FREUD
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SCHOLAR ISLAND |
FREUD
"For no other system of thought in modern times, except the great religions, has been adopted by so many people as a systematic interpretation of human behavior."
-Alfred Kazin, "The Freudian Revolution Analyzed"
"Salvation appeared in the form of a young Viennese medical student by the name of Sigmund Freud, whose adventures in the unseen regions of the mind commenced in 1876 when he was sent to the Italian seaside town of Trieste to discover whether eels had testicles, a matter which science had previously overlooked. The endless dissection of marine life this quest involved began to disturb Sigmund: 'even in my dreams, in my thoughts,' as he confided to a friend, 'nothing but the great problems connected with the words, "ducts", "testicles" and "ovaries".....When Freud returned to Vienna he decided to devote his career to the workings of the mind, and the investigation of the afflictions that tormented it.
Freud had his first crack at the grey matter with cocaine, which he had found could cure opium addiction if prescribed in the right doses. The drug also seemed to help people to talk freely about themselves, which gave Freud another clue: speech, not a scalpel, would unlock the secrets of the human mind. Tragically, after one of his experimental cocaine patients committed suicide, Freud was forced to renounce cocaine as a diagnostic tool. He passed on his discoveries to the dental trade, which still uses the drug as a local anesthetic, and continued his personal use of the ancient Incan stimulant....."
Iain Gately
La Diva Nicotina
"is it not sad, that we are materially dependent on these savages, who are not a better class of human beings?"
-Sigmund Freud (in a letter to a German friend after WWI....about the Americans)
"As I stepped on to the platform of Worcester to deliver my Five Lectures upon Psychoanalysis it seemed like the realization of some incredible day-dream: psychoanalysis was no longer a product of delusion, it had become a valuable part of reality."
-Sigmund Freud An Autobiographical Study
"We are bringing them the plague....And they don't even know it."
-Sigmund Freud Wall Street Journal Aug 7, 2009 "One Hundred Years of Freud in America"
"However, insisting that everyone with behavioural problems had been sexually abused in their youth became a difficult argument to maintain, in particular because Freud's patients came from respectable families. He, therefore, refined his theory: the abuse need not be actual-it could be dreamed, in fact, it had to be dreamed, because every little boy's libido had as its goal the murder of his father and the seduction of his mother, vice versa, of course, for girls. This tendency became known as the Oedipus complex.
The philosophical repercussions of Freud's theories were immense. He shifted the blame from bad blood to a bad upbringing. Your parents, in a sense, were still to blame, but their work could be undone by other means than the gallows or newly invented electric chair, sponsored by Thomas Edison. Freud's work succeeded in paving the way for a new perception of addicts, smokers included. If addicts were curable, then, like any other invalids, they were to be pitied instead of scorned. This change in status is the foundation stone of the contemporary school of thought that considers smokers victims instead of consumers, and tobacco companies heartless merchants of death."
-Iain Gately
La Diva Nicotina
"....Today, this young man's identity and legacy are hotly disputed. Sigmund Freud was a genius. Sigmund Freud was a fraud. Sigmund Freud was really a man of letters, or perhaps a philosopher, or a crypto-biologist. Sigmund Freud discovered psychoanalysis by delving deep into his own drams and penetrating the mysteries of his patients. Sigmund Freud stole most of his good ideas from others and invented the rest out of his own odd imagination. Freud was the maker of a new science of the mind that dominated the West for much of the twentieth century. Freud was an unscientific conjurer who created a mass delusion. Who was Freud? Who are the Freudians, Freudian psychoanalysts, and psychoanalysis? And who are we, those of us in the West who have found the terms and concepts of psychoanalysis permeating our everyday language, changing on the most intimate levels the ways in which we think about ourselves, surround us in what the poet W.H. Auden called "a whole climate of opinion?"
George Makari
Revolution In Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis
"Freud's contribution to the study of dreaming rescued the subject from the periphery, and restored it to the centre of western man's concern. That he was able to do this in the climate of opinion prevailing at the turn of the century was extraordinary. Freud's approach to neurosis through the dream was so radical at the time that it was treated with contempt and dismissed as a mixture of obscenity and obscurity, and even C.G. Jung, by his own admission, was unable to appreciate its importance for a number of years. Freud provided the impetus for the twentieth century to explore the dream. Andre Breton paid him this eloquent tribute: "Under the pretence of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in accordance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer-and, in my opinion, by far the most important part-has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. On the basis of these discoveries, a current of opinion is finally forming by means of which the human explorer will be able to carry his investigations much further."
David Coxhead & Susan Hiller
Dreams: Visions of the Night
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"I consider the founder of psychoanalysis the prime incarnation of Jewish genius since Jesus himself."
-Harold Bloom
Jesus and Yahweh
"Only people of depraved minds, could impugn the motives or find "impure" so great and fine a personality as Freud."
-Emma Goldman
"Freud was more devious and less original that he made himself out to be, and where he pioneered, he was often wrong. Freud displayed bad character in the service of bad science."
-Peter D. Krager
Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind
"We live more than ever in the Age of Freud, despite the relative decline that psychoanalysis has begun to suffer as a public institution and as a medical specialty. Freud's universal and comprehensive theory of the mind probably will outlive the psychoanalytical therapy, and seems already to have placed him with Plato and Montaigne and Shakespeare rather than with the scientists he overtly aspired to emulate."
Harold Bloom
Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
"I recognized, a universal characteristic of such (repressed) ideas: they were all of a distressing nature, calculated to arouse the affects of shame, of self-reproach, and of physical pain, and the feeling of being harmed; they were all of a kind that one would prefer not to have experienced, that one would rather forget."
Freud on 'Hysterics' 1895
"In America today, Freud's intellectual influence is greater than that of any other thinker. He presides over the mass media, the college classroom, the chatter at the parties, the playgrounds of the middle classes."
-Philip Rieff
"...the only systematic account of the human mind, which, in point of subtlety and complexity, of interest and tragic power, deserves to stand beside the chaotic mass of psychological insights that literature has accumulated through the centuries."
-Lionel Trilling 1947
"The essence of Freud's social theory is that a stable human society becomes possible only when the universal patricidal tendencies of the sons are overcome, so that the family-the "cell of society"-is preserved. Since the taboo against incest, which is also a component of the Oedipus conflict, makes extra familial marriage mandatory, different families are bound through marriage into clans, tribes, and eventually nations. The psychological nucleus of cultural development, in this view, thus lies in overcoming Oedipal strivings."
Franz G. Alexander ,M.D. & Sheldon T. Selesnick, M.D.
The History of Psychiatry
"There is and can only be one Fuhrer, Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis."
-Francois Roustang
"Freud was 50 percent right and 100 percent wrong."
-Robert Stickgold
"Oedipus , schmoedipus-as long as he loves his mother"
anon
"In his entire fabled career-which really is mostly a fable-Freud wrote up detailed histories of only six patients, all of them heavily spun, revised, and embellished to make the Doktor look like a genius. In the intervening century or more, scholars have dug up documentation-such as letters and contemporaneous case notes-which demonstrate Freud's inability to meaningfully help his patients, falling light years short of the incredible claims he made."
Russ Kick
50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know
"The demise of Freudianism can be summed up in a single word: lithium"
Tom Wolfe
"I regret that I cannot accede to your request, because I should like very much to remain in the darkness of not having been analyzed."Einstein (1927)
"I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me."
Vladimir Nabokov
"I just want to make one brief statement about psychoanalysis: "Fuck DR. Freud."
Oscar Levant
"The whole process of psychoanalysis is inimical to the welfare of mankind."
Alfred Adler
"Freud was out of his fucking mind....He was as nutty as could be."
-Albert Ellis
"Thanks to Freud, you're prone to believe your dreams are repressed desires for your exes when they could just as easily be X-rated mental lint. A growing body of evidence suggests Freud's famous book, The interpretation of Dreams, might be more correctly titled The Misinterpretation of Dreams, or I'll Make a Bunch of stuff Up Because I'm Sex-Mad, and Get Real Famous and make a Fortune."
-Amy Alkon The Advice Goddess
"By insisting the Committee must be absolutely secret, Freud enshrined the principle of confidentiality. The various psychoanalytic societies that emerged from the Committee were like Communist cells, in which the members vowed eternal obedience to their leader. Psychoanalysis became institutionalized by the founding of journals and the training of candidates; in short an extraordinarily effective political entity."
Phyllis Grosskurth
The Secret ring" Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics
Of Psychoanalysis
"What took hold of my imagination immediately was your idea of a secret council composed of the best and most trustworthy among our men to take care of the further developments of an defend the cause against personalities and accidents when I am no more.....I dare say it would make living and dying easier for me if I knew of such an association existing to watch over my creation."
(a letter from Freud to Jones who suggested that a secret committee should be formed in order to protect Freud and his doctrines)
"A group is an obedient herd, which could never live without a master. It has such a thirst for obedience that it submits instinctively to anyone who appoints himself its master. Although in this way the needs of a group carry it halfway to meet the leader, yet he too must fit in with it in his personal qualities. He must himself be held in fascination by a strong faith (in an idea) in order to awaken the group's faith; he must possess a strong and imposing will, which the group, which has no will of its own, can accept from him."
Freud Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
"This ‘who is not for us is against us’ this ‘all or nothing’ is necessary for political parties. I can therefore understand the principle as such, but for science I consider it harmful."
Eugen Bleuler (former Freud disciple in 1911)
"We begin to grasp the deviser of psychoanalysis was at bottom a visionary but endlessly calculating artist, engaged in casting himself as the hero of a multivolume fictional opus that is part epic, part detective story, and part satire on human self interestedness and animality. This scientifically deflating realization…..is what the Freudian community needs to challenge if it can."
Frederick Crews
The Memory Wars
"Interestingly, I have read that Freud reportedly had no sexual experience until age forty, when he married, and from this connubial couch he quickly retreated to then become the sexual authority for his time and indeed the last century, "
-Joseph Chilton Pearce
The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit
"If the pun can be forgiven, a close analysis of Freud's reputation shows it was built on a tissue of lies. He only wrote up six cases in his career, claiming to have cured all of them despite the fact that one patient was "totally shattered" and placed in an asylum, one committed suicide and two others claimed the treatment did not help them."
-David Southwell
Secrets and Lies
"My difficulties were surly personal, but I could not help suspecting that psychoanalysis was a form of alienation that was being used as a substitute not only for Marxism but for social activism of any kind. New York, that riverbed through which so many subterranean cultures are always flowing, was swollen with rivulets of dispossessed liberals and leftists in chaotic flight from the bombarded old castle of self-denial, with its infinite confidence in social progress and authentification-through-political-correctness of their positions at the leading edge of history. As always, the American self, a puritanical item, needed a scheme of morals to administer, and once Marx's was declared beyond the pale, Freud's offered a similar smugness of the saved. Only this time the challenge handed the lost ones like me was not to join a picket line or a Spanish brigade but to confess to having been a selfish bastard who had never know how to love."
Arthur Miller
"The inconsistency between Freud's passionate antireligious tirades and his profound commitment to Jewish ness significantly highlights an important aspect of Freud's personality and production, namely his anti-gentilism. The popular image of Freud as an enlightened, emancipated, irreligious person, who, with the aid of psychoanalysis "discovered" that religion is mental illness is pure fiction....he was sympathetic to Zionism from the first days and was acquainted with and respected Herzl; he had once sent Herzl a copy of one of his works with a personal dedication. Freud's son was a member of the Kadimah, a Zionist organization, and Freud himself was an honorary member of it."
Dr. Thomas Sazsz
The Myth of Psychotherapy
"Freud had a dream-I would not think it right to air the problem it involved. I interpreted it as best I could, but added that a great deal more could be said about it if he would supply me with some additional details from his private life. Freud's response to these words was a curious look-a look of the utmost suspicion. Then he said, 'But I cannot risk my authority!' At that moment, he lost it altogether. That sentence burned itself into my memory; and in it the end of our relationship was already fore-shadowed. Freud was placing personal authority above truth."
-C.G. Jung
"May I say a few words to you in earnest? I admit the ambivalence of my feelings towards you, but am inclined to take an honest and absolutely straightforward view of the situation. If you doubt my word so much the worse for you. I would, however, point out that your technique of treating your pupils like patients is a blunder. In that way you produce either slavish sons or impudent puppies (....) I am objective enough to see through your little trick. You go around sniffing out all the symptomatic acts in your vicinity, thus reducing everyone to the level of sons and daughters who blushingly admit the existence of their faults.
You see, my dear Professor, as long as you hand out this stuff I don't give a damn for my symptomatic actions; they shrink to nothing in comparison with the formidable beam in my brother Freud's eye. I am not in the least neurotic-touch wood.!"
-C.G. Jung
Read: "Why Shrinks Have So Many Problems" by Robert Epstein, Ph.D.
Suicide, stress, divorce-psychologists and other mental health professional may actually be more screwed up than the rest of us….Psychology Today, July/Aug 1997
"….Freud also had frequent blackouts. He refused to quit smoking even after 30 operations to correct the extensive damage he suffered from cancer of the jaw. …..
"Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one is to solve the task by oneself.....(But) a better path: that of becoming a member of the human community and with the help of a technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will. Then one is working with all for the good of all."
-Freud
"….Here’s a theory that’s not so crazy: Maybe people enter the mental health field because they have a history of psychological difficulties. Perhaps they’re trying to understand or overcome their own problems, which would give us a pool of therapists who are a bit unusual to begin with. That alone could account for the image of the Crazy Shrink……"
Robert Epstein, Ph.D. Psychology Today, July 1997
"It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius."
-Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)
"In practice , psychoanalysis has by now become all too often no more than a psychic blood-letting. The patient is not so much changed as aged, and the infantile fantasies which he is encouraged to express are condemned to exhaust themselves against the analysts' nonresponsive reactions. The result for all too many patients is a diminution a "tranquilizing" of their most interesting qualities and vices. The patient is indeed not so much altered as worn out-less bad, less good, less bright, less willful, less destructive, less creative."
Norman Mailer
Book: "Making us crazy: DSM, The Psychiatric Bible and the Creation of Mental Disorders…..by Herb Kutchins and Stuart A. Kirk
"…..Freud is treated as a demigod, or even as a god. No criticism of his utterances is permitted."
Fritz Wittels (1924)(another Freud disciple)
"Freud thought he was bringing the plague to the U.S.A. but the U.S.A. has victoriously resisted the psychoanalytical frost by real deep freezing, by mental and sexual refrigeration. They have countered the black magic of the Unconscious with the white magic of "doing your own thing," air conditioning, sterilization, mental frigidity and the cold media of information."
-Jean Baudrillard
"From the age of 16 onward (in 1929) I read many books by Freud and his followers, but I could see that Sigmund was especially obsessed with the sexual "origins" of disturbance, especially with the ubiquitousness of the Oedipus complex. I could also see that was an overgeneralizer, and a dogmatist, and therefore a poor scientist."
-Albert Ellis
"There is a long and interesting association between psychoanalysis and the political and cultural left. Support of radical and Marxist ideals was common among Freud’s earlier followers, and leftist attitudes have been common in later years among psychoanalysts(Hale,1995 p31; Kurzweil,1989,pp 36,284) as, e.g. among the groups in Berlin and Vienna during the post-World War I era (Kurzweil,1989; pp. 46-47) in the post revolutionary Soviet Union where all of the top psychoanalysts were Bolsheviks and Trotsky supporters and were among the most powerful political figures in the country Chamberlain, 1995); and in America from the 1920s to the present (Torrey, 1992, pp. 33, 93ff; 122-123). If Crews is correct in his analysis of the institutional structure of psychoanalysis as an authoritarian political movement-and he certainly is-one is left with the conclusion that one of the century’s major intellectual and cultural forces was nothing more than a highly disciplined political movement masquerading as science."
Kevin MacDonald
"Freud’s Follies, Psychoanalysis as Religion, Cult, and Political Movement SKEPTIC mag
"WE have our own science."
Freud
"The distinction between conscious and unconscious mental states is the sovereign means for believing what one likes."
William James
"We cannot be surprised then, to learn that Freud’s record includes not a single validated cure."
Frederick C. Crews
Unauthorized Freud *
"What asylum doctor has not had his own attack of madness by dint of continued association with madmen? …..But before that, what obscure inclination, what dreadful fascination had made him choose the subject?"
Marcel Proust
"When I first visited a national psychiatric convention in 1943, I was dismayed to find the greatest collection of oddballs, Christ-beards, and psychotics that I had ever seen outside a hospital. Yet this is to be expected: psychotherapists are those of us who are driven by our emotional hunger."
( a past President of the American Academy of Psycho-therapists.)
"….psychological establishment-the Freudian Mafia."
Sam Keen Ph.D.
(Psychology Today 1972)
"The entire system of classical psychoanalytic thought rests on nothing more substantial than Freud’s word that it is true. And that is why the late Nobelist in medicine Sir Peter Medewar famously condemned that system as a stupendous intellectual confidence trick."
Unauthorized Freud
"We are bringing them the plague ....and they don't even know it."
-Sigmund Freud (referring to his system coming to America....See Wall Street Journal Aug 7,2009 "One Hundred Years of Freud in America"
"….To fully accept the idea of unconscious motivation is to cease to be human. The greatest analyst in the world can live his own life only like an ordinary blind and driven human being. Like his patients, he receives occasional glimpses of the peculiar activities going on behind the curtain of consciousness; and like his patients, he is always running a little behind. The crowning paradox of psycho-analysis is the near-uselessness of its insights. To "make the unconscious conscious"-the program of psychoanalytic therapy-is to pour water into a sieve. The moisture that remains on the surface of the mesh is the benefit of analysis."
Janet Malcolm
In the Freud Archives
"Some people do want to help people. But most therapists are deeply disturbed. It’s the only profession I can think of that is virtually ungoverned in terms of power….and whenever there is power, there is abuse of power."
Mia Farrow
"Freud's shadow fell shorter as the sexual sky brightened. The horrifying secrets of his couch are tonight's television programmes. He had his dissidents. Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) of Zurich broke away in 1911 and watered down the libido. Viennese Alfred Adler felt that all small boys did not really want to have sex with their mothers. Henry Havelock Ellis from Croydon reclassified Freud as an artist, not a scientist. Jolly, vain Wilhelm Stekel cheerfully expressed his own relationship to Freud as: 'A dwarf on the should of a giant can see further than the giant himself.' About which, Freud observed: 'That may be true, but a louse on the head of an astronomer does not.'
Freud's teaching was busily propagated by his phantoms, richly walking the dreams of the world, particularly American. Analysts continue to unburden life's strugglers and stragglers of their elaborately packaged troubles, towards which family and friends might possibly express shock, but certainly feel boredom. Psychoanalysis has an oddity: it is the only cure for any condition to be attempted by talking about it. Which has one increasingly prized advantage in medicine: no side-effects."
-Richard Gordon
The Alarming History of Medicine: Amusing Anecdotes from Hippocrates to Heart Transplants
"I think that psychoanalysis has been the greatest block to the study and understanding of mental disease, and by this I mean insanity, that has happened since the time of Rush. All doctors in all institutions for the care of the insane that I have been in touch with in the United States were so saturated with the Freudian concept that real investigation of mental diseases was almost entirely excluded."
Myerson
"What a lesser breed are those….who run Institutes of Psycho-analysis from which a candidate can be certified only if he emerges with orthodoxy in his mouth and lead in his heart."
Sheldon B. Kopp Ph.D.
"The air is heavy with psychoanalytic dust which everybody is breathing."
Emil Ludwig
"Witch doctors are as important as psychiatrists."
T. Adeoye Lambe
"Only a specialist in perversity could have taken such liberties with the beautiful Greek legends of the phoenix and Prometheus. Of the former, Freud wrote, "Probably the earliest significance of the Phoenix was that of the revivified penis after its state of flaccidity, rather than that of the sun setting in the evening glow and rising again". Freud dismissed Prometheus as a "penis-symbol" and gave his own version of the discovery of fire "Now I conjecture that, in order to possess himself of fire, it was necessary for man to renounce the homosexually-tinged desire to extinguish fire by means of his own water signified a pleasurable struggle with another phallus." It was for these reasons, according to Freud, that primitive societies put women in charge of fire because their anatomy precluded yielding to the temptation faced by males."
Wilmot Robertson
The dispossessed Majority
"When I look at my pupils. I get the impression that psychoanalysis liberates the worst instincts in human beings."
Freud (in conversation with Stekel)
"Neurotic is a far more sinister adjective than people realize. Sigmund Freud once suggested that neurotics are poor sports; that they are unable to lose gracefully. and the worst poor sports of all, it seems, are the intellectuals."
-J.R. Nyquist
"the masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability."
-Freud
"Paul Johnson's book on intellectuals suggests that a great many of them were spoiled children. One finds, in Johnson's work, a parade of arrogant and willful individuals, maladjusted and amoral, self-destructive and destructive of others-a gallery of neurotics. Were they properly punished as children? Were they humbled? No."
-J.R. Nyquist
"About being psychoanalyzed, my own feeling most decidedly is that it would be better to follow his (Freud’s) example than his precept. He did not begin by being psychoanalyzed (never was!) or attaching himself to any sect or school but went about freely, studying the work of others, and retaining always his own independence. If he had himself followed the advice he gives you, he would have attached himself to Charcot with whom he was working and become his disciple, like Gilles de la Tousette, an able man and now forgotten. If you are psychoanalyzed you either become a Freudian or you don’t. If you don’t you remain pretty much where you are now; if you do-you are done for!-unless you break away, like Jung or Adler or Rank."
Havelock Ellis
"Freud’s whole school was made up of a group of people emotionally tied together. He was like an old-fashioned father surrounded by a large number of children, each one of whom had only a single goal: becoming his favorite child. That psychoanalysis was a science, a part of medicine, and that other people elsewhere in the world were doing things that may be important to the field and have bearings on it was completely ignored."
Sandor Rado
Heresy
"Here in one beguiling gift-wrapped box is almost all the religious stock-in-trade of ancient man-interpretation of dreams, casting out of devils, incest myths, obsessive sexual teleology's, and confessionals. And the jack-in-the-box is none other than the grand old shaman himself, Sigmund Freud."
Wilmot Robertson
Dispossessed Majority
"Freud’s habit of regarding human culture as superimposed on man, rather than as an integral part of his biological makeup, led him into the realm of sheer fantasy, on a par with the religious myths he despised: in the slaying of the primal father by his sons, Freud re-created man’s original sin and even accepted the notion that a single symbolic act might hang like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross around the neck of every succeeding generation. He thus evolved a private religion which introduces a universal guilt without providing for any more universal method of redemption than a prolonged analysis of the sufferer by a competent psychoanalyst: a new priesthood whose very scientific scruples must condemn their method of salvation to remain the boon of an even smaller body of elect than Calvin thought merited salvation."
Lewis Mumford
The Condition of Man
"Freud once remarked that the objective of psychoanalysis is to transform hysterical misery into common, everyday unhappiness. In saying this, he exhibited not only his personal temperament, but also his thinking's bandwidth. Freud is a superb student of misery and unhappiness, but about what makes life worth living, he has surprisingly little to say. Freud cannot contribute much to understanding what makes a happy marriage or a flourishing family life. He cannot tell where genuinely consequential art comes from: he can offer a superb analysis of Hamlet the character, but not of Hamlet the play. Hamlet the character he can treat like a patient of his, though a singularly complex one; the play itself, in its freshness and power, passes beyond his terms of analysis. Similarly, he cannot explain how an individual moves past narcissism or the will to personal power, and lives for the good of others or for the good of humanity as a whole."
Mark Edmondson
The Death of Sigmund Freud
"I think of my psychoanalyst friends…..they are working with torsos and decapitated heads. In Aesculapian times man was still a whole being. He could be reached through the spirit. Today not even the greatest psychoanalyst can restore to men what they have lost. Each year there ought to be a congress of analysts at Epidauros. I would give them a month of complete silence…..I would order them to stop thinking, stop talking, stop theorizing. I would let the sun, the light, the heart, the stillness work its havoc. I would order them to listen to the birds, or the twinkle of great bells, or the rustle of leaves. I would make them meditate not on disease but on health, which is every man’s prerogative."
Henry Miller
"To me, psychoanalysis is a hoax-the biggest hoax ever played on humanity. By showing who analysts are, how they work, what they believe, and what they have done, I hope to show Freud as a fraud. If I succeed, I am idealistic enough to hope that the world may return to the belief in love, ideals, good taste and courtesy-the "books" that have been burned by the Freudian Inquisition."
Edward R. Pinckney M.D. Cathy Pinckney
The Fallacy of Freud and Psychoanalysis
"I am sometimes tempted to wonder whether Freudianism is not a great school of prudery and hypocrisy.....Does not Freud underrate the extent to which nothing, in private, is really shocking so long as it belongs to ourselves?....The feeling with which we reject the psychoanalytic theory of poetry is not one of shock. It is not even a vague disquietude or an unspecified reluctance. it is quite a definite feeling of anticlimax, of frustration....
In general, of course, the fact that a supposed discovery is disappointing does not tend to prove that it is false: but in this question I think it does, for desires and fulfillments and disappointments are what we are discussing. If we are disappointed at finding only sex where we looked for something more, then surely the something more had a value for us? If we are conscious of loss in exchanging the garden for the female body, then clearly the garden added something more than concealment, something positive, to our pleasure. Let us grant that the body was, in fact, concealed behind the garden: yes since the removal of the garden lowers the value of the experience, it follows that the body gained some of its potency by association with the garden. We have not merely removed a veil, we have removed ornaments. Confronted with what is supposed to be the original (the female body) we still prefer the translation-from which any critic must conclude that the translation had merits of its own. Or perhaps "prefer" is the wrong word. We really want both. Poetry is not a substitute for sexual satisfaction, nor sexual satisfaction for poetry. But if so, poetical pleasure is not sexual pleasure simply in disguise. It is, at worst, sexual pleasure plus something else, and we really want the something else for its own sake."
C.S. lewis
"Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism"
"We do not hesitate to brand it as technically wrong if for the purposes of therapy an analyst selects his patients from his circle of acquaintances; if he shares his interests with them or discusses his opinions either with them or in their presence; if he forgets himself far enough to judge their behavior, to disclose his criticism to other people, and to permit it to affect decisions; if he actively manipulates the patient, offers himself as a pattern, and ends analysis by permitting the patient to commit every single one of these deviations from the classical technique when we analyze candidates. Further we do not inquire frequently enough how far these deviations complicate the transference and obscure its interpretation."
-Anna Freud 'The Problem of Training Analysis" 1938
"The philosophy of Freud....is in direct contradiction to Christianity: and also in direct contradiction to the other great psychologist, Jung. ....But psychoanalysis itself, apart from all the philosophical additions that Freud and others have made to it, is not the least contradictory to Christianity....
When a man makes a moral choice two things are involved. One is the act of choosing. The other is the various feelings (either normal or abnormal).....What psychoanalysis undertakes to do is to remove the abnormal feelings, that is, to give the man better raw material for his acts of choice: Morality is concerned with the acts of choice themselves."
C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
"While Freud and his techniques have been somewhat debunked and largely replaced by drugs, one must remember that Freud was proposing a technique that had worked for thousands of years. One person, through interest and conversation, can, and often does, change the mind of another. But drugs can deal with pervasive problems like anxiety and depression. Indeed drug-based psychiatry has since launched a search for many conditions that no one knew existed before. In the 1950s, the treatable (and billable) psychiatric conditions listed by mental-health professionals numbered a few dozen. Now there are over four hundred, and more drugs to obtain quicker cures, although sometimes there are cures for conditions no one is sure even exist.
So we are right back to where we started when Freud came along a century ago."
James F. Dunnigan
Dirty Little Secrets of the Twentieth Century
"Freud, one might say, triggered a large-scale transference in the mind of the West. That is, people have aimed at him all the hopes and hatreds that have in the past infused their relations to authority. Accordingly, Freud inspires what he would call "an artificial illness," in which the regressive dynamics of authority are made visible and susceptible to analysis. All of the best that Freud offers-his ideas about dreams and jokes and the structure of the psyche, his suggestion that there is more to know and less to judge than we had imagined possible-all of this legacy at times disappears. In its place, we have Freud the cocaine user, Freud the misogynist, Freud the ersatz scientist. Perhaps this phase will pass and Freud will become a mortal god, a cultural patriarch, again; but really that is very little better."
Mark Edmondson
The Death of Sigmund Freud
"Freud of course reigned over American psychiatry in the the 1950s and 1960s. In that era, it was virtually impossible for the head of any respectable department of psychiatry not to be a psychoanalyst, just as today it's a virtual impossibility for one not to be a neuroscientist. When Leon Eisenberg dared utter a few words challenging the scientific basis of psychoanalysis at a conference in 1962, "there was a veritable stampede of department chairmen to the floor microphones....Just about every eminent figure present rose to defend the primacy of psychoanalysis as the 'the basic science' of psychiatry. As a trainee in the early 1960s, a young psychiatrist was warned by his supervisors about giving medication to people with catatonic schizophrenia "because it would muck up transference," a reference to the process by which the patient projects feelings and emotions onto the therapist. These days he'd likely be told not to do therapy at all."
-Charles Barber
Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating A Nation
"I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think."
-Sigmund Freud
"we need education to reality....Once we have had it, we will be in the same position as the child who has left the home where he was so warm and comfortable. But, after all, is it not the destiny of childishness to be overcome? Man cannot remain a child forever; he must venture at last into the hostile world."
-Sigmund Freud
"The more the movement grew, the more did the leading bureaucracy, by now consisting of many new members, trying to control it. This was no longer a defense against those who, because of lack of courage, tried to tune down Freud's teachings. On the contrary, as has been said before, official psychoanalysis had lost its radical character, and very often the aim of the bureaucracy was to remove and keep out the more radical analysts. Control of the ideology meant control of the movement and its members, and was so used. Old members who did not entirely agree with the dogma were excluded or forced to resign, others were criticized by the London authorities even for having shown a "bored face' while listening to a speech by an orthodox representative of the bureaucracy. Psychoanalysis (in fact, though not in form) were forbidden-as recently as 1961-to give lectures at scientific meetings of groups of analysts who were not members of the official organization. it is not surprising that the bureaucratization of the psychoanalytic movement resulted in a corresponding diminution of scientific creativity. many new ideas in psychoanalysis were expressed by annalists who sooner or later severed their ties with the bureaucracy and continued their work outside of its jurisdiction."
-Erich Fromm
Beyond the Chains of Illusion (1968)
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Book: "Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis" by Eli Zaretsky
Book: "Freud Among The Philosophers: The Psychoanalytic Unconscious and Its Philosophical Critics" by Donald Levy
Book: "Eros and Civilization: Philosophical Inquiry into Freud" by Allen Lane
Book: "Beyond The Pleasure Principle: The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading" by Sigmund Freud
Book: "The Hoax of Freudism" by R.M. Jurevich P.hd.
Book: "The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siecle" by Sander L. Gillman
Book: "Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis" by Richard Webster
Book: "Why Freud was wrong" by Richard Webster
Book: "Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision" by Louis Breger
Book: "Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American thought and Culture" by C. Fuller Torrey M.D.
Book: "The Freudian Fallacy" by E.M. Thornton
Book: "Freud and the Bolsheviks: Psychoanalysis in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union" by Martin A. Miller
Book: "Freud and Freudians On Religion" Ed. by Donald Capps
Book: "Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision" by Louis Breger
Book: "Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter" by Serge Leclaire
Book: "The Freud Encyclopedia: Theory, Therapy, and Culture" ed by Edward Erwin
Book: "The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes" by Richard Panek
Article: "What Freud Got Right" by Fred Guterl, Newsweek, Nov 11,2002
Book: "Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology" by George Prochnik
Book: Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend" by Frederick Crews
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