 Although Marcuse had read Freud in the 1920s and 1930s, his serious engagement did not begin until the 1950s. Marcuse was invited to give a series of lectures in 1950–51 by the Washington School of Psychiatry. The result of this engagement was one of Marcuse’s most famous books, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Marcuse’s book is a response to the pessimism of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents (1930 [1961]). Freud’s book paints a bleak picture of the evolution of civilization as the evolution of greater and greater repression from which there seems to be no escape. The death and life instincts are engaged in a battle for dominance with no clear winner in sight. According to Marcuse, Freud fails to develop the emancipatory possibility of his own theory. Marcuse’s task is two-fold. First, he must show that human instincts or drives are not merely biological and fixed, but also social, historical, and malleable. Secondly, he must show that repressive society also produces the possibility of the abolition of repression (Marcuse 1955: 5). 