On Sigmund Freud: pushing society into sexual psychopathy, Part 1

Biography of Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (May 6, 1856 – September 23, 1939) was an Austrian neurologist, researcher and writer who is most celebrated as “the Father of Psychoanalysis.” Freud’s early career was his training as a doctor of medicine receiving his medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1881; here he conducted research into microscopic neuroanatomy, aphasia and cerebral palsy at the Vienna General Hospital. In 1902, he became an affiliated professor (‘professor extraordinarius’) at the University of Vienna.

As a pioneer in psychoanalysis, a clinical process for treating psychopathology (or psychopathy, which Freud considered a “guiltless crime”) through discourse between a patient and a psychoanalyst, Freud established therapeutic procedures for instance discovered transference and the use of free association instituting its dominant part in the analytic process. Freud’s perversion of and obsession with sexuality compelled him to involve its childhood forms and to create the “Oedipus complex” as the dominant principle of his psychoanalytical theory. His examination of dreams as wish-fulfillments gave him models for the clinical study of symptom development and the mechanisms of repression along with the expansion of his theory of the unconscious as an agency disruptive of conscious states of mind. Freud hypothesized the reality of libido, a dynamism with which mental procedures and structures are endowed and which creates erotic connections, and a death drive, the basis of aggression, hate, repetition, and neurotic guilt. In other works during his middle and late periods Freud developed a comprehensive interpretation and reactionary analysis of religion, culture and society.

Psychoanalysis remains prominent in the realm of psychotherapy, in parts of psychiatry, and throughout the humanities. For example, it continues to produce widespread and very spirited debate concerning its therapeutic effectiveness, its scientific viability, and whether it promotes or is negative to the concept of modern feminism (which I will discuss in Part 2 of this essay series). However, Freud’s legacy has come to dominate present-day Western ideas and popular culture. So dominate was Freud’s psycho-sexual worldview on American and European thought it was said by poet W. H. Auden at the time of Freud’s death in 1939 that he declared “A whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives.”

Freud and Psychoanalysis

Freud went to Paris in October 1885 on a fellowship to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a famous neurologist who was directing scientific explorations into hypnosis. Freud considered that experience a turning point in his life and a catalyst in compelling him to pursue the techniques of medical psychopathology and more away from neurology research which would have been a more financially favorable career. Charcot was an expert in the field of hysteria and hypnosis techniques, which he often demonstrated with patients on stage in front of an audience.

During Freud’s early years of private practice from 1886-1895, he started using hypnosis in his clinical work, however, by 1896, Freud had rejected hypnosis and began utilizing the term “psychoanalysis” to denote to his new clinical system and theoretical framework he would utilize to reinterpret the world in his own, objective image from that point forward.

Freud’s expansion of these different theories occurred during a time when he suffered heart irregularities, distressing dreams and episodes of depression, a “neurasthenia” which he connected to his father’s death in 1896 and which compelled Freud to conduct a “self-analysis” of his own memories and dreams of youth. His investigations of his emotional states of hostility to his father and jealousy rivalries over his mother’s love caused a fundamental change in his theory of the origin of the neuroses.

Freud, using his early clinical work had hypothesized that unconscious memories of sexual molestation in early childhood were an essential cause for the psychoneuroses (obsessional neurosis and hysteria), a precondition known as Freud’s seduction theory. Nevertheless Freud’s self-analysis compelled him to reject the theory that every neurosis can be connected back to the outcome of infantile sexual trauma, now contending that infantile sexual abuse still had a contributory function, however it did not matter whether they were real or imaginary and that in either case infantile sexual trauma became pathogenic only when functioning as repressed memories.

Therefore the formulation of one of Freud’s most enduring and celebrated psychiatric theories, the Oedipus complex derived from this conversion from the theory of infantile sexual trauma as a universal description of how all neuroses develop to one that presumes an independent infantile sexuality.

Freud defined the evolution of his clinical techniques and proposed his theory of the psychogenetic origins of hysteria, verified in numerous case histories like his Studies on Hysteria published (1895). One of Freud’s most important early works was The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) in which Freud analyzes interpretations of his own and his patients’ dreams employing his theory of wish-fulfillments, censorship of the “dream work” and repression. As a child of about age 10 or 11, I was introduced to the writings of Freud through this book by my mother who at the time was studying psychology in college. I recall reading Freud’s abridged version, On Dreams (1901) which was very popular with the general public and had many subsequent editions where he established the theoretical archetypes of psychological organization (the unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious) on which these ideas became established. Later Freud applied his theories separate from a clinical setting in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). Another book my mother gave me to read as a young teenager was Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), where he gave details regarding his theory of infantile sexuality in all of its “polymorphous perverse” forms and the functioning of the “drives,” which he considered the basis of sexual identity. Also in 1905, Freud published one of his more famous and provocative case studies Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora).

Freud’s Philosophy and Marxism

>From roughly 1900-55 Freud and his Psychoanalysis revolution of sexual perversion and anti-religion was re-interpreted (ironically using Freud’s defense mechanism Psychological Projection) as both radical and ‘conservative.’ By the 1940s, Leftist propaganda began systematically rewriting history to reinterpret Freud’s ideas as ‘conservative’ by the European and American intellectual circles, thus psychological projection existed as a Marxist tactic and strategy to label your political enemies with ideas you actually believe. For example, Frankfurt-born psychologist and social theorist Erich Fromm had contended that many aspects of psychoanalytic theory aided the interests of political reactionaries on the Right in his book, The Fear of Freedom (1942). Likewise Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) represented Freud as a dystopian zealot who compelled society to make the best of an unavoidably miserable fate, and was therefore championed for that depressed worldview. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh noted Freud’s dystopian worldview as a phenomena President Barack Obama through his presidency has given to Millennials in a monologue he gave in 2014.

Beginning in the mid-1950s several important philosophers and conservative schools of thought like the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, began to systematically provide a viable intellectual paradigm to challenge the then dominant view of Freud as a conservative, most notably – Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955), Lionel Trilling’s Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture, and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959). Eros and Civilization championed the notion that Freud’s psychoanalysis and Marxism were philosophically the same addressing related problems from different perceptions and following not a Right but an aggressive and doctrinaire Leftist, hedonist worldview. Marcuse criticized Neo-Freudian revisionism for ostensibly rejecting pessimistic philosophies for instance the death instinct, contending that they could be reinterpreted to promote a utopian worldview instead.

Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Sigmund Freud, and one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry, viewed Freud’s contributions in the field of psychiatry as comparable to that of Marx for economics, and Stanford Historian Paul Robinson, regarded Freud as a revolutionary whose influence on twentieth century thought is equal in importance to Marx’s socialist-communist contributions to nineteenth century thought. Fromm regarded Freud, Marx and Einstein as the three “architects of the modern age,” however unlike Robinson rejected the opinion that Marx and Freud were equally important, contending that Marx was exceedingly more indispensable to history and a much better philosopher than Freud. However, I agree with Fromm’s contention that credits Freud with forever changing the way human nature is understood and interpreted (more on this point at the end of this essay). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (1972) promoted the idea that psychoanalysis was similar to the Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in that it became corrupted almost from the beginning which they traced to Freud’s development of the theory of the Oedipus complex a theory which they considered to be idealist.

This last point by Deleuze and Guattari that Communism in Russia became ‘corrupted’ is disingenuous. Freudians would call their historical revisionism a defense mechanism, or specifically a psychotic rationalization. Why? Because in the history of nations that tried any form of Marxism and its corollary Leftist government systems – Communism, Socialism, Western Socialism, Liberalism and Progressivism, is the unbroken narrative that these systems have utterly failed every time they were tried, yet Marxist academics and Progressive sycophants to this day always claim that Communism failed here or there because it wasn’t “pure” or it became “corrupted” or it was “underfunded,” but that our version of Communism will succeed. That’s a lie; that’s historical revisionism or what Freud would call the defense mechanism of psychotic rationalization.

Freud’s Influence and Connection to other Writers

In his celebrated book Being and Nothingness (1943) French existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre criticizes Freud’s theory of the unconscious, writing that consciousness is basically self-conscious. Sartre likewise tried to integrate some of Freud’s philosophies into his particular existential worldview, and thus advance an “existential psychoanalysis” by which causal classifications are exchanged by teleological classifications. Freud continues to be one of the most polarizing figures in history, for example, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, believed Freud to be one of the founding fathers of phenomenology, which is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness, while Theodore Adorno, a German sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist known for his critical theory of society, believes Husserl (the actual founder of phenomenology), to be Freud’s philosophical opposite interpreting Husserl’s critical essay against psychologism (psychology’s effect on facts and law) as a diatribe against psychoanalysis. Philosophers Paul Ricœur and Jürgen Habermas together have developed a “hermeneutic version of Freud,” promoting the idea that “claimed him as the most significant progenitor of the shift from an objectifying, empiricist understanding of the human realm to one stressing subjectivity and interpretation.” Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher and father of deconstructionism, understands Freud to be a central figure in the history of Western metaphysics and, with Nietzsche and Heidegger, a forerunner of his universal brand of sexual hedonism and extremism.

Freud’s Legacy in Modern times

If it is indeed true as Freud wrote that “the madman is the dreamer awake,” then I believe that two major overarching themes of Freud’s oeuvre clearly expressed his madness – atheism and sexual perversity (psychopathy) – diabolical ideas that have cursed us all in modern times. Freud’s militant atheism is demonstrated here by his declaration, “[I]t would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, … a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. …” In other words to Freud religion was a delusion, a loss of contact with reality.

Like the picture above Freud was obsessed with sex, sexuality and sexual drives, but before he could create the world in his own perverted image, Freud had to first deconstruct and render Western civilizations’ historical and culture reliance on its Judeo-Christian traditions. To achieve this Machiavellian feat Freud would make effective use his of medical background in neurology and psychopathology to ingeniously create out of whole cloth and chronicled in his numerous books and scholarly articles, a comprehensive sexual Weltanschauung (worldview), a veritable Unified Field Theory of psycho-sexual perversity where within 10 years after Freud’s death another radical sex researcher and Freudian sycophant, Alfred Kinsey would write in his infamous book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) based on the sexual perverse idea that “the only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform.”

Freud would be pleased with Kinsey’s anti-Christian obsession and fraudulent scientific statistics which would drive society into sexual nihilism during the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and 70s. Freud’s rationalization of sexual psychopathy is his legacy the results of which in the early twenty first century reside a grotesque battlefield of sexual casualties in the tens of millions due to a litany of sexual transmitted diseases (STDs) – Gonorrhea, Syphilis, Herpes, HPV, Hepatitis A, B, C, Chlamydia, Bacterial vaginosis, Crabs, Scabies, and the most deadly, HIV/AIDS, etc… A hellish legacy of sexual perversity, pain and obsessive psychopathy given scientific justification and rationalization by Marxism Media, Inc., legions of Marxist professors spewing facile propaganda to clueless students, Leftist intellectuals, politicians, judges and Herr Sigmund Freud.

*N.B.: This essay is based in part on ideas from Encyclopedia Britannica Great Books of the Western World, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Editor-in-Chief (University of Chicago, 1952), Vol. 2, Chap. 19 – Duty; Vol. 2, Chap. 22 – Emotion; Vol. 3, Chap. 58 – Mind; Vol. 3, Chap. 79 – Religion; Vol. 3, Chap. 94 – Truth; Vol. 54 – Sigmund Freud. The Oxford Guide to Philosophy, Ted Honderich [Editor], (Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 323-24.