As a consequence of this separation, each individual suffers of repression, the “universal neurosis of mankind,” and history, led by a collectivity of individuals, goes through an analogous process of repression. History seen as neurosis, and in particular, Brown presents the rise of capitalism as the key moment of that neurosis.
Thus, in Eros y Tanatos (Life Against Death), Brown goes over the Freudian theories of repression, of the instincts, the stages of infantile sexuality, and the theories of sublimation and offantasy, to finally put forward a “way out”: the dialectical reunification of life and death, the end of repression, the “resurrection of the body”.