Freud's psychoanalytic theories

In September 1909, invited to give a series of lectures in New England, Freud jokingly asked his companion, Sandor Ferenczi and Carl Jung, "Don't they know we're bringing them the plague?" An extraordinary statement from a medical doctor pretending to have found a cure for neurosis, and a prophetic one.

Freudianism became a justification for a sexual liberation that can be seen in retrospect as a massive sexual abuse of the youth.

So, uh, uh, I don't want to rebut this too strongly.

It's just worth pointing out that Reich was a critic of Freud, um, and that Reich...

I don't want to sound like I'm trying to do apologetics here, because I'm not really a Freudian.

Uh, I think he's an interesting person in, in, in, you know, intellectual history.

But there's, there's like sort of a difference between Freud and then Freudianism that followed after him, and there was a lot of people who took up Freud as a kind of revolutionary figure and took his ideas as, as, as a vehicle for, like, anti-Christian, anti-Gentile, anti, you know, Western polemics.

I mean, as, uh, Laurent Grenot mentions earlier, uh, in, in the passage that you read, you know, a lot of the post-Marxist tradition was a blend of Freud and Marx, uh, and it was taking up some of those ideas, um, that really were compatible, um, compatible as a sort of, like, radical communist polemic against, uh, you know, the, the, the, the inherited tradition of Western society.

Most of the people, most of the, the faculty in the psychology, uh, the grad program had, uh, had that background, and so that was most of...

I mean, most of the classes I took t- were from a, a, a, a, a Freudian perspective.

I'm not a Freudian myself, and most of my, um, career, if you want to call it that [laughs] uh, what I took from Freud was sort of like a, a contrarian point of view, which is to say, um...

There's a, there, there's a couple of...

Like, uh, the, to the extent that people know about Freud, they tend to land on a coup- on, on one of a few perspectives.

From the standpoint of Freud's earlier theory, which he euphemistically called the seduction theory, his new theory of spontaneous infantile sexual fantasies can be seen as a projection, not unlike sex offenders' tendency to blame their victims.

The patients themselves are now accused of both sexual passion and murderous fantasies towards their pa- parents.

By repressing these self-generated impulses, says Freudian orthodoxy, they have created their own neuroses which may, in hysterics, take the form of false memories of abuse.

You know, that we're going to journey with Lewis through the landscape of philosophy as he comes to find, in the end, the one who is the way, the truth, and the life, the one in whom all true ideas hold together.

But as we journey with Lewis through his own philosophical journey, taking the time to pull in some of those texts, at least some excerpts, you know, the idealism, the materialism, the Freudianism, all the different places he journeys.

So I think that would be really fun.

I'm going to

Even so ingenious and competent an investigator as Professor Dr. Sigmund Freud, who has told us a lot that is of the first importance about the materials and machinery of thought, he has also told us a lot that is trivial and dubious.

The essential doctrines of Freudism, no doubt, come close to the truth, but many of Freud's remoter deductions are far more scandalous than sound, and many of the professed Freudians, both American and European, have greasepaint on their noses and bladders in their hands, and are otherwise quite indistinguishable from evangelists and circus clowns.

In this condition of the science, it's no wonder that we find it wasting its chief force upon problems that are petty and idle when they are not downright and impalpably insoluble, and passing over problems that are of immediate concern to all of us, and that might quite readily be solved, or at any rate considerably illuminated by an intelligent study of the data already available.

After all, not many of us care a hoot whether Sir Oliver Lodge and the Indian chief Waka Waka Mak are happy in heaven, for not many of us have any hope or desire to meet them there.

And there, those are other books that they, um, that they burned.

And I think that the greatest takedown of Freud came from Yaki from Francis Parker Yaki in, um, In Imperium, he says, it is both needless and impossible to refute Freudianism.

If everything is sex, a refutation of Freudianism would also be sexual insignificance.

The 20th century does not approach phenomena that have become historical by asking whether they are true or false.

To its historical way of thinking, a Gothic cathedral is an expression of the intensely religious, newly awakened young Western culture of which shadows forth the striving nature of the culture soul.

In its necessity for self-expression, however, the new outlook must reject the materialistic tyranny of the old immediately preceding its outlook.

It must free itself also from Freudianism.

The last great attempt to animalize man also uses critical rationalist methods.