Hysteria: The Shaky Foundation of Psychoanalysis
Sang Freud, Part Two
A Deep Reading of Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis, by Richard Webster
(Part One)
The Spell of Greatness
The myth of greatness—a.k.a. cult of personality—is essential for the propagation of ideologies.
The basis of any religious system is a Messiah, a Message, and the social system (I was tempted to type “Mess”) that builds up around the two.
The more greatness that can be attributed to the originator of any given message, the more avidly people will follow it.
In Why Freud Was Wrong, Webster quotes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “It will be a long time before we lose our subservience.”
This problem is central to my own writing, fueled as it is by a drive to wrestle free from subservience by exposing all the lies and false ceremony masters I have become unwittingly subservient to.
This problem of writing my way out of subservience is multilayered, however, because it’s all tangled up with a desire to become what I am rejecting: a “somebody” that others will be subservient to. The simplest—not easiest—way to feel free from subservience, after all, is to create one’s own following.
The fact is that this only creates its own sort of subservience, however, even if it seems simpler as a solution when compared to removing this installation (the one constantly looking for figures to submit to) from my psyche, once and for all.