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"
"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
"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
"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
"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
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. …..
"….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
"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
"….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
"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)
"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
"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"
"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
**************8
Book: "Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis" by Eli Zaretsky
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
Article: "What Freud Got Right" by Fred Guterl, Newsweek, Nov 11,2002
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