Freudian Psychology Slips—Can’t tell the Truth
Unmasking Freud's Toxic Legacy: How Psychology Poisoned the Modern World
Freud Destroyed the Soul, Made Religion a Crutch, and told you God was in your Head
My Opinion on Reading Freud
I had started researching this book, knowing psychology was one of mankind's triumphs. I have ended this chapter on Freud, realizing psychology is one of mankind's greatest evils. Only when Christians have turned it into a ministry and calling does it have some efficacy--only when Christianity sanctifies it does it become valuable. Even then, a Christian therapist must be aware of all the pitfalls in psychology threatening to take down his patient and himself.
The subconscious has to go, and the soul has to be re-established in its rightful place as the center of man's connection to himself and God. When I started to read Freud, I thought I would at least read someone I could respect. I read him so much in college and grad school. He had shaped my worldview.
Like Voltaire, Freud is relatively easy to understand and approachable by many undergraduates and even High School students. He comes across as a wise teacher, someone who would have been enthralling to listen to in a lecture hall. Freud weaves narrative better into his philosophy than the other three, though Voltaire is a close second. Nietzsche tries to write a narrative but doesn't write to an audience. Freud does, and it's a love letter.
For a long time, I thought it was a love letter to his audience, but after researching this book, I realized I was deluding myself. Freud could only love those who reflected his image to him. I had for a while in my career and personal life. In my research, I was disturbed to find out just how abusive his psychosexual stages were, and I was even more shocked to discover he had likely abused his daughter. It explains a lot about his daughter following so closely in his footsteps. He poured her out and poured himself in, and despite her evident intelligence, she never outgrew his abuse or shadow. He possessed her as clearly as Legion possessed a herd of pigs.
Learning these things about him also shook my confidence in psychology and the worldview I had built for myself because I had been committed to certain things about him--concepts about how heroic he was. I was already struggling with it for personal reasons and was beginning to doubt its efficacy in physical health, but I can now see how damaging it had been to my mental health.
I started to recover only by returning to a church filled with believers. My soul was beginning a long process of healing, and the time I had spent in "real" talking therapy had never been as effective. It had been narcissistic. It fed into behaviors that blamed others around me for my pain and never allowed me to accept and heal from the pain I caused. Therapy gives the client the sense of a great wrong done to him by the universe through his parents, and only by accepting who I was intensely inside could I break free from my past. And yet the opposite was true as I healed my soul. I didn't blame those who hurt me; I worked on forgiving them.
I gave up the illusion I was in control of my sins and worked to remove them from my life. In Church, God restored me to those I loved rather than the satanic and psychological encouragement to do what was in my best interest. The problem with doing what is in my best interest is I tend to corrupt it with what will give me the greatest pleasure and ease. The Church understands my best interest doesn't end in hedonism or fear of responsibility, but that my best interest is served by placing the yoke on my shoulders and pulling alongside others for a Kingdom, I cannot win or own. Materialism, Will, and Ego are not the end goals of a good life. Further, I am not responsible for God's plan.
Toxic Faith
In the Toxic Faith created by these four [Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud], little ol' you becomes responsible for Heaven, and you must make it out of the inferior materials around you--good luck. It's exhausting and destructive of others and yourself. You end up having the same mentality as that of an enslaver over an enslaved person. You enslave yourself to your will.
Imagine that for a moment. Your will rules over you like a tyrant, demanding that your body conform to your every thought, lust, and perversion. Then, once you fall under the delusion of self-mastery, you extend this psychological terror over others into a sociological nightmare. Your intentions begin well, but you soon discover your role is corrosive, destructive, and hateful to yourself as much as it is the slave. And you continue to do so because it's the only morality you have in your system of beliefs. You must create Heaven, communism, happiness, or whatever new Garden of Eden is promised to you by your demons.
I also struggled with psychology professionally as an Adaptive Behavior Analysis [ABA] trained technician and a Special Education teacher. I was starting to see through the cracks but blamed theorists such as B.F. Skinner. Skinner was another man with a daughter who had rumors about abuse. My clients and students were material objects that I could manipulate to reach specific standards of behavior that I found acceptable as the expert.
ABA requires the grooming concepts of psychology that Freud gave us. It's manipulative at its best, and at its worst, it's lethal to the soul's individuality. We would work with a child with Autism or other Behavior Disorders, and we would attempt to shape behaviors we want to see in a child so they would learn to speak or interact socially or decrease violent behavior. The therapy works because it reduces incentives for the wrong behavior and increases incentives for the correct behavior. We should want children with Autism or other issues to improve and be able to work with us in a variety of ways.
My problem with ABA and psychology, in general, is the root idea that children, especially children, are easily manipulated into performing certain behaviors without any concept that each child has a soul and moral worth. The child is a product, ABA is the factory, and the parents are the consumers.
Further, I started to see psychology can reinforce the patterns of abuse and how psychology has openly accepted pedophilia and the mutilation and blood sacrifice of children and adults on the altar of Transgenderism. Pedophilia and Transgenderism are ancient practices, but the modern roots for both were born in Vienna with Freud himself through his psychosexual stages of development.
I spent months stuck on this chapter, trying to reorder my mind and worldview. If you read this, you may struggle to accept that your subconscious is your soul. Freud told this lie so well and so convincingly that many Christians have accepted it if it was as Gospel as the Virgin Birth. However, while the Virgin Birth is required for faith as a Christian, the belief in the subconscious victory over the soul is not.
Examining these four men for their roles in shaping the modern faith shook my worldview--it's for precisely this reason so many of us need to have Freud pulled out by the roots, like a noxious weed. What I am saying may be as upsetting to you as it has been to me. Even going into this research, I had yet to learn how extensively my ideas were informed by these four. Freud's teachings poisoned me far more profoundly than I had conceded--some of my personal struggles were because I chose to accept his help and his worldview rather than to seek help from a good church and a good pastor.
Quotes from Freud
"Furthermore, among customs through which the Jews marked off their aloof position, that of circumcision made a disagreeable, uncanny impression on others. The explanation probably is that it reminds them of the dreaded castration idea and of things in their primeval past which they would fain forget."
Freud ridicules circumcision as a behavior related to castration and how it is born out of a time long forgotten. It doesn't matter how clearly the Bible states circumcision was founded in the Bible. The Bible is made up, rituals are made up, and traditions are made up.
This stands to reason only if the material world is all that exists and there is nothing outside the material world. However, if there is one single thing outside the material world, call it one single spiritual atom if you will, then all of the Spiritual world exists and God exists. Circumcision is not what is on trial in Freud's comment, but rather God and the immaterial. God doesn't exist so he can't issue commands so circumcision must be related to a fear of something similar to the penis and so men, afraid of castration save themselves from castration through circumcision. No one would dare castrate a man who was circumcised. If true, every culture would have practiced it if the ritual had helped men not be castrated after being captured in war.
Being forced to become a eunuch was a real fear among many men, and if the Hebrews had sold it as protection against castration, everyone would have been Hebrew eventually. But Jews didn't see it as protection against castration but as obedience to God. No man wants to cut their penis to be obedient to God outside of true believers.
"If it is correct that in the primitive peoples of our time we find as the sole content of their religion the worship of the highest Being, then we can interpret this only as a withering in the development of religion, and from here draw parallel with the innumerable cases of rudimentary neuroses which we find in clinical psychology."
Freud is linking the worship of a supreme being, or highest being, as linked with mental health disorders. Psychology is here to rescue men from these mental health disorders by helping men realize their beliefs cause their problems.
Imagine that you are a Christian. You believe in God. You also suffer from clinical depression. This is a depression so deep that you struggle to escape from it--you can often be suicidal. For Freud's argument to be valid, religion is the cause of your depression.
To escape from the depression, you must abandon God and your belief in God. In becoming a functioning atheist, you gain freedom from your depression. But let's consider this from a different angle. What if depression is triggered through trauma, stress, or abuse?
To be fair to current practices, many modern therapists will look for these as the underlying issue and talk to you about them and not ask you to abandon your faith. But some are convinced Freud is correct and your faith is the issue.
In some ways, we see this play out in the Transgender debate. If a person is Transgender and not living out their "true" identity, they will be depressed and suicidal. The cause or triggers are identified as something social (religion or socially constructed gender roles), and so to fix it, a client must divorce themselves from the social "identity" to be free from the mental health disorder.
Social identity, such as "norms," is seen as repressive. People believe it creates inhibitions that destroy one's mind and keep one from happiness. One can only find one's true self and ego by releasing oneself from false social institutions.
While talking therapy can be helpful, and it mimics what a good church and faith in God can help you accomplish, it is not where Freud wants you to end as a patient. The second type of therapy is abusive and cult-like. It's a Toxic Faith that tells people their happiness is found only in being free to act on every impulse. They may find happiness, but this person will destroy every relationship in their life that matters. But that's the point. The therapist becomes the High Priest for each of us, giving us access to the God we are all meant to be.
"The inner development of the new religion [Islam], however, soon came to a standstill, perhaps because it lacked the profundity which in the Jewish religion resulted in the murder of its founder."
To claim the Jewish faith started from an act of murder is shocking--especially from someone Jewish. But he is saying the problem with Islam is they didn't murder Mohammed, and Judaism's ability to self-reflect comes from the murder of Moses.
So, if you murder your religious leader or father figure, you can become self-reflective. I think this is why psychology tries to convince the client to blame the parent for the trauma they have experienced in life. It's killing the parent(s) in the abstract. If you are a groomer, one of the best ways to achieve your goals is to separate the child away from the parents not only physically but mentally and spiritually. If you befriend the child when they are mad at their parents, you can use that anger to your advantage.
A groomer and a lousy therapist use the same tactic to separate an adult child from their parents to convince them to accept the therapist as the new parental figure. In murdering your parents, you become self-reflective, and it opens the door for the therapist to replace your parent's moral code with a new ethical code.
"In reality this crime, deserving of death, had been the murder of the Father who later was deified. The murderous deed itself, however, was not remembered; in its place stood the phantasy of expiation, and that is why this phantasy could be welcomed in the form of a gospel of salvation."
The murder of a father may be a simple projection by Freud--a fantasy he held and so he projects onto the Jewish and Christian faith. Maybe he wishes he had murdered his father. It's hard to say. Freud's most revelatory notes about himself have been locked away in the National Archives until 2200. That said, if he can make fantastical claims about the birth of Judaism, we should wonder at his reasons for saying these things.
The Father in Judaism and Christianity becomes "Guilt" and therefore no god at all.
It's guilt for killing or wanting to kill our father, and these two faiths allow us to vicariously experience that pleasure in killing our father without committing the crime. So much of the modern guilt comes from Freud. We aren't guilty because we killed God. We are guilty because we accepted the religion whose ancestors killed Moses and Christ, or so he reasons.
White people aren't guilty of being slave owners. We are guilty because we accept the society in which some slaves weren't white. However, if you go far back enough, you would have to argue that every society has had some white slaves at some time. Yet, as Freud doesn't present facts, neither do his modern High Priests.
Freud offers a replacement for a system that teaches forgiveness of enemies. And it's not a real replacement, but the shadow of the thing.
He's still stuck in his fantastical Judaism because he counsels his clients to abstractly kill their parents in session rather than to forgive them. Forgiveness restores broken relationships. Killing your parents, even abstractly, ends any hope of restoration. Chesterton argues that Christian opponents and detractors make all their arguments from within Christianity. I think Freud does the same. What he detests so much is what he uses to replace Christianity but through his Toxic perversion. The Father has to die, but not so we can be free from the Father, but so the Father can restore us to Him.
"That the Redeemer sacrificed himself as an innocent man was an obviously tendentious distortion, difficult to reconcile with logical thinking. How could a man who was innocent assume the guilt of the murderer by allowing himself to be killed? In historical reality, there was no such contradiction. The 'redeemer' could be no one else but he who was most guilty, the leader of the brother horde who had overpowered the Father."
Christ, for Freud, doesn't come to redeem mankind but to be killed for being the father-killer. Christ represents his guilt and not the guilt of man. He changes the Biblical narrative to Historical Reality with no evidence or clarity beyond Freud's authority. "I'm the great and powerful Freud." For a man trained in Austria, he sure sounds like a charlatan from Kansas.
Christ's death had to be substantiation for our sins. He is the substitute, like the lamb, which was the substitute for Isaac when God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
The sacrifice of Christ is part of the sacred mystery we see carried out through our judicial system. If I commit a crime, I will be arrested, prosecuted, and found guilty. However, if Christ steps into my role, takes my crime on him, and breaks the judicial system. The justice system is moral when it convicted me of a crime I committed. But the justice system becomes merciful when Christ steps in and takes my place.
My crime called for my death, and Christ took my death, and this system can no longer prosecute me. Christ took this crime and all future crimes and all future punishments for me. Christ creates a higher system of morality--through it, He demonstrates love and mercy. He creates within me a sense of value and worth.
If the God of the entire Universe died for me, then I'm not just a material being who is here for a while and gone forever after I die. I have infinite value now as a follower of Christ, and no judge can take that away from me.
"If there was no such leader, then Christ was the heir of an unfulfilled wish-phantasy."
Freud thinks Christ wanted to die because he was guilty or felt guilty for Moses. Christ sacrificed himself for nothing because he could not expiate or remove the sins of the Jewish people by claiming to be innocent. Christ is mentally disturbed according to this logic. He's in desperate need of Freud's talking therapy.
I like Freud's bravado and confidence here--foolish as it is. It's almost as if Freud imagines that if Christ were his patient, he could talk Christ out of this ludicrous cross and try to die for others. If Freud can't, there is the Sanitorium to send Christ to because Freud is a gentleman in a refined age in pre-WWII Germany.
If only Freud could have saved Christ and brought about Christ's salvation from himself and his self-destructive tendencies. Can't you hear it in a thick German accent--the pontificating?
We must hold to C.S. Lewis's view. Either Christ is a liar, a madman, or he is God. Freud has a wish-fulfillment fantasy, thinking he could have saved Christ.
"Jahve [Yahweh] was undoubtedly a volcano-god. There was no reason for the inhabitants of Egypt to worship him...the countries around the eastern basin of the Mediterranean were apparently the scene of frequent and violent volcanic eruptions, which were bound to make the deepest impressions on the inhabitants."
Freud has neatly divorced Christ from Christianity by declaring he's, at best, a madman and, at worst, a leader of revolutionaries. In a previous passage, he attacked Moses as the original God-Father who replaced Yahweh. He now dismisses Yahweh as nothing more than a volcano, a process of the natural material world. The primitives who lived in the Middle East and Near East saw the volcanoes and attributed to them God-like statuses. While we see this in other pagan religions, you don't see this evolution of God in the Bible. God comes into the story fully formed already. He doesn't have a growth or narrative arc behind Him. God exists. Nor does God represent the material world. He stands outside and above it.
Why would the Jewish people even conceive this type of God? A God above the material world isn't a God you can appease through sacrifice while still living your life immorally. God is concerned with your soul, mind, and body. He also has no equal and is not in charge of other gods through conquest. He stands above all beings as unique and sovereign. From the very first verse of the Bible, we don't see a Yahweh who is born from the creative work of other gods or primordial elements like fire or earth. He's not some petty volcano. He's the creator of trillions of volcanoes across the known universe and all of the universe.
The God that Christians worship is unfathomable, and He reveals himself in the Bible--name another religion with a God that stands as powerful as He does. When people say every religion points to God, they don't know what they mean. No wife would tell any woman to have their husband because all men are alike.
Deny Him if you want, but don't distort Him. He doesn't give you that option.
"Among the events of the Jewish prehistory that poets, priests, and historians of later age undertook to portray, there was an outstanding one, the suppression of which was called for by the most obvious and best of human motives. It was the murder of the great leader and liberator Moses."
The greatest conspiracy in human history was the cover-up of the murder of Moses by his followers. We saw the same logic in Voltaire. Here, Freud takes it even further. Moses is a victim of his success, and the Jewish people, this small barbarian tribe, killed him. However, in killing him, they felt tremendous guilt and decided they couldn't live without him, so they built up the concept of a Father-God. Freud's creative imagination always looks for the narrative to tell his story.
I understand it, and sometimes I also lean into the narrative. However, there is no textual evidence for this belief, nor is there any reason to say that if the early Jews had killed Moses, they would have had the ability or desire to create a God. He gives them too much credit after dismissing them as primitive barbarians. How many people killed their fathers throughout history, and it's this one tribe that makes up a supreme God of the Universe that exists outside of time and space? Com' on now? You're pulling my leg.
Why go to the trouble to make up a new god when they could rely on the old gods of Egypt or the Near East? Especially since they tried to go back to the old Gods repeatedly. They didn't want to worship this new God very much if you read the Old Testament or Torah. If you kill someone, you would have to be mad to turn them into a puppet God. This effigy of God would be like playing with the limbs of Moses to make him appear alive--Weekend at Bernies, Moses'-style.
If the Jews did this, then they must have been truly mad, and that is probably his point. His narrative is religious people are angry or neurotic, and he sees his evidence everywhere he looks and never has to uncover it. It appears so quickly to him as a solution--he can't trust that people might believe in God because he is real.
"In the long run, it did not matter that the people, probably after a very short time, renounced the teaching of Moses and removed the man himself. [Killed him]. The tradition itself remained and its influence reached–though only slowly, in the course of centuries–the aim that was denied to Moses himself. The God Jahve attained undeserved honour when, from Qades onward, Moses' deed of liberation was put down to his [Jahve's] account; but he had to pay dear for this usurpation. The shadow of the God whose place he had taken became stronger than himself; at the end of historical development there arose beyond his being that of the forgotten Mosaic god. None can doubt that it was only the idea of this other God that enabled the people of Israel to surmount all their hardships to survive until our time."
Freud argues Moses founded a religion, but the Hebrews replaced it with a Mediterranean volcanic deity named Jahve. However, over time, Moses's ethical ideas slowly grew inside the religion of Jahve to replace it with a Mosaic deity. So, the Hebrews quickly replaced it. However, a kernel of the original idea remained and somehow germinated into the Judaism that we know today.
It represents the idea of prophets' slow cultivation over centuries to establish Moses as the deity of the Jewish faith. Imagine that instead of Judaism failing, as the accounts in the Bible suggest, to create faith in the people, the faith somehow grew more refined and even more complex.
Here is one of the core problems applying evolution to social theory. Things do not grow more complex over time but somewhat more chaotic. Look at Hinduism. Hinduism is one of the oldest human religions--it isn't one religion but a collection of religions all operating under a similar creation story. Do you think it had 300 million gods at the start, or did those gods accrue over time? The evidence seems to show that it accrues Gods, as they even turned Christ into a God in Hinduism without any of the Christian monotheistic teachings attached to him. Hinduism's genius is its ability to co-opt other religions rather than to be evangelistic.
Time creates chaotic religion, though, and if anyone claims they understand Hinduism, they are a liar. It's far too large and complex for one person to learn in a lifetime. If you look at the history of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, they all grew into what I will gently call "denominations" for simplicity's sake. Even Judaism, in the 1st Century, had multiple sects. Religion doesn't tend towards unity over time. It requires reformative periods to maintain unity, or religions will end up like Hinduism with sufficient time.
Evolution doesn't work when applied to religion. Hinduism is a natural religion, and it's not well-ordered or even capable of sharing a statement of faith like Christianity does. Freud cannot explain Judaism by arguing it grew more complex.
"We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism. In Soviet Russia, the attempt has been made to better the life of a hundred million people till now held in suppression. The authorities were bold enough to deprive them of the anodyne of religion and wise enough to grant them a reasonable measure of sexual freedom. But in doing so, they subjected them to the most cruel coercion and robbed them of every possibility of freedom of thought." (Freud 67).
Freud comments on Socialism in Russia and Italy and recognizes its dangers, but believes the Lutheran Church will protect his nation against these types of excesses. Germany annexed Austria March 11-13, 1938, and invaded Poland Sept. 1, 1939. Sigmund Freud fled Austria after the annexation and died on Sept. 23, 1939.
The irony is he thinks he has given the world progress without the barbarism of religion, and for a long time, psychology seemed to represent a better future. But we now can see how rotted psychology has always been. It was just a slower, more sophisticated barbarism.
While Socialism and Communism tend to be a faster way to get to the Toxin, Freud's psychology is a slower burn and one that permeates society, entering into the minds and lives of those who are Christian. Psychology has radicalized Many Christians in leadership positions because they believe they are helping make the world a better place because of Social Emotional Learning, Mental Health, or Equity. I have discovered this through journalism in a way I didn't understand when I wrote these words a year ago. It has saddened me that when I have tried to explain to Christians that this Demonic Philosophy has captured them, they call me names and tell me I'm not "nice." They think they serve God, but their hearts belong to Baal. Nice is going to lead many Christians straight to Hell.
"Psychoanalytic research is in any case the subject of suspicious attention from Catholicism. I do not maintain that this suspicion is unmerited. If our research leads us to a result that reduces religion to the status of a neurosis of mankind and explains its grandiose powers in the same way as we should a neurotic obsession in our individual patients, then we may be sure we shall incur in this country the greatest resentment of the powers that be."
Freud is not naive. He is aware of where his therapy will go if it succeeds. Therapy will replace the Church, and therapists will replace the priests. In doing so, Catholicism, with its mysteries, mysticism, and immaterial neuroses, would disappear, but he worried the Church might fight against him. Little would he suspect how much of the Church would subvert his teachings and use his methods but without destroying the souls of their clients.
Therapy is just confession in the confession booth, and maybe more churches that have no confession should reinstate it as a social good rather than as a requirement for church membership. Confession is powerful and cathartic--confession could heal many conflicts. I'm not Catholic, nor do I attend High Church. I'm just an old Southern Baptist, dyed-in-the-wool, stubborn, pig-headed, miserable, dirt-eating protestant. Yet, there is some value in confession we have given up.
Freud tries to stand on the same ground as a therapist and offer a distinct, toxic worldview at the same time.
Christian therapists still need to have their own Association to toss out the concept of the subconscious and replace it with the idea of the soul and help their clients seek forgiveness over hedonism. If Christian Therapists would do this, they could subvert Freud's entire enterprise, and the Church would win in a way he couldn't have predicted.
Where Freud meant to pervert speaking to God, the Church can subvert and sanctify--returning people to a relationship centered on God rather than on his unholy Trinity of Id, Ego, and SuperEgo. Do you think it's a coincidence he also gave us a Trinity? Along with a soul?
"But also because of my 'race'--I left, with many friends, the city which from early childhood, through seventy-eight years, had been home to me."
If Freud had seen the results of his theories, he would have been thrilled at one moment, and at the exact moment, he would have fled. He is still very much a man of his period and would have struggled to see the results his "Talking Therapy" and other theories would have on mankind. He had a utopian view of the progress of mankind, much like if you read the works of Isaac Asimov or if you watch Star Trek. Humanity would eventually get it right--maybe with robots or Vulcans' help.
He also fails to see that the Lutheran Church fell in Germany and Austria to Socialism because of the Two Kingdom's Piety of Martin Luther. For further reading, consult William Federer.
Socialism replaced it with a perverted Christian morality--we can see the result in twenty million dead in concentration camps and tens of millions more through the war. Socialism makes Heaven on earth by making Hell on earth. It's the same for Marxism and Communism.
Freud fled a worldview that killed God because it didn't see him as a fellow ally as an atheist--he was an enemy because of identity politics. Socialism could only see his race--how true that still is today.
We see the same thing in our own culture with anti-racism and diversity, inclusion, and equity. Your ideas aren't nearly as important as your class or race. Those screaming the loudest for the Church to be destroyed and replaced will often face the consequences of a world without the Christian ethic to "Love your neighbor as you love yourself."
"I found the kindliest welcome in beautiful, free, generous England. Here I live now, a welcome guest relieved from that oppression and happy that I may again speak and write–I almost said 'think'--as I want or have to. I dare now to make public the last part of my essay."
I cannot fault him for enjoying his time in England, but he forgets that generosity of spirit in England comes from a Christian worldview. Instead of seeing his race, his class, or his ethnicity, the English welcomed him and gave him a home--this welcoming nation will also participate in a bitter war for their survival against his home nation. Where does that spirit of generosity and charity come from in England? I think we can certainly argue it was from its Christian Church and its teachings which shaped its culture.
"From then on [after writing Totem and Taboo], I have never doubted the religious phenomena are to be understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the individual, which are so familiar to us, as a return of a long-forgotten important happenings in the primeval history of the human family, that they owe their obsessive character to that very origin and therefore derive their effect on mankind from the historical truth they contain."
I may have answered this sufficiently before, but let's review it again. If Freud is right, religion is a mental health disorder passed on from one generation to another for thousands of years. Only once Freud arrived were we all finally able to see that truth.
Before Freud, our incompetent ancestors could not reason it out like he was. We needed his discovery of psychoanalysis, the conscious, the ego, the id, and the superego. After Freud, this seismic shift in our understanding is available to the elite, who can see past the lies of religion.
I struggle to understand why everyone who lived/lives out a deep-seated faith is insane. Even if their faith is misguided and there are no immaterial planes or beings, that doesn't necessarily lead to people being insane or neurotic. People don't grasp onto religion because they have trauma as a coping mechanism.
If his worldview is accurate and there is nothing but the material world, why bother freeing those trapped? That's his need to be declared superior--Freud and others like him need to be elites. They need the validation of other people. Religious people are strange creatures who often choose to believe despite what others think. This is true in many different faiths, whether Christian, Hindu, or Islamic.
Yet, Freud is god-like; the more people who believe as he does in a material world, the more he can shape the world and others into his image. He is able to gain comfort and power, which are the only things that matter in a strictly material world. Other people are just pawns in his world.
"Among the intimates of Ikhnaton [Founder of a Monotheistic Egyptian religion which did not last past his lifetime] was a man who was perhaps called Thotmes, as many others were at that time; the name does not matter, but its second part must have been '-mose.' He held high rank and was a convinced adherent of the Aton religion, but in contradistinction to the brooding king, he was forceful and passionate. For this man the death of Ikhnaton and the abolishing of his religion meant the end of all his hopes. Only proscribed or recanting could he remain in Egypt. If he were governor of a border province he might well have come into touch with a certain Semitic tribe which had immigrated several generations before. In his disappointment and loneliness he turned to those strangers and sought in them for a compensation of what he had lost. He chose them for his people and tried to realize his own ideals through them. After he left Egypt with them, accompanied by his immediate followers, he hallowed them by the custom of circumcision, gave them laws, and introduced them to the Aton religion, which the Egyptians had just discarded. Perhaps the rules the man Moses imposed on his Jews were even harder than those of his master and teacher Ikhnaton; perhaps he also relinquished the connection with the sun god of On, to whom the latter had still adhered."
Circumcision was introduced in Genesis 17: 10-14 and was a command to Abraham. It's strange how Freud ignores Abraham and focuses so much on Moses. He ignores what the Bible actually says about Moses. He just invented this entire narrative out of thin air. Why? Because he doesn't think Abraham ever existed, he starts Hebrew history arbitrarily with Moses. Why not David? Or Isaiah? Or Daniel? Some radical historians try to say Aliens wrote the Bible. Freud should have attempted that approach.
"The first . . . is that the Jews, who even according to the Bible were stubborn and unruly towards their lawgiver and leader, rebelled at last, killed him, and threw off the imposed Aton religion as the Egyptians had done before them."
The Aton religion was the monotheistic belief in Ra as the only God. It was short-lived, and the polytheistic temple priests were quite livid about it. Freud argues that the Egyptians were smart to throw away this idea of a monotheistic god, but the Jews adopted it only after they had killed Moses out of a sense of guilt. So the temple priests were brilliant, and the Jews were--what were the Jews, Freud? He begs the question.
"The second fact . . . is that these Jews, on their return from Egypt, united with tribes nearly related to them in the country bordering on Palestine, the Sinai peninsula, and Arabia, and that there, in a fertile spot called Qades, they accepted under the influence of the Arabian Midianites a new religion, the worship of the volcano-god Jahve. Soon after this, they were ready to conquer Canaan."
So here is the narrative if you have been following along. The Jews killed Moses, who brought them the law and then adopted the religion of Aton, a monotheistic god. After they did this, they fled to their ancient homeland, intermarried, and accepted the volcano god Jahve. Later, Jesus, who somehow felt guilty about Moses and was an unlawful rebellious bandit, was killed.
However, his people say he died for them, which has never happened in human history before, and they start an entirely new religion. It's bad fan fiction or an improbable Gnostic gospel. Anything the Bible says about Christ, he ignores. Only Freud's version is valid. If this is the requirement for dismissing the Bible, we are all experts and can write historical accounts of any period. While this passes for TikTok Scholarship, why are we still reading him in graduate schools as if it provides some insight into Christianity? We could all make everything up under these standards of scholarship. If you look at today's standards for being the Harvard president, you will see that it doesn't matter what you say in your research.
"For a people that was preparing to conquer new lands by violence, Jahve was certainly better suited."
So, killing Moses didn't make the Jews vicious enough, but they now needed a god worthy of their violence and chose a volcano god? Do we begin to understand some of the antisemitic beliefs in our finest Ivory Towers today? Why not Ishtar, Baal, or Moloch? These gods were undoubtedly more terrifying than a localized volcano god. They also would have given them status among the Assyrians and Egyptians and allowed for trade between the nations.
Yet, we must ignore what happened and pretend that something else happened. A friend, who I do love, told me I'm a hick, a Baptist, and from a small town. My friend means to say I can't see the world the way I could if I was more refined and elite.
My friend told me my identity limits my ability to think and see the world. Yet, as backward as I am, I reckon I would have Freud beat if he is the definition of educated and erudite. I could certainly come up with a better narrative than his for the creation of the Jewish faith and Jewish state. However, I would instead stick with the facts--as much fun as a good story is, the truth is far stranger.
The facts are that the Old Testament God who commands the death of Canaanites living in the Holy Land is the same God who teaches, "Love your enemies" and "Forgive trespasses against you seven times seventy." The crimes of the Canaanites were many and severe. The Jewish tribe conquered lands that even Egypt had failed to conquer. They didn't do so because of their strength and genius but because of God's favor. The people of Canaan practiced some of the worst human atrocities in human history and were violently racist against outsiders.
God used the Jews to judge them as he would use the Assyrians and Babylonians to judge the Jews. God doesn't tolerate nations who sacrifice their own children for long. And what Freud doesn't tell you is that every country that has no God or has turned away from God sacrifices their children. Freud wants you to turn away from God so that your children can be conditioned and made into a new likeness--their inner self. I don't know about you, but my inner self is not the best part of me. I must learn control over my thoughts so they don't lead to actions. The inner self is the root of every evil action I would take. If I were to harm someone, my arm wouldn't just jump on its own volition and strike a person. It does so because my mind and heart grew angry, resentful, bitter, jealous, or evil. Freud wants to release the inner self, the beast inside each of us, and then celebrate it. That beast consumes and devours. It would destroy every good thing our Christian civilization has taken 2000 years to give us.
God would not tolerate a civilization built upon the beast of the inner self for long. He did not tolerate it with the Canaanites.
"I have already mentioned . . . that the central fact of the development of Jewish religion was this: in the course of time Jahve lost his own character and became more and more like the old God of Moses, Aton. Yahweh merged with Moses and Aton, and their different characters and personalities became one."
Again, Freud applies the concept of evolution to religion. For him, religion is just a hybridization of different ideas that slowly breed together into a superorganism. There is no concept for him of religion being handed down to us by an immortal and loving God. I have no more proof than he does of my beliefs, but I can at least demonstrate his ideas are undoubtedly inferior to the Bible and what it says about God. Religion is complex. Even the so-called primitive religions are complex. Man needs religion as much as man needs to eat.
Freud wants to describe this need as a neurosis. You would have to discount the need for friendship, organization, food, breathing, marriage, children, family, love, sex, and a million other things we have as neurosis for Freud to be right about religion.
Can the religious impulse be perverted and misused? Of course. Christians teach this. We don't have a problem with it at all. We also teach that sex can be perverted and misused. The funny thing is Freudian psychology doesn't, but tries to get us to accept things like pedophilia by describing it as a sexual identity. It wants to legalize it, normalize it, and label Christians as bigots for saying that sexual impulses are good the way God gave them to us between a husband and wife and wrong when we use them in other ways--such as in harming children or ourselves.
Freudian Psychology is broken because, at its core, it believes that we are all there is. We are gods—our inner lives are something we can tame on our own without help from a supernatural power. We can look at our nation in its current state and see that psychology cannot replace the Church.
“Chesterton argues that Christian opponents and detractors make all their arguments from within Christianity. I think Freud does the same.”
So very true. You cannot get away from God.
Thank you. Have never read Freud, so I enjoyed your essay very much. Odious fellow.