As I continue to build upon Dave Breese's book, Seven Men Who Rule the World From the Grave, another man, whose ideas have left such a pervasive impact on not only the individual, but the society as a whole, have inundated just about every sphere of influence, including science.
Psychology is perceived as the answer to all human behavior. The degree to which psychology and psychiatry is utilized can not be measured but for one, it is used to assess just about every human behavior and it is used to control just about every human behavior with psychotropics, anti-psychotics, and anti-depressants. Why the fascination and obsession with human behavior? And why is the field of psychology and psychiatry so popular that there are countless degrees and therapies associated with it and books upon books of diagnoses that have popularized the notion of mental illness or any other kind of personality problem? The answer is simply really: man wants to know what lurks deep in his or her soul. In man's quest to be known and to answer the question of who am I and what am I like, "the true nature of man and the shape of his spiritual being has been defined in more ways, shaped by more theories, and analyzed by more psychic approaches than probably any other entity on the face the earth" (Breese 125). The pursuit to find answers to the questions of human behavior has been infinitely complicated to say the least and has left in it's wake more confusion than absolutes; the quest to unleash the hidden recesses of the soul and the dark mysteries therein have produced the most bizarre analyses, the most strange theories, and the most ridiculous methods that some people have opened the door to the [occult] in their lives and have actually believed more lies than truth.
These impenetrable mysteries, perfect for the insatiable appetite of the hungry soul that can never be satisfied, have opened the door to all kinds of dangerous outcomes and occult practices, namely fortune tellers, mystics, induced hysterias, bizarre hypnosis, strange sexual tendencies, drug addictions and overdoses, and unknown spirits with evil intents. How much of the common folk or lay people depend upon and trust these bizarre theories and psychoanalyses by "authoritative" people? It is true that "man is acutely conscious that there is much he does not know and that no small percentage of that unknown resides in the mysterious depths of personality" (126). In man's quest to be known, he is willing to accept anything even if the answers come wrapped up in bizarre psychoanalyses and strange sexual determinisms. The populace would be more than intrigued, even titillated, removing all common sense thinking from their minds.
And then it happen!
There came a man with what appeared to be the answers to the deep, impenetrable mysteries that lie within the human personality. This man who broke into the silence of that deep mystery and attempted to define the nuances of the human psyche that although at first seemed strange actually became a household name. The man, Sigmund Freud, no doubt gave the world titillating theories that satisfied the curiosity of many but how much of his theories and definitions of human personality are grounded in real science and objective truth? And how much of his theories have left a negative impact on the culture and a stain on the human soul? These important questions should be considered when most people will blindly follow any new trend or idea even though it is not backed by real science.
Sigmund Freud and his bizarre psychoanalysis changed not only the face of science but human behavior as well. His theories even changed the culture in such radical ways that it is safe to say that all has never been the same since. The world gladly submitted itself to his therapy and his influence can be seen in both superficial and profound ways. Few can say that they have not been influenced in any way by Freud's theories of human personality and behavior. Before I go into Freud's theories and the negative impact of those theories on the individual soul and the culture, I will give you a background into Freud's upbringing and how it influenced the trajectory of his life.
Sigmund Freud was born in 1856. He was the eldest son of his second father's wife. His father was married before and had two sons and his father's second wife was as old as his two step-brothers. This large family of Freud's shaped many of his theories and determined the direction of his life as noted by many of Freud's biographers (Lauzun 27). It was Freud's memories that meant more to him than anything (which became a big part of his hypnosis and psychoanalysis). When his family moved to Vienna, Freud obtained most of his education there but before his move to Vienna, his family moved a couple times which would be considered normal by most standards, but it was these moves however that became the premise or basis of his "phobias" of traveling and trains. Despite his phobias, Freud was known by his colleagues as having an unusual amount of self-confidence, as this became one prevailing characteristic of his reputation, "he seemed relatively uninterested in conforming, pleasing others, or fitting in and was relatively unperturbed by being thought odd or iconoclastic" (Breese 127). Although Freud was Jewish, he never practiced or adopted the Jewish religion. The idea of a personal God intimately involved in his life was not a part of his thinking and this fact alone is important because it also shaped many of his theories. After Freud finished his education, he received his degree in medicine but it took him three extra years to complete his studies because of his intense interest in related subjects that he pursed in addition to the requisites of his medical degree. Freud eventually opened a neurology practice specifically for an income-producing activity even though he was more interested in theory and experimentation. It was in this neurology practice of his that he encouraged the use of cocaine with his patients to cure depression and even indigestion. He was so certain that cocaine was innocuous that it could be considered equal to morphine as an answer in psychotherapy. After this came a wave of cocaine addiction in Vienna and Freud was held responsible for this new drug affliction. This was his first encounter with controversy which in turn revealed his noted characteristic trait of not caring what others thought of him, not even his colleagues. As Freud was banned from classical medicine even as his friend and colleague, Joseph Breuer, deserted him, "he maintained his theories with astonishing stubbornness" (129). Another fascinating fact of Freud's life as many of his biographers noted, was that his marriage to his wife, Martha Bernays, was uneventful, unassuming, and unruffled, and for a man who promoted the most bizarre sexual theories, it was more than likely assumed that his private life would be just as bizarre and kinky.
Before Freud was banned from classical medicine, his practice in Vienna began at a very interesting point in European history when a wide variety of neuroses proliferated and at the same time the bourgeoisie had the money to pay for it. Freud's first therapy used was hypnosis and this characterized the first phase of his medical practice. He became familiar with this mental phenomenon when he was in Paris studying under Charcot. This French neurologist induced hysteria in his patients causing them to recall lost memories and then caused the hysteria to cease all under the guise of hypnotic suggestion. Fortunately there were some sensible and reasonable doctors who were skeptical of this therapy and saw it as an activity of a charlatan. There is no science to back up hypnosis, namely because memories can not be trusted and there are too many variables that can potentially alter the memories of individuals. Memories are subjective, inconsistent, and can be interpreted in many ways. Despite many objections to the use of hypnosis in therapy by his colleagues, Freud was determined to press though those objections and in turn became its champion. As noted by Freud himself,
"there was something positively seductive in working with hypnotism.
For the first there was a sense of having overcome one's
helplessness;
and it was highly flattering to enjoy the reputation of being a miracle
worker" (Lauzun 38).
Freud's own arrogance is quite apparent. With the further use of his hypnotic technique, he became convinced that as memories surfaced with his patients, many had suffered severe sexual abuse which was the cause of their current aberrant behavior. Eventually he came to believe that "the cathartic method," or the recall of childhood memories, was the answer to neurotic behavior. As he continued with his therapy sessions, he noted that behind the neurosis of his patients there was one or more aberrant sexual practice, meaning the patient was molested by a person close to them like a family member and this gave way to his theory called the Oedipus Complex, as in Greek mythology (one of Sophocles' tragedies) where the son has an incestuous relationship with his mother. This theory and his method of hypnosis left damaging and lasting effects on individuals and families and sadly for his patients who trusted him, his bizarre theories started to break down when he began to have doubts about what his patients had said. Upon further research, he realized that most of the seductions the patients reported had never really happened. In The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement Freud said,
"In the end I told myself that one has, after all, no right to despair if
one's expectations turn out to be wrong; they must simply be
reexamined" (50).
Freud admitted to the breakdown of his own theories. He later wrote that "four factors particularly bothered him about the theory: his continued unsuccessful attempts to bring his analysis to a conclusion, the impossibility of believing that so many fathers were sexual perverts, the definite realization that there is no "indication of reality" in the unconscious, and the absence of memories of sexual assault in serious mental illness when the personality is invaded by the unconscious" (Breese 132, Lauzun 49). Unfortunate for his patients, Freud used them as guinea pigs in his experimental lab.
Eventually, Freud abandoned the idea of hypnosis because he did not trust it's conclusions and he felt it was a weak method to use in psychotherapy. And so he went more and more into the method of free association which to this day is strongly associated with Freudianism. Clearly we can see that Freud just had ideas that were constantly changing and were not reliable or grounded in objective truth. Most of his results with his patients were inconclusive and much of "his 'data' came from unconfirmed and quite unconfirmed testimony of his privately interviewed patients" (Breese 139). So much confusion and far from being the father of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy but rather the father of pop psychology and despite this, Freud became a household name in the West!
This impact of Freud's had more damaging effects, not just in the individual, but in the culture as a whole, particularly in the area of the libido.
Libido was everything to Freud as were memories. With the same vigor applied to his patient's memories, he integrated libido in all his bizarre ideas and methods. The term libido for Freud was the sexual instinct and "so fundamental was the libido to Freudian thought that a modern dictionary, incorporation with Freud, calls libido 'psychic energy generally; the driving force behind all human action" (135). This of course is one of the most extreme statements ever made in the history of man and has turned a culture upside down with pervasive sexual deviance. It is amazing that this could even be considered real science, "psychic energy?" Just another case of pop psychology and you can observe the consequences in the culture as Freud's other idea of sexual determinism was the cause of the 1960s sexual revolution. Sexual determinism was the driving force behind most of Freud's philosophy and he was more than serious when he said in Civilization and its Discontents that libido is the universal motivation for all things,
"This struggle between individual and society, however, is not derived from the antagonism of the primal instincts, Eros and death, which are probably irreconcilable; it is a dissention in the camp of the libido itself, comparable to the contest between the ego and its objects for a share of the libido; and it does eventually admit to the solution in the individual, as we may hope it will also do in the future of civilization-however gravely it may oppress the lives of individuals at the present time" (Hutchins 800).
There are many other statements made by Freud that "clearly demonstrate Freud's capacity to translate his ideas of human personality to the societal level, for in them he seconds the notion of cultural evolution and holds that society itself has a superego and is vying for a piece of the libido. This truly is comical and outright laughable and would be much better served in a script for a late night comedy show and yet Freud was absolutely convinced that his ideas were right especially when he attempted to define the personality in three overlapping components: id, ego, and the superego. For lack of time and space I am not going to go into depth on these three components but it is important to mention that Freud, being obsessed with sexual thoughts, postulated that "behind these entities lay a pair of instincts that decide the nature of life itself" and those instincts he called life and death instincts. These two instincts in the personality are in conflict with one another and produce a fluctuating energy that feeds into the id and becomes accumulated there (Breese 135). Freud then asserted that the death instinct could become loaded with erotic charges and as it combined with the libido, it would manifest in sadism and masochism. This is science? It sounds more like science fiction than anything! These cryptic and bizarre, ridiculous notions of Freud's didn't stop there, he even claimed that the libido in masochism turned inward upon itself and the libido in sadism turned outward as it was made manifest in aggressive and dramatic interactions with others. In all honestly, we can not say this is true objective science when Freud really just "created arbitrary delineations in his own mind and then proceeded to superimpose them on the personalities described in the reports of his interviews with patients, many of which interviews he destroyed" (Breese 138). Certainly, these ideas will ignite curiosity but just because an individual peddling titillating ideas has the credentials of a doctor, does not mean he is right. Many times, we wrongly assume that they are a deep thinker and although we may not understand their ideas or assertions, we still treat them with due difference; who are we to disagree with what they say. Instead, we should be suspicious that these ideas are not scientific. Many of Freud's colleagues (at least the one's who knew better) broke with him because of his addiction with, and overemphasis on, sexual motivation and the professional world of neurology was greatly divided by a man whom so many could not understand (139). So deeply is Freudianism ingrained in the human psyche that the human soul has been radically changed resulting in sexual depravity on every level of the culture.
This sexual depravity is played out in the daily lives of so many people who believe that all their successes or failures in life reside in their cooperation with, or opposition to, the forces of the libido. In the civilized world up to the mid-twentieth century and still under the influence of orthodox Christianity, sexual matters were not to be addressed in public. There was a clear discretion and clear manners associated with proper and prudent public behavior. Not so the case today. We have witnessed the destruction of family values, more divorces from adultery, more children born out of wedlock, and more children abandoned by their parents with no moral figure or example to guide their lives into adulthood. We have witnessed more unplanned pregnancies, more abortions, and more sexual transmitted diseases as so many, under the influence of Freud, have abandoned a moral conscience and a moral volition to stay within a healthy boundary. We have witnessed open flagrant displays of sexual behavior, orgies, and practically unclothed figures, especially the female figure, in an attempt to sell a product. These visuals do more than spark a desire, they create the very destruction of a culture, "what careers have been blasted, what potential melted into nothing, what great accomplishments never achieved because of our generation's incredibly nonsensical preoccupation with that never-to-be-achieved will-o'-the-wisp, that ever-unfulfilled pseudo-promise of sexual fulfillment?" (143). How has our society become so gross and so stupid at the same time? Our culture is a clear indication that unbridled sex produces not just a destruction of the flesh, but a deterioration of the mind and yet in our present generation the one who chooses to possess their vessel with honor is considered pitiful, no fun, boring, and prudish! Some actually think it unfortunate that society in the Victorian days missed out on all the fun by not dragging sex out into the streets and so we witnessed the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Funny it is that "the person who has a recalcitrant attitude toward the sexual revolution is the one who needs a psychiatrist, our pundits say" (142)! Reducing life and the soul to some sort of sexual determinism is the grossest form of reductionism. Freud can not only be the great reductionist, but he is a great deceiver as well. These ideas of Freud's only draw foolish conclusions. In a real sense, Freud should be considered an artist, not a doctor of medicine. But if a doctor of medicine, we can only call him Frankenstein, especially when Freud (regarding his critics) was quoted as saying,
"My inclination is to treat those colleagues who offer resistance
exactly as we treat patients in the same situation"
Freud's practice of treating his colleagues as dissenters was picked up by a previous totalitarian society. Another of Freud's biographers, Paul Johnson, states in Modern Times,
"Two decades later, the notion of regarding dissent as a form of mental sickness, suitable for compulsory hospitalization, was to blossom in the Soviet Union into a new form of political repression" (6).
And Johnson also said,
"after eighty years experience, his methods of therapy have proved, on the whole, costly failures, more suited to cosset the unhappy than to cure the sick" (6).
This is not surprising coming from a man who did not believe in God. Man in his wisdom, apart form God, can not know the heart of man, not even his own heart. Freud's poor relationship with his own father was "projected" (using his own concept) onto the living God and his atheistic gleanings fueled his ridiculous notions of sexual determinism and godlessness. One can only imagine the inevitable despair of Freudianism and yet his psychoanalysis became the new revelation and his psychotherapy became the new salvation. Despite these "mysterious" deep findings in the human psyche and the nuances of human personality, Freud was much more simple than most realize. It is a gross insult to say that man is merely a collection of psychological forces that he has no control over. Man being tripartite, possessing his body, soul, and mind, capable of sound moral judgment and intelligence, reveals the image of God, not an animal. Freud reduced man to an animal with purely instinct alone. How empty and how sad to make man conditioned by his environment and the pressures of life. Is not man so much more capable than that? Is not man so much more intelligent and can not man show much more restraint than instinct alone? Man rising above and reaching his potential in a thrilling sense resembles the image of God and man using his mind capable of making intelligent decisions manifests the nature of God in man. But this cold wind of Freudianism, along with Darwinism, has reduced the world to "concentrate on libido to the point of addiction and it has legitimized the creation of determinisms, thereby opening the door for the invention of the plethora of other determinisms that are being concocted in the minds of the would be pied pipers of our time" (Breese 146). How sad!
Gerand Lauzun, Sigmund Freud. The Man and His Theories. Fawcett, Greenwich, Conn., 1962
Robert Maynard Hutchins, Freud, vol. 54. Great Books of the Western World. Chicago. Encyclopedia Britannica. 1952
Paul Johnson. Modern Times. Harper & Row. New York, NY. 1983