Seduced by Theory: the Church of Freud

Sang Freud, Part Eight

A Deep Reading of Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis, by Richard Webster

(Part One · Part Two · Part Three · Part Four · Part Five · Part Six · Part Seven)

(Art by Michelle Horsley)

The acceptability of incorrect scientific theories depends not only on the internal coherence, elegance, or plausibility of the explanations which they offer, but also on the obscurity, inaccessibility, indeterminacy, or partial invisibility of the phenomena they purport to explain . . . . Freud himself insisted time and time again that unconscious resistance had prevented wider acceptance of psychoanalytic theory. The reality, it must be suggested, is very different. For it is partly because of the widespread resistance to the most disturbing details of human sexual behavior and the consequent reluctance of doctors, therapists, and theorists to reexamine the entire realm of sexual behavior that Freud’s science, which repeatedly offers pseudo-explanations of sexual behavior rather than real explanations, has survived, and indeed flourished (Webster, p. 295).

Freud’s Fantasy Project (Recapping)

Was Freud the one indulging in sexual fantasy when he interpreted his patients’ (particularly female patients) stories, dreams, and behaviors?

For further evidence, Webster offers the example of an attractive 18-year old girl, Dora, who reports a dream in which she smells smoke. Freud points out that he’s a heavy smoker: the dream suggests she wants to be kissed by him. Then when Dora is fidgeting with her reticule (small handbag), he notes the “unmistakable pantomimic announcement” of what “she would like to do with her genitals” (p. 272). He then tries to persuade her that the tickling in her throat (which causes her to cough nervously) is due to the experience of giving fellatio.

There can be little doubt here that Freud was having fantasies about his patient, and then projecting them—or imposing them—onto her:

He was using the interpretive strategies he had developed in order to fantasize that one of his patients was fantasizing about him. Freud himself, however, was conspicuously lacking in such “Freudian” insight into his own techniques (ibid.)

Irony proliferates into absurdity. Freud writes:

“clocks and watches—though elsewhere we have found other symbolic interpretations for them—have arrived at a genital role owing to their relation to periodic processes and equal intervals of time. A woman may boast that her menstruation behaves with the regularity of clockwork. Our patient’s anxiety, however, was directed in particular against being disturbed in her sleep by the ticking of a clock. The ticking of a clock may be compared with the knocking or throbbing in the clitoris during sexual excitement.” [Webster continues:] For the taboo on the realm of the obscene did not only engender the obscurity which made incorrect or pseudo-scientific explanations of sexual behavior acceptable; it also encouraged the insecurity and confusion which surround most people’s normal sexual identity. As a result, many refrain from leveling against psychoanalysis the obvious charge of vicarious sexual indulgence, lest they should themselves be accused of prurience [or of prudishness]—an accusation which, as we have seen, Freud himself did not hesitate to make. At the same time, the forces of taboo helped to keep many practicing psychoanalysts—most significantly Freud himself—in a genuine and profound ignorance of their own motivation (p. 276-77).

The Altar of Analysis

The second part of Webster’s book begins with a chapter about the church of Freud (“Freud, who was my Christ!”)—its head cornerstone, infant sexuality.¹

The correlation Webster makes between infant sexuality and original sin is basically convincing, in two ways. It’s convincing that the dynamic in Freud’s circle (the way Webster describes it) was like a church, complete with high priest and disciples. And the parallels between infant sexuality, the Oedipus complex, etc., and original sin, also come through strong and clear in Webster’s book.

During this later period, Freud shifted his emphasis from trying to cure physical symptoms—which he was diagnosing as psychosomatic results of neurosis—to directly dealing with people with emotional symptoms. In other words, here was the beginning of psychoanalysis as it would come to be practiced and take over the western world. Despite this shift,

Freud never ceased to regard himself, and to seek to be regarded by others, as a healer. It is quite true that, like many messianic personalities before him, he was not prepared to allow himself to be constrained by the apparent limitations of this role. But it was not by turning away from those who were ill towards those who are healthy that he sought to escape these. It was by enlarging the notion of disease and applying it to those who in reality were not ill at all (p. 313, emphasis added).

Because of this, the criteria by which Freud diagnosed psychological neurosis included pretty much the entire human species—“For everybody, if not actually ill, was now deemed to carry within them the pathogenic impulses which might engender ‘neurotic illness’ at almost any juncture in their lives” (ibid.).

The Condemnation of Innocence

Because of the way Freud updated original sin as infant sexuality, Oedipus complex, etc.—and because he equated the unconscious and the id with primordial impulses as the source of all pathologies—he implicitly—and at times explicitly—associated the child’s psyche with the root of all evil.

“As soon as we recognize that ‘what is unconscious in mental life is also what is infantile,’ Freud writes, ‘the strange impression of there being so much evil in people begins to diminish’” (p. 327). This evil in children is easy to overlook, Freud argued, and is easy to tolerate because children do not have the power to act on it. But if it isn’t repressed sufficiently—or repressed in the right way—it potentially manifests in adulthood as pathological behavior.

Webster quotes Eric Erikson’s description of Freud’s theory and how it presents the “‘infantile organism’ as ‘a powerhouse of sexual and aggressive energies’” (ibid.). This strange idea potentially dovetails with Fabian Havelock Ellis’ sexology (and later Alfred Kinsey’s), not to mention with the occult practices of child sexual abuse for “hacking” the child’s psyche to access that primal energy—as I explored in Prisoner of Infinity and Vice of Kings (& all my later books to a degree).

The rationale that children are the source of all psychological perversions leads seamlessly to the belief that it is not really so perverse to sexually abuse them: after all, that’s what they would do, if they were able to act on their impulses.

Child sexualization can even be reframed this way as a means of “liberation.”