Sigmund Freud: Lionised Conman

Sigmund Fraud

A new biography demolishes whatever was left of the Viennese con man’s reputation.

By Kyle Smith
National Review Online

Writing to his close friend and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess in 1890, Sigmund Freud explained that he couldn’t pay a visit because, in a struggling psychiatric practice that suckered rich society women in Vienna, “My most important client is just now going through a kind of nervous crisis and might get well in my absence.”

No, Freud wasn’t being ironic: He depended on grandes dames to stay in business. On another occasion, referring to a cartoon in which a yawning lion grumbles, “Twelve o’clock and no negroes,” he wrote, “The worries begin again whether some negroes will turn up at the right time to still the lion’s appetite.” That appetite, as Frederick Crews makes clear in his exhaustive, reputation-pulverizing book Freud: The Making of an Illusion, was from an early age for fame and riches, which Freud relentlessly pursued by championing one faddish quack remedy after another, backing away when justified criticism made his position untenable, covering his tracks with misleading or even completely false claims about what he’d been up to, then bustling on to the next gold mine.

In 1884, for instance, in the giddy throes of a fondness for cocaine that Freud would indulge on and off for some 15 years, he had the marvelous idea of treating a brilliant young scientist, Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, for a mild morphine addiction (resulting from surgery) by putting the patient on cocaine. Instead, Fleischl became hugely addicted to both morphine and cocaine — sleepless nights, strung-out dozy days — and wasted away into a scarecrow while Freud, writing about the patient under a pseudonym, bragged in a paper about the tremendous success of his experiment. Meanwhile, a colleague of Freud was discovering an actual useful application of cocaine, as a topical anesthetic that opened the door to new kinds of surgery (such as on the eye). This was a truly revolutionary breakthrough and Freud had nothing to do with it. Later he would suggest that he had been on the brink of making the discovery but had been distracted by his fiancée, Martha.

The case for Freud’s misogyny is ludicrously easy to make.

Spiritually Repressed Memories

Betrayed By Words

The noun "hell" is of interest.  Millions of people, if asked, Do you believe in hell? would respond in the negative.  Nah.  Hell is just a name for something.  It does not really exist.  To reassure themselves that Hell is a figment it has become one of the most widely used words in the English language.  It  has even had usages added to facilitate further its deployment in everyday thought, speech and writing.  Take the adjective "helluva" for example, as in "We had a helluva great time."

When someone gets really wound up, they might use the word "hell" as an execration:  "Go to Hell, you son of a bitch!"  Why being the sire of a dog should result in one being cursed unto Hell is a bit of a mystery--but we get the general idea.  The cursor does not like the one he or she is execrating.

Of course, the inflated use of the word and its cognates minimises their power, effectiveness; it dilutes their meaning.  Here we believe is the unconscious motivation for the ubiquitous, never ending use of the word "hell" in the English speaking world.  The Bible makes very clear that mankind--everyone--is God conscious.  Not, mind you, god conscious--that is, holding a vague, general idea of a deity out there somewhere. But God conscious.

Freud and Freudians speak about repressed memories.

A Call to Arms

When The Vast Majority are Secular Atheists 

The curse of atheistic secularism is scourging the land like an ancient Balrog.  Evil now comes finally to full flower.  The point of the modern world is this: man is the measure of all things, and nothing human is foreign to me.  This self-contradictory dogma places Man at the centre of the universe.  All meaning, all coherence, all truth is to be found in man.  

There are only two ways this nonsense can play out.  Either it will morph into militant libertinism; or, it will morph into the benign rule of the Great Leader.  For the latter think of Kim Jong-Un as a current manifestation.  In the case of the former think of the vast majority of people living in Western nations.

The West's version of roiling atheistic secularism places man at the centre of all meaning and truth.  The pace of integration into this nightmare gathers by the day.  Rod Dreher writes:

What Is Our Policy?

Survival

The period between the First and Second World War in the UK has been dubbed the "Twilight Years"  by celebrated historians.  The country was awash with communist and latterly national socialist sympathisers, with pacifists, with Fabian socialists, with academics entranced by Freudianism, and with eugenicists.  [See Richard Overy,  The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Penguin/Viking, 2009)]

The pacifist sentiment was largely represented politically via the Labour and Liberal parties.  But not exclusively so.  Neville Chamberlain, the architect of the foreign policy of appeasement towards Hitler, professed to be a pacifist.  He led the Conservative Party.  But despite the grip of these strange philosophies and teachings, when it finally became clear to the wilfully obtuse that Herr Hitler was an aggressor and had an ambition to rule Britain by force, the nation and its intellectuals and false prophets came together as one.

When Chamberlain realised that Hitler had deliberately deceived and lied to him, he became resolute in leading the nation in war.  But he was unable to win the universal support of the House of Commons.  Eventually, Winston Churchill was asked to lead a coalition government representing all parties in the House.  Repentant pacifists stood to indicate their support.  All parties laid aside politicking and began to pull together in harness to defend the nation.

Winston Churchill describes the moment:

Stupendous Confidence Trick

Nabokov on Freud

Famously, Nabokov could not resist deriding Freud. And for good reason: Freud’s ideas were enormously influential, especially in Nabokov’s American years, but his claims were hollow. Nobel laureate Peter Medawar, perhaps the greatest of science essayists, declared in his book Pluto’s Republic, in terms akin to Nabokov’s, that Freudianism was “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century.” Nabokov saw the intellectual vacuity of Freudian theory and its pervasiveness in the popular and the professional imagination. He thought it corrupted intellectual standards, infringed on personal freedom, undermined the ethics of personal responsibility, destroyed literary sensitivity, and distorted the real nature of childhood attachment to parents–the last of which has been amply confirmed by modern developmental psychology.

From an essay by Brian Boyd, in The American Scholar. Boyd is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

The Twilight Years, Part VI

Dark Have Been My Dreams of Late

In this series of posts on the Twilight Years, as presented by historian Richard Overy, we have seen how firstly historians, followed by economists, then biologists in Britain during the Inter-War years were all harbingers of doom, all warning of the coming collapse of civilization. In almost every case, the solutions and preventatives offered involved a vast expansion of state powers in an attempt to do something to prevent the decline.

At the turn of the century the universal consensus was one of unbridled optimism for the future. Within twenty years it had swung to dark ideas of the breakdown and collapse of Britain. We have argued that this bi-polarity of manic optimism followed by dark pessimism is intrinsic to secular humanism, the dominant religion of the age.

But there is another bi-polarity present within secular humanism. It is the tendency to lurch between rationalism and irrationalism. It was rationalism which insisted upon endlessly repeated historical patterns of ebb and flow, and upon the inherent contradictions within an economic system built upon private ownership of property and free-exchange of goods, and upon the threats of miscegenation. It was rationalism which urged a vastly expanded role of government planning to counteract these threats. (What else is “planning” but an attempt to extend "rational" patterns over the chaos of an unregulated economy?) But when rationalism was at its height, irrationalism suddenly surged up and became very popular at the same time, arguing that all such attempts were ultimately useless and futile.

The particular manifestation that irrationalism took in the Inter-War years was the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the 1920's, psychoanalysis was a new branch of psychological science. It immediately captured widespread interest. Suddenly, it was the irrational which was the dominant reality, not the rational. Overy writes:

There is an unavoidable impression that psychoanalysis was precisely attuned to the age in which it emerged. Barbara Low, author in 1920 of the first popular introduction to psychoanalysis in Britain, recalled Freud's own observation that, “increasingly manifest in modern civilised life are the Neurotic and the Hysteric”. Low reflected that pressure of civilization had been “too extreme, too rapid in its action” for many people to adapt to its demands. Psychoanalysis was the therapeutic instrument for dealing with the dysfunctional nature of modern society by liberating mankind from the paralysing fear of the primitive instincts that lay concealed in the unconscious portion of the mind. (Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars [New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009], p.137,8)

The implicit promise in psychoanalysis was that if the irrational and suppressed neuroses asserted to lie within each individual were teased forth by psychoanalysis, so that they could be faced and one could come to terms with them, much of the dysfunction of modern society would evaporate. Freudianism argued that what was on the surface of man and society—which could be rationally analysed, evaluated, argued over and examined—was not what was real. The Real was what was subliminated unconsciously within the human psyche. The sublimated neuroses were essentially irrational. The rational man was therefore captive to the dark forces of irrationalism. Psychoanalysis held out the hope that these dark motivations could be exposed and corrected (that is, treated). This would free man to behave far more reasonably and constructively.

When psychoanalysis was taken out of the medical academic cloisters and popularised, it was immediately seized upon by the leading intellectuals of the day. Kingsley Martin, later to become editor of the New Statesman professed himself shaken to the core by the approach.

The fear that reason could no longer be relied upon to sort out the problems of the modern world was, Martin continued, “the most devastating of all”. (Overy, p. 145). Emphasis, ours.

Freudianism—in its narrower, stricter, medical manifestations—was unable to win sustained support. It could so quickly be reduced to absurdity. The obsession with sex was seen as ludicrous, if not distasteful. But in the Inter-War years the notion that the unconscious irrational mind lying beneath the rational superficial exterior and pulling puppet strings to control rational processes proved very attractive and even compelling to the wider public. It offered an explanation as to why things were "breaking down". Quite rapidly the theory morphed to its “mature” stage. The unconscious came to be seen not as something which just afflicted those who had neuroses of various kinds: rather the unconscious was one of the core realities of being human.

At work in every individual and in society and nations corporately were hidden irrational passions of love, hate, aggression, sadism, masochism and narcissism which would come forth unconsciously, at any point, to overthrow reason. Irrationality ultimately trumped rationality.

The effect of mass-circulation popular psychology was not to provide effective therapy but to familiarize growing circles of the population with the idea that every individual is prey of inner demons which could manipulate at will the outer person. (Overy, p.169).

It is difficult to conceive of a more dark, irrational world view.

By the 1930's most psychoanalysts had abandoned the consulting couch and had become social commentators, applying guilt, repression, eros, and the death drive to the wider society, to the social order, political behaviour, international crises and war. (Overy p.163). Civilization, it was thought, was about to be swamped by irrational dark forces of the human soul.

By 1939, as one sociologist put it, there had emerged a wide popular expectation among political and social scientists that only psychoanalysts could properly explain “man of the causes of our 'Modern Discontents'. Even socialists, argued the journal of the National Labour Colleges, should recognize “the melancholy truth” that man “is not at bottom a rational animal” and adapt their tactics accordingly. (Overy p. 173)

Under this variant of secular humanism, the irrational pole, civilization was the rational, the structured, the ordered, the controlled and restrained. But it was paper thin. Underneath were irrational, chaotic, primitive, infantile and arbitrary forces, and a

seething mass of instincts and drive that . . . was capable of a terrible aggression and an urge to morbid self-destruction. . . . (T)his paradigm . . . only served to illuminate what many people already suspected, that beneath the thin veneer of civilization there lurked a monstrous other self whose release would spell the end of civilized life and the triumph of barbarism. (Overy, p. 173).

In the end the Freudians, despite the wide public appeal and interest, could offer no hope. In their case, no amount of government planning, spending, or programming would ever be great enough to win. But the irrationalism of psychoanalysis added fresh impetus to the pessimism of the rationalists: not only was doom coming; it was inevitable and unavoidable, for man could not escape his unconscious, repressed, evil and brutal self. It served only to pour petrol on the fires of despair, which had been already burning brightly.

In our modern day, of course, humanist psychology has swung back to its more rationalist pole. Generally evil, violent, masochistic or destructive human passions are believed to be a result of conditioning by society itself. This offers the prospect that such dark forces can be ameliorated by social planning, government programmes, and above all, by government education. Once again, we labour under the fallacy of false cause, and therefore false cures. When the remedy proves a failure, the appeal of darker, more pessimistic alternatives is likely to rise once again.