned about repression in adults, crediting it with maladjustment. He argues for the value of psychoanalysis for the sake of unlocking repressed memories. He believes that the repressed individual will be able to reformulate responses to childhood pain only by being brought into a state of free recollection.
"Not those who die, but those who die before they must and want to die, those who die in agony and pain, are the great indictment against civilization. They also testify to the irredeemable guilt of mankind. Their death arouses the painful awareness that it was unnecessary, that it could be otherwise. It takes the institutions and values of a repressive order to pacify the bad conscience of this guilt."
In this excerpt Marcuse accuses society of being guilty for deaths which could have been prevented. Those who desired death but did not need to die are victims of society, he argues. Their agony in living and in dying is the direct result of an insufficient social construct. If life is the goal, then everyone must participate in its preservation, even at the cost of society's various institutions.
"The Orphic symbols center on the singing god who lives to defeat death and who liberates natures, so that the constrained and constraining matter releases the beautiful and playful forms of animate and inanimate things. No longer striving and no longer desiring 'for something still to be attained,' they are free from fear and fetter -- and thus free per se."
Marcuse hones in upon the messianic nature of Orpheus in his divine representation. Orpheus serves as the mythic representation of the defeat of death. With Orpheus' arrival the people rejoice, for they know that he desires ultimate freedom. He defeats death in order to allow people to live unhindered by the weight of the knowledge of their own deaths. He saves people from wasting their lives in despair because he has already defeated their sole opposition.
