(4) Sigmund Freud – Looking Within!!
Born – 1856
Died – 1939
Fruit – Psychoanalysis
Man is acutely conscious that there is much he does not know. The questions “who am I” or “why am I like I am?” will or has been uttered by most of the human beings who have lived in the world. The hungry souls thirsting for answers to these questions found a wellspring unlike the world had ever known. The “wellspring of human personality” seemed to quench the longing desires of answers to the unknown! The supplier of such rich elixir is the fourth man who rules the world long after his own soul had departed from his body, that man is Sigmund Freud.
Psychoanalysis was his profession, but from a young age, he pursued naturalistic sciences! The need for extra funds convinced him though to open up a medical practice in psychiatry.
Freud was a peculiar fellow to say the least, a man who was at odds with all those around him, but with an unshakeable stubbornness in his own theories. His life would be characterized by controversy after controversy. His first foray into the practice of neurology advocated the use of the drug cocaine alongside morphium or morphine to deal with depression and indigestion of his patients. Suffice to say that there was a wave of cocaine addiction in Vienna and Freud was accused by the medical profession of aiding this drug addiction in the town.
Freud believed greatly in hypnosis, just around the time when hypnotism was becoming a more accepted form of analysis. Whilst hypnotic suggestion was rejected by most neurologists of the day, Freud himself cared little for other opinions except his own. Therefore he pushed for the acceptance of results from hypnosis. It was during these early period of Freud’s medical practice, having listened to patient after patient give an account of his or her past life, that Freud became convinced that aberrant behaviour in the present lives of patients could be traced back to an earlier experience in the life of the patient.
In his therapy sessions it appeared that because his patients gave such clearly stated accounts of past abuse, Freud was led to believe that they had indeed been molested by a father, a mother or another person close to them. So it was, that the role of sexual factors in neurosis became the emerging reality. This would come to be the object of Freud’s concentration.
Naturally his findings were met with universal disgust in the medical field, and it is often stated that it was his intellectual courage alone that carried him along during this time, whilst his associates deserted him. Nevertheless the number of Freud’s patients grew……..
Freud though would hit the first significant bump in his road to social (un)acceptance! Suspicion began to grow in his mind over the validity of his patients claims of abuse at childhood. Whether it was the sheer number of suspected “sexual perverts in families” or just the conclusion that there is no “indication of reality” in the unconscious. Freud was disturbed, and began to question the validity of his findings.
But as the song goes “you can’t keep a (disturbed) man down“, and at the point of such crumbling conclusions he….. “stumbled” upon the “Oedipus complex“. To cut a long story short, Freud took an unprecedented dive into further dark practices as he concluded that children are unconsciously attached to the parent of the opposite sex, whilst being hostile to the parent of the same sex. Freud abandoned the practices of hypnotism for the method of “free association” as he deemed hypnotism untrustworthy, and to this day free association is strongly identified with Freudianism.
Alright! Break time!!!
How does Freud influence the world from beyond the grave? The previous paragraphs were written just to give a brief look at the man, but how exactly does he exert such influence today?…..
Well to summarise it in a nutshell of some sorts; Freud postulate that behind the entities of basic human nature, human outward personality, and consciousness lays the pair of instincts that decide the nature of life itself. He named the instincts the “life instinct” and the “death instinct”. These two instincts are at constant odds with each other and produce an un-differentiating energy within all humans on their basic level.
What does that mean? I don’t have a clue, but I know that Freud asserted hat these two instincts can be charged with erotic charges and combine with the libido to express itself in sadism or masochism. The charge of eroticism in these two instincts have an enhancing effect on the personality of human beings.
Libido (for those who care to know) is the sexual urge or instinct as described by Freud. Many see Freud’s assessment of the role of sexual energy in human activity as his legacy to the world, and a clear majority would agree with him that the sexual instinct is the drive that makes everything else happen. Freud’s thinking had brought about a universal motivation for all things….you can clearly see where this is going.
Freud: a devout atheist himself was not afraid to address religion, claiming those who believe in a deity suffer from “mental infantilism” and “mass delusion” Dawkins anyone?
Freud brought about a certain amount of interest in his time, an interest which may not have been grounded in fact, but society as a whole were in awe of him. He carried his age through this new phenomenon known as psychoanalysis as the Pied Piper did with his hearers. Instead of the public repudiating him, he was made a household figure and the father of psychoanalysis/psychotherapy.
Freud was to bring to the table a new kind of thought which is still present today! The idea of being and the nature of being. Man is not made in the image of God, rather he is merely consisting of an id, ego, and superego pressed by libido and influenced by life and death instincts, a man does not have a body, soul or spirit, but rather he is a collection of psychological forces.
What is the purpose to life? According to Freud, there is no purpose to life, eventually the death instinct will prevail.
Perhaps the most critical influence of Freudianism thought to modern day society is the new determinism, by which man does what he does and becomes what he becomes. The libido is the prime mover, the reason that everything exists. One succeeds in life or fails because of his co-operation or opposition to the forces of libido that course within his life. The notion that libido is everything is a part of the unfortunate heritage of Freudian thinking that has devolved upon mankind.
In the civilized world, perhaps until the beginning of the twentieth century the minds of people at least in public were to keep sexual matters right within its confines of marriage or behind closed doors. This is an influence under orthodox Christianity, sexual matters rightly were not to be spoken of in public.
Now though in present day the sexual revolution is here for everyone to see, the open hot furnace of insatiable sexual activity is rife in our world, intimacy has left the confines of marriage and is bare for all to partake of. Divorce is rife in infidelity, sex is commercial, in books, clothing, films, cartoons, internet, magazines, schools, churches etc. The libido according to Freud determines everything right? The female figure has become the catalyst for selling automobiles, cigarettes, holidays, food, books, etc.
What a world we live in……not to say that Freud is guilty for all of this….but when you set sexual desire as the focus of achieving all things, you put some factors in motion, which were never meant to be in motion. You remove God’s protective hand of marriage and masquerade it as a joke, whilst the body is lifted up as the pinnacle of human achievement…..sexual fulfilment. We have made a god out of something which was never meant to be. Herein lies the controlling hand of Freudian thinking. Sigmund, or Sickmund as I like to refer to him rightly deserves his place in this list of rulers.
There is so much more I could say on this man, but I think I have made the point, even if I just grazed on something which others who know more would more than elaborate further.
The Seed, The Melanin, The Saviour! 