he attempted to fuse Marxism with Freudian ideas - indeed, Freud rather eclipses Marx in the book. Using Freud was not new to the Frankfurt School (Eric Fromm and others had used Freudian ideas, especiallyin trying to demonstrate the social psychology of fascism), but nothing as thoroughgoing as Marcuse's attempted absorption had been attempted. What Marcuse sought to do was to rewrite Freud's theory of the relationship between civilization and sexual repression. Freud had argued, in Civilization and its Discontents and elsewhere. that the powerful instinctual drives that human beings possess, especially the sexual, have to be repressed in order that civilization - institutions. businesses, states and empires, high art - can be created. Sexual energy has to be rechanneled to make it available for other purposes. The greater the level of civilisation, the greater the level of repression there must be. Thus, civilization comes at a heavy price in terms of widespread individual unhappinessand a high incidence of mental illness. Freud‘s bleak conclusion was that there was no answer to this relationship between civilisation and unhappiness. Repression was an inescapable accompaniment of any kind of advanced human society. Marcuse, however, disagreed.