* A Jewish delusion if you will, but more significantly a Jewish heresy.
That is a significant deviation from a traditional Jewish view of human nature, as well as being an atheist.
Point well taken about Freud not being as bad as that other atheist Rebbe, Karl Marx.
* While there has been a decline of interest in Freud, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung has been gaining popularity since his death in 1961, primarily due to his treatment of mythological archetypes (Jung would ask his patients, “What myth do you live by?”), the Hero’s
Journey (which provides an interpretative scheme useful in analyzing novels and movies), and synchronicity, i.e., meaningful coincidence, that seems to impose order on the random flux of existence. People want to know, “Is this a sign from up above telling me to play this number in the lottery?” We all know people like that, and, at least based on the number of books published, the interest in synchronicity seems to be exploding nowadays.
It’s fair to say that Freudianism has attracted little or no interest east of Berlin. Personality theory is peculiar in that there is no universally accepted theory but instead we have national schools centered around brilliant individuals. Poland, for example, produced a psychiatrist named Kazimierz (Casimir) Dabrowski (1902-1980) who continues to have a lot of disciples both in Europe and in the U.S. His main treatise is entitled “Personality Shaping through Positive Disintegration,” and his work seems to appeal greatly to educators working with fragile but gifted children.
* I think a big factor in the rise of Freud was World War I. After WWI, purely rational explanations of human behavior weren’t nearly as convincing. Understanding other people (and yourself) as a battleground between a raging brute (id), a sadistic tyrant (superego) and a struggling rationality trying to keep it together was a schema that seemed to fit Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
Why did it appeal to Jews more than gentiles? Possibly because assimilated Jews had to tear down their religiously-based culture more completely than Christians or Christian-stock nonbelievers did? Like a deforested mountain that is now more vulnerable to mudslides?
(Besides of course being a parlor game that high-verbal-IQ types could use to exert power over or at least claim superiority over other people. Which is always psychologically rewarding. Then it was psychosexual complexes among the non-psychoanalyzed, now it is structural privileged among the non-woke.)
* Well Steve:
Do you ever use the term ‘Freudian slip’?
Do you ever refer to someone having a big ego?
Do you ever refer to someone’s subconscious?
Do you ever say that someone has an inferiority complex?
You Freudian, you.
Fortunately no one else does, so I guess you’re right about his ideas being dead.
* Jews used psychoanalysis as a form of status signalling (it also showed you had money to burn). In the same way, Jews of the 50s-70s generation loved, loved, loved having an illness to discuss. Illness one-upmanship was a standard part of any conversation that had one or more Jews involved.
But the smarter and more hostile Jewish intellectuals also used Freud as a weapon to dismantle Gentile societies, and in this they were exceptionally successful. Sure, the use of “Freud” as a term has declined, because he’s no longer needed as a faux-authority figure. We are well beyond that now, but all the gender-as-a-social-construct, homo-philia, pornophilia, race mixing propaganda, and so on, it all stems from Freud and the Jewish compulsion to be part and parcel of every decadence movement in society.
Marx was similarly weaponized, of course, in a much blunter way by the Russian (((Bolsheviks))). The great, bloody revolution was never something they managed in America or Western Europe, but they managed a revolution just the same.
* Freud’s main gift was that he found a way to conceptualize observations that were common to introspective philosophers for many centuries and to give them simple names, as per the above. But there’s virtually nothing in Freud that cannot be gleaned from his milieu, in particular, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, just for starters. The difference is that neither of those two philosophers created such a rigid schema for the human mind both descriptively and prescriptively.
I note that Freud always claimed that he never read either philosopher.
However, while Freud had a gift for taking the fairly common psychological insights of philosophers and giving them names, those names, as slogans or mental shortcuts, have nothing to do with his conception of the human mind, which is pretty much dead as a doornail.
I think the popularity of introspective philosophy leading up to psychology and then to psychology and psychiatry in the 20th Century had a lot to do with the decline of religion as a meaningful category of explanation or self-explanation. It’s not as though religious thinkers were unaware of these phenomena either, however, they described these things in terms of the “soul” not in terms of the “mind” or the “unconscious.” If the cure in the religious context is and was active love, the cure in the psychiatric context was a lot of talking that amounted to being actively loved, which is really what it comes down to. Of course, nowadays psychiatry and psychology mostly comes down to pills to alleviate your symptoms. Which is one of the reasons why Freud is not really relevant anymore.
* I wonder if another Jewish big thinker whose reputation is in for a major correction isn’t Noam Chomsky.
If I had to generalize about a lot of the most famous Jewish thinkers/scientists, I’d say that, disproportionately, they seem to let their theorizing get ahead of their sanity checks against reality. Certainly Freud is an example of that. Likewise Marx, who extrapolated economic prediction far beyond any evidence.
Maybe 20 years ago Chomsky seemed to be on relatively firm ground for a great, lasting reputation — and no doubt he will always be to a good degree regarded as important because of how he forced linguistics to take on a formal approach. But his theory always suffered under his frankly quite arrogant indifference to the question of how the human brain might have evolved the ability to employ just the sort of grammars he developed. This question today is taking on much greater urgency, and his failure to come up with a convincing answer may well take his approach down for the count.
Again generalizing — probably overgeneralizing — I’d say that more gentile European thinkers, proportionately, tended to create their theories of the world from bottom up, looking first to reality and observation for their cues, then creating models to represent and subsume those observations. Classic cases are Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Faraday, Darwin, Galton, Mendel, Fisher.
One of the most puzzling facts about Jewish intellectual history is how completely Jews lacked any independent development of astronomy, physics, or even mathematics. They had, in their own culture, even into 18th or 19th century, less astronomy and mathematics than the Babylonians or even the Aztecs. Obviously, in the light of their later achievements, they must have enjoyed the capacity for such endeavors, but they must have had relatively little independent inclination to pursue them. (In contrast, think of how many gentile scientists pursued their science even as hobbies.)
It’s my guess that this strong inclination to theorizing over observation may have something to do with their strong attachment to ideologies in political and cultural issues.
It’s no accident that Freud and Marx have seen their reputations go into steep decline. Both of them described in elaborate detail a reality that simply didn’t exist. Little remains of the theories of either that holds up.
* Eliezer Yudkowski wrote once that a common vice for those who were always the smartest guy in the room is that it is tempting to try an argue both sides of an issue merely to show how smart you are. Truth is not is important as demonstrating your superior intellect, the way an educated teacher tears apart a student’s reasoning why more/less welfare would be a good idea. This is a pernicious path, but very alluring to those select few, why hubris is the greatest vice of the talented.
Freud was probably always the smartest guy in the room growing up, and so convincing others to believe his these fantastic narratives for different anxieties was exhilarating, the ultimate demonstration of his superior intellect. He had many good ideas, but many more bad yet clever ones. A lot of academic argument today has this tendency.
* The Jews Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck invented cognitive-behavioral therapy, though apparently out of frustration with the failure of psychoanalysis to help their respective patients.
Perhaps CBT works better because it has roots in gentile wisdom traditions like Stoicism and Buddhism.
* Freud, Marx, and Einstein together can serve as a pretty good proxy for the ideas that animated the twentieth century. If you add in Darwin, the set would be more comprehensive, but that would break the Jewish symmetry.
It is remarkable how influential these men were over such a long period of time. Even though all of their fields have moved on over the last century, each one of them remains well-known, and can easily be used to represent what you like or don’t like about their fields. No one of comparable stature has arisen to replace any of them in the mind of the educated public, despite the passage of much time.
* Did Freud know how destructive his ideas would be?
Sailing into New York Harbor, Sigmund Freud stood on the deck with Carl Jung and gazed out at the statue illuminating the world. Their arrival was a much-anticipated event for American psychologists so very curious of what this new theory of the psyche could expose. Whether out of hubris or prescience—and are they not often one and the same?—Freud turned to his disciple and whispered, “They don’t realize we’re bringing them the plague.”
Was revenge and destruction of Christianity and Catholic Church in particular on his mind? Perhaps it was a very common Jewish fantasy but Freud actually admitted to it.
“I myself had walked in Hannibal’s footsteps; like him I was destined never to see Rome, and he too had gone to Campania when all were expecting him in Rome. Hannibal, with whom I had achieved this point of similarity, had been my favourite hero during my years at the Gymnasium; like so many boys of my age, I bestowed my sympathies in the Punic war not on the Romans, but on the Carthaginians. Moreover, when I finally came to realize the consequences of belonging to an alien race, and was forced by the anti-Semitic feeling among my classmates to take a definite stand, the figure of the Semitic commander assumed still greater proportions in my imagination. Hannibal and Rome symbolized, in my youthful eyes, the struggle between the tenacity of the Jews and the organization of the Catholic Church. The significance for our emotional life which the anti-Semitic movement has since assumed helped to fix the thoughts and impressions of those earlier days. Thus the desire to go to Rome has in my dream- life become the mask and symbol for a number of warmly cherished wishes, for whose realization one had to work with the tenacity and single-mindedness of the Punic general, though their fulfilment at times seemed as remote as Hannibal’s life-long wish to enter Rome.”
* What Marx and Freud have in common is the belief that “conditions create consciousness.” Marx meant this in a political and economic way, but Freud (and also the behaviorists, e.g., Skinner) held it to be true at a more basic level. Whatever peculiarities of action any conscious being, whether a human being or a laboratory rat, may exhibit, they hold are products of its experiences. There is no allowance for human (or rat) nature. Behavior and even thought are entirely malleable by manipulating the conditions surrounding it.
In the case of Marxism, this principle led to Stalin’s embrace of Lysenko and the belief that acquired characteristics could be inherited. How else could “New Soviet Man” – the Bolshevists’ equivalent of Hitler’s Master Race – come into existence? To admit that there is such a thing as “human nature,” that some traits are innate and resistant to change through altered conditions, would have doomed the project from the start.
Freud’s influence on the Frankfurt School was to provide an explanation for the failure of Marxism-Leninism to spread across Europe after the Russian Revolution. According to Frankfurt Scool thinkers such as Adorno and Marcuse, a simple economic change was not enough to bring about the utopia predicted by Marx. Adorno argued that opposition to such social progress was a psychological aberration in The Authoritarian Personality. Moreover, pre-existing social structures, like the “patriarchal family,” traditional sexual taboos and inhibitions, and other customary ways of thinking, had to be demolished and rooted out before the “worker’s paradise” could be achieved. Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization is full of such arguments, derived from Freudian psychology and the late work of Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State.
Modern feminism, along with gay liberationism and most recently the tranny-bathroom phenomenon all have their roots in this Frankfurt School thinking, and particularly that of Marcuse, though it is probable that not even 10% of the noisy social justice warrior crowd could identify them.
* Adding Darwin would be a mistake, not only because he was not Jewish, but also because the social implications of his thought are – needless to say – those of social Darwinism, which goes in a direction quite opposite to that of Marxist egalitarianism. The full title of Darwin’s celebrated work is On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The notion of “favoured races” leads naturally to early HBD thinking, exemplified by the early physical anthropologists, and to eugenics, conceived and advocated during Darwin’s lifetime by his kinsman, Sir Francis Galton.
Such ideas, needless to say, have been purged from the received wisdom on grounds of being proto-Hitlerian, so all that really remains in the popular consciousness from Darwin is a plausible creation myth that dispenses with the need for God. This is the purpose for which Darwinism is now taught in public education, to the distress of fundamentalist Christians and the delight of cultural Marxists. We have lost, thanks to this, and the propagandistic play and movie Inherit the Wind, a correct understanding of the infamous Scopes trial, in which the Nietzschean and anti-egalitarian H.L. Mencken was the principal publicist on behalf of the defendant, against the Christian pacifist and egalitarian William Jennings Bryan. Today we perceive their struggle as one of enlightened liberalism against religious obscurantism. Wherever the shade of Mencken now reposes he is probably laughing.
A better figure to include in the quartet than Darwin would be Franz Boas, who not only fits in it as a Jew, but also as an exponent of egalitarianism and cultural relativism. It is not through the lens of Darwinist thought that we view other peoples, but rather through that of Boas.
* General rule about Freud: When he was original, he was wrong. When he was right, he wasn’t original.
* There was no “independent” Jewish development of ANYTHING because they did not exist as an independent and isolated people. Even if you step inside the ghetto of Venice, the buildings look no different than those outside the ghetto wall. In the Diaspora, there was no purely “Jewish” art or architecture or cuisine or anything outside of the purely religious – things might have been adapted to fit religious requirements (no butter in the meat sauce) but fundamentally, Arab Jews ate Arab food and produced Arab style art, Polish Jews ate Polish food and lived in Polish style houses and even synagogues, etc. If you try to figure out whether you are in the former Jewish quarter of any European city, you have to rely on the most subtle cues – there is very little to physically distinguish them.
The Christian diaspora was hostile to Jews pursuing secular education (unless they converted or no longer lived as Jews), so it’s not surprising there were not a lot of Jewish scientists until after Napoleon granted civil rights to the Jews. There were also few if any blacks in American professional sports prior to WWII , “in light of their later achievements” – was this due to the blacks themselves or the society that they lived in?
I think the idea of the “amateur” was really a British gentleman thing and didn’t exist in a lot of places. Anyway, inside the Jewish community, musing on science would get you no praise. If you were a man of means with intellectual pretensions, the expectation was that you would study the Talmud. The Talmud does have a certain amount of science and math but it is pretty much locked in at the Babylonian era.
* The most insightful critique of Freudian theories that I ever read was an essay by the renowned management consultant, Peter Drucker. Drucker was born into and grew up in the same Viennese, upper-class, Jewish community as Freud. His parents knew Freud and many of his patients. Drucker was acquainted with the families involved in Freud’s most famous published case studies. He points out that it is obvious even from Freud’s descriptions that all his patients were suffering from severe anxieties relating to financial uncertainty and extremely unstable social status. Dora was the young daughter of a family who expected her to keep the family afloat by marrying a much older man whom she despised. Wolf man was the son of an aristocratic Russian family facing severe financial and political problems. Little Hans’s family was on the fringes of upper class Viennese society. And so on. Drucker argued that it was insecurities and stresses like these and not sexual problems that caused the neuroses of most patients. Problems like these were endemic among the upper class Viennese Jews whom Freud treated and whose high status was very precarious in fin de siecle and post WW I Austria.
* I don’t see much of analogy between the situation of Jews before, say, the nineteenth century, and that of blacks before they made their way into professional sports. Blacks just weren’t allowed, so of course they weren’t represented in professional sports until afterwards — there’s nothing to explain there.
But what prevented pre-nineteenth century Jews from picking up a book on geometry or algebra or trigonometry or calculus and studying it, becoming fascinated with it, and producing important theories and theorems of their own?
There are any number of gentile scientists who lacked any real formal education in math or science and yet, seemingly because they couldn’t stop themselves from pursuing the subjects, in the end achieved great things. Some of these scientists/mathematicians managed to do this despite having to make a living at other things. If you read about the lives of, say, George Green, Michael Farady, Oliver Heaviside, Nathaniel Bowditch, or for that matter Ben Franklin, you get the strong sense that these were men who were determined to learn everything they could about a subject that fascinated them, despite their lack of formal education or independent means. I’m not sure I can think of a Jewish equivalent — though perhaps Spinoza, albeit not a scientist, comes closest.
And it’s also insufficient, I think, to say that Jews only appreciated Talmudic studies as an avocation. Many of the gentile “amateur” scientists, including those I just mentioned, seemed to be driven to do their science or math at the expense of everything that might naturally bring them honor and appreciation — certainly many of us know STEM people who appear to be so motivated.
Another thing that strikes me as quite peculiar is how little mathematics Jews seemed to have developed even to do the sort of work for which they were uniquely employed, namely as money lenders. As is now evident, there are all manner of issues in mathematics that arise in such calculations, such as probability and risk assessment, and a need for calculus to understand what’s going on at a higher level. So far as I know, none of this got developed. I find that very strange and puzzling, and wonder what, exactly, the obstacle was.
* Beck and Ellis should be a lot better known than they are, both for due credit’s sake and also because so many people could benefit from their ideas and techniques. CBT is more effective than Freudian psychoanalysis because it’s a pragmatic set of approaches to actually solving problems rather than just explaining them. It’s not as entertaining as what Freud cooked-up, but it’s a whole lot more useful to the silent majority of people who aren’t English professors or Hollywood script writers.
* Best guess off the top of the head – no motivation to stick out, leave the herd, revolutionize things. Conformity is highly valued. Smart Jews that questioned tradition usually ended up leaving the faith/ethnic association; Spinoza is a good example.
Making discoveries requires indifference to fitting in. Probably why China isn’t all that great at innovation nowadays.
* Major novelists like Roth and Updike are really, really smart. You can become a cult leader by being a second rate novelist like Rand or a fourth rate novelist like Hubbard, but being a first rate novelist is very hard.
* There does seem to be a trend in psychology for Jewish psychologists to focus more on verbally-based therapy (with varying levels of success). In contrast, gentile psychologists tend to be more interested in non-verbal therapy, such as creative visualisation and brain-body therapies, or understanding dysfunctional behaviour through animal studies and evolutionary psychology.
* Literally every single Jew I’ve ever known – and I am a recovering lawyer, so that’s one Hell of a lot of Jews! – has had a therapist. I’m not exaggerating. I’ve known maybe three or four gentiles with one.
Do Jews more readily do this stuff of just more readily admit it? Are they seeking attention by seeing a therapist, or by telling others they do so, or both? I do also observe a heck of a lot more neurosis among Jews, yet less actual mental problems. Thus my theory about it as an attention-seeking behaviour; a kind of Munchausen syndrome, as it were.
After all, they do like obsessing over how unique and special and tormented they are as a people, so it follows thet would do so as individuals as well….
* The “Plot Against America” is not a very good novel. But it shows how paranoid and irrational American Jews are about populist and nationalist movements. I don’t think that was Roth’s intention though.