Expunging God
Why Webster Was Wrong, Part Two
Interpreting, reviewing the third part of Richard Webster’s Why Freud Was Wrong, “Psychoanalysis, Science and the Future.”
(Part One)
Bodily Consciousness
But what Ryle’s argument does imply is that any theories of human nature which repudiate the evidence of behavior and refer solely or primarily to invisible mental events will never in themselves be able to unlock the most significant mysteries of human nature (Webster, p. 483).
It is true that there is a danger, as I talked about with Wanderer, in trying to understand, access, or claim direct experience of supersensible realities divorced from an immediate, physical, day-to-day experience of the senses.
But there is also a danger in (as Webster is) trying to argue that the physical realm incorporates everything, and that everything can be understood through the ordinary senses. Webster cites Nicholas Humphrey’s book, A History of the Mind, which “implicitly demonstrates that the pursuit of consciousness as an aspect of some non-physical, non-bodily ‘mind’ is a chimera” (p. 484).1
That consciousness has less to do with the mind, or even the brain, than the whole body is a necessary point of view, if we are to expand our ideas about consciousness toward the supersensible realms.
However, both Humphrey and Webster appear to want to take it in the opposite direction, by confining the source of consciousness to the body, rather than allowing that consciousness uses the body as an instrument.
The latter claim posits some extra-corporeal, supersensible mode of consciousness—i.e., a soul—and Webster is not leaving space for that. This makes him and his ideas compatible with some highly dubious individuals and operations.
Enter the Ultra
Webster cites Montreal Psychologist Donald Hebb, his book, The Organization of Human Behavior, about how the brain evolves, or is reconfigured, by learning, meaning that the process of learning “might actually be cognate with a process in which the cellular structure of the brain is permanently modified” (p. 487).
What Webster doesn’t acknowledge—perhaps due to ignorance—is that Hebb’s research was central to the MKUltra mind control experiments of Ewan Cameron. The fact Hebb’s theories were weaponized to reconfigure human brains and program human beings, to turn them into instruments of organized malevolence, is a glaring example of just how divorced Webster’s thesis is from sociopolitical reality.
Webster is writing about characters, theories, and developments, as if they existed in a political vacuum, independent of groups, institutions, agendas, organized families, that were in fact central to their existence.
Why Freud Was Wrong is not a book about social engineering conspiracies, so it is unfair to expect him to know about this aspect of things. Nonetheless, they constitute an underlying reality that, when not factored in, can lead to a thesis that is the proverbial house built on sand.