The Unknown Freud

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Luke Ford

Frederick Crews writes in 1993:

* That psychoanalysis, as a mode of treatment, has been experiencing a long institutional decline is no longer in serious dispute. Nor is the reason: though some patients claim to have acquired profound self-insight and even alterations of personality, in the aggregate psychoanalysis has proved to be an indifferently successful and vastly inefficient method of removing neurotic symptoms. It is also the method that is least likely to be “over when it’s over.” The experience of undergoing an intensive analysis may have genuine value as a form of extended meditation, but it seems to produce a good many more converts than cures. Indeed, among the dwindling number of practicing analysts, many have now backed away from any medical claims for a treatment that was once touted as the only lasting remedy for the entire spectrum of disorders this side of psychosis.

…Without significant experimental or epidemiological support for any of its notions, psychoanalysis has simply been left behind by mainstream psychological research. No one has been able to mount a successful defense against the charge, most fully developed in Adolf Grünbaum’s meticulous Foundations of Psychoanalysis (1984), that “clinical validation” of Freudian hypotheses is an epistemic sieve; as a means of gaining knowledge, psychoanalysis is fatally contaminated by the inclusion, among its working assumptions and in its dialogue with patients, of the very ideas that supposedly get corroborated by clinical experience. And Grünbaum further showed that even if Freud’s means of gathering evidence had been sound, that evidence couldn’t have reliably yielded the usual constructions that he placed on it. We cannot be surprised, then, by Malcolm Macmillan’s recent exhaustive demonstration that Freud’s theories of personality and neurosis—derived as they were from misleading precedents, vacuous pseudophysical metaphors, and a long concatenation of mistaken inferences that couldn’t be subjected to empirical review—amount to castles in the air.

Nevertheless, Freudian concepts retain some currency in popular lore, the arts, and the academic humanities, three arenas in which flawed but once modish ideas, secure from the menace of rigorous testing, can be kept indefinitely in play. There psychoanalysis continues to be accepted largely on faith—namely, a faith in Freud’s self-description as a fearless explorer, a solver of deep mysteries, a rigorously objective thinker, and an ethically scrupulous reporter of both clinical data and therapeutic outcomes.

* Dostoevsky was an unlucky man in several ways, but he did have the good fortune to have died without presenting his troubles in person to Sigmund Freud and his epigones.

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The Gnosticism At The Heart Of Freudianism

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Luke Ford

Frederick Crews writes:

* a gnostic tendency lay at the very heart of analytic work as the mature Freud conceived it. In drawing on a privately determined symbology to assign thematic meanings to dreams, associations, errors, and symptoms (productions that can easily be taken to signify anything whatsoever), and then in leaping inferentially from those arbitrary interpretations to putative childhood “scenes” that had to be “recalled” or at least acknowledged if a cure was to occur, classical analysis didn’t just resemble divination; it was the very thing itself. And in this light, Freud’s lifelong paranormal sympathies—almost always treated as a minor biographical curiosity—deserve to be considered an integral part of the record.

As Ernest Jones’s otherwise flattering biography concedes in its startling chapter entitled “Occultism,” Freud displayed “an exquisite oscillation between skepticism and credulity” where occult topics were concerned (Jones, 3:375). The expressions of doubt, however, were partly diplomatic and partly aimed at holding in check an embarrassing affinity for “the uncanny” and “the omnipotence of thoughts.” Freud engaged in magical propitiatory acts and tested the power of soothsayers; he confided to Jones his belief in “clairvoyant visions of episodes at a distance” and “visitations from departed spirits” (Jones, 3:381); and he even arranged a séance of his own with his family members and three other analysts. He also practiced another hermetic art, numerology, attaching fated meaning to certain room, telephone, and ticket numbers and uncritically accepting such bizarre fancies as Wilhelm Fliess’s assertion that the day of a woman’s death ought to coincide with the onset of her daughter’s menstrual period. Nor, though he and Fliess fell out at the turn of our century, did he ever renounce his allegiance to such notions.

Perhaps most significantly, Freud was strongly attracted to mental telepathy, an unconfirmed paranormal phenomenon which, though it needn’t be linked to manifestly occult beliefs and practices, nevertheless entails the very power that Madame Blavatsky and others touted as their pipeline to Theosophical wisdom. Jones himself was barely able to dissuade Freud from publishing a credulous paper of 1921 entitled “Psycho-analysis and Telepathy” (SE, 18:177-193). But Freud, who plainly told his inner circle of his “conversion to telepathy” (Jones, 3:394), could not be altogether hushed.

* Jung drew several of his vitalistic and race-conscious notions from leading exponents of those movements, and he taunted the Jewish Freud by making pointed references to them in his letters. Though Anglo-American Jungians continue to deny it, Jung’s thought, in Noll’s words, “arose from the same Central European cauldron of neopagan, Nietzschean, mystical, hereditarian, völ-kisch utopianism out of which National Socialism arose” (p. 135). Thus it is surely no coincidence that Jung initially welcomed Hitler’s ascension and, at least for a while, cheerfully accepted the challenge of hewing to “Aryan science” in matters of psychology, declaring that Jewish notions were incapable of answering to the creative Germanic soul.

* an awareness of the gnostic strain in Freud and Jung does cast a suggestive light on the central issue that now confronts, and radically polarizes, the therapeutic community throughout the West: whether caregivers should address themselves to helping clients cope with their current dilemmas as they perceive them or, rather, send those clients on a regressive search for a hypothetical early past and initiate them into “knowledge” of repressed traumas and introjected personages. There is all the difference in the world between “taking a history”—investigating the relationships and vicissitudes that have predisposed the patient to act in self-defeating ways—and producing a previously unsuspected, artifactual history that is dictated by boilerplate diagnostic expectations. The cabalistic penchant lingers precisely insofar as therapists insist that true healing must entail a confrontation with some predetermined class of memories, powers, insights, buried selves, or former incarnations. And it is no coincidence that the dangers of drastic harm are all clustered at that end of the therapeutic spectrum.

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Darwin

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Luke Ford

Frederick Crews writes in 2001:

* Darwin’s contemporaries saw at once what a heavy blow he was striking against piety. His theory entailed the inference that we are here today not because God reciprocates our love, forgives our sins, and attends to our entreaties but because each of our oceanic and terrestrial foremothers was lucky enough to elude its predators long enough to reproduce.

* Richard Dawkins has asserted that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” What he meant was not that Darwinism requires us to disbelieve in God. Rather, if we are already inclined to apprehend the universe in strictly physical terms, the explanatory power of natural selection removes the last obstacle to our doing so. That obstacle was the seemingly irrefutable “argument from design” most famously embodied in William Paley’s Natural Theology of 1802. By showing in principle that order could arise without an artificer who is more complex than his artifacts, Darwin robbed Paley’s argument of its scientific inevitability.

* the Darwinian outlook is potentially a “universal acid” penetrating “all the way down” to the origin of life on Earth and “all the way up” to a satisfyingly materialistic reduction of mind and soul.

* Working evolutionists, once they notice that Behe’s and Dembski’s “findings” haven’t been underwritten by a single peer-reviewed paper, are disinclined to waste their time refuting them. Until recently, even those writers who do conscientiously alert the broad public to the fallacies of creationism have allowed intelligent design to go unchallenged. But that deficit has now been handsomely repaired by two critiques: Robert T. Pennock’s comprehensive and consistently rational Tower of Babel, the best book opposing creationism in all of its guises, and Kenneth R. Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, whose brilliant first half reveals in bracing detail that intelligent design is out of touch with recent research.

* The proper way to assess any theory is to weigh its explanatory advantages against those of every extant rival. Neo-Darwinian natural selection is endlessly fruitful, enjoying corroboration from an imposing array of disciplines, including paleontology, genetics, systematics, embryology, anatomy, biogeography, biochemistry, cell biology, molecular biology, physical anthropology, and ethology. By contrast, intelligent design lacks any naturalistic causal hypotheses and thus enjoys no consilience with any branch of science. Its one unvarying conclusion—“God must have made this thing”—would preempt further investigation and place biological science in the thrall of theology.

Even the theology, moreover, would be hobbled by contradictions. Intelligent design awkwardly embraces two clashing deities—one a glutton for praise and a dispenser of wrath, absolution, and grace, the other a curiously inept cobbler of species that need to be periodically revised and that keep getting snuffed out by the very conditions he provided for them. Why, we must wonder, would the shaper of the universe have frittered away thirteen billion years, turning out quadrillions of useless stars, before getting around to the one thing he really cared about, seeing to it that a minuscule minority of earthling vertebrates are washed clean of sin and guaranteed an eternal place in his company? And should the God of love and mercy be given credit for the anopheles mosquito, the schistosomiasis parasite, anthrax, smallpox, bubonic plague…? By purporting to detect the divine signature on every molecule while nevertheless conceding that natural selection does account for variations, the champions of intelligent design have made a conceptual mess that leaves the ancient dilemmas of theodicy harder than ever to resolve.

* In recent decades both Kristol and Himmelfarb have been ideological bellwethers for the monthly Commentary, which, interestingly enough, has itself entered combat in the Darwin wars. In 1996 the magazine caused a ripple of alarm in scientific circles by publishing David Berlinski’s essay “The Deniable Darwin,” a florid and flippant attack that rehearsed some of the time-worn creationist canards (natural selection is just a tautology, it contravenes the second law of thermodynamics, and so forth) while adding the latest arguments from intelligent design. And as if to show how unimpressed they were by the corrections that poured in from evolutionists, the editors brought Berlinski onstage for an encore in 1998, this time declaring that he hadn’t been taken in by party-line apologetics for the Big Bang, either.
In answering his dumbfounded critics, Berlinski—now a fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle, an organization founded to promote anti-Darwinian ideas—denied that he is a creationist. What he surely meant, however, was that he isn’t a young-Earth creationist.

* Commentary is not the only rightward- leaning magazine to have put out a welcome mat for intelligent design. For some time now, Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the conservative religious journal First Things, has been using Phillip Johnson as his authority on the failings of natural selection—this despite the fact that Johnson’s willful incomprehension of the topic has been repeatedly documented by reviewers. On the dust jacket of The Wedge of Truth, furthermore, Neuhaus calls Johnson’s case against Darwin “comprehensive and compellingly persuasive,” adding, remarkably, that its equal may not be found “in all the vast literature on Darwinism, evolution, creation and theism.”

Further: when, in 1995, the neoconservative New Criterion sought an appropriate reviewer for Daniel C. Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea—a book that rivals Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker as creationism’s bête noire—it was Johnson again who was chosen to administer the all-too-predictable put-down. The New Criterion’s poor opinion of evolutionism can be traced to its managing editor Roger Kimball’s esteem for the late philosopher David Stove, whose book Darwinian Fairytales (1995) is notable for its obtusely impressionistic way of evaluating scientific hypotheses. But since Kimball and The New Criterion regularly divide the world’s thinkers into those who have and haven’t undermined Western ethics, here once again the ultimate source of anti-Darwinian feeling may be moral gloom.

* Liberals and radicals who have been taught in college to believe that rival scientific paradigms are objectively incommensurable, that the real arbiter between theories is always sociopolitical power, and that Western science has been an oppressor of dispossessed women, minorities, and workers will be lukewarm at best toward Darwin. The latter, after all, shared the prejudices of his age and allowed some of them to inform his speculations about racial hierarchy and innate female character. Then, too, there is the sorry record of Social Darwinism to reckon with. Insofar as it has become habitual to weigh theories according to the attitudinal failings of their devisers and apostles, natural selection is shunned by some progressives, who are thus in no position to resist the creationist offensive. And while other leftists do broadly accede to evolutionism, much of their polemical energy is directed not against creationists but against Darwinian “evolutionary psychologists,” a.k.a. sociobiologists, who speculate about the adaptive origins of traits and institutions that persist today.

* Take, for example, The Faith of Biology and the Biology of Faith by Robert Pollack, a molecular biologist at Columbia University and the director of its recently founded Center for the Study of Science and Religion. The title of Pollack’s book appears to promise a vision encompassing the heavens above and the lab below. By the time he gets to evolution on page 2, however, the project has already collapsed. There he tells us that a Darwinian understanding of the natural world “is simply too terrifying and depressing to me to be borne without the emotional buffer of my own religion.” By cleaving to the Torah he can lend “an irrational certainty of meaning and purpose to a set of data that otherwise show no sign of supporting any meaning to our lives on earth beyond that of being numbers in a cosmic lottery with no paymaster.”

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The Trauma Trap

Posted on April 15, 2021 by Luke Ford

Frederick Crews writes for the New York Review of Books in 2004:

In the 1980s, as McNally relates, day care workers risked prosecution and imprisonment on the coerced testimony of bewildered and intimidated three-year-olds who were prodded to “remember” nonexistent molestations. Meanwhile, poorly trained social workers, reasoning that signs of sexual curiosity in children must be “behavioral memories” of rape, were charging parents with incest and consigning their stunned offspring to foster homes. And most remarkably, whole communities were frantically attempting to expose envisioned covens of Satan worshipers who were said, largely on the basis of hypnotically unlocked “memories,” to be raising babies for sexual torture, ritual murder, and cannibal feasts around the patio grill.

In the same period many psychotherapists, employing hypnosis, dream analysis, “guided imagery,” “age regression,” and other suggestion-amplifying devices, persuaded their mostly female patients to “remember” having been molested by their fathers or stepfathers through much of their childhood, in some cases with the active participation of their mothers. The “perpetrators” thus fingered were devastated, embittered, and often publicly shamed, and only a minority of their accusers eventually recanted. Many, in fact, fell in with their therapists’ belief that young victims of sexual trauma, instead of consciously recalling what was done to them, are likely to develop multiple personalities. Disintegrating further, those unfortunates were then sent off to costly “dissociative identity” wards, where their fantasies of containing five, a dozen, or even hundreds of inner selves were humored until their insurance coverage expired and they were abandoned in a crazed condition. At the height of the scare, influential traumatologists were opining that “between twenty and fifty percent of psychiatric patients suffer from dissociative disorders”—disorders whose reported incidence plummeted toward zero as soon as some of the quacks who had promoted them began to be sued for malpractice.

What we experienced, McNally shows, was a perfect storm, with forces for mischief converging from every side. The fraudulent 1973 bestseller Sybil had already helped to relaunch the long-dormant fad of multiple personality and to link it to childhood sexual abuse. Beginning in the early 1980s, the maverick Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller taught many American readers what Sigmund Freud had once believed, that memories of early abuse are typically repressed and must be therapeutically unlocked if the resultant neuroses are to be cured. Jeffrey Masson’s melodramatic book The Assault on Truth (1984), misrepresenting Freud’s “seduction” patients as self-aware incest victims rather than as the doubters that they remained, fanned the feminist anger that Miller had aroused, encouraging women to believe that molestation by fathers must be pervasive. Self-help manuals such as The Courage to Heal (1988) then equipped scientifically ignorant psychotherapists with open-ended “symptom checklists,” ensuring that their patients would be diagnosed as suffering from buried memories of violation. And all the while, Geraldo Rivera and less cynical alarmists were whipping up fear of murderous devil cults.

* Like Holmes and Pope, McNally finds that no unanswerable evidence has been adduced to prove that anyone, anywhere, has ever repressed or dissociated the memory of any occurrence.

* …the 1990s recovered memory therapy made significant inroads into the practice of North American psychoanalysis. Even today, feminist clinicians bearing diplomas from analytic institutes are probing for missing memories of abuse and vigorously defending that practice in psychoanalytic books and journals. But the American Psychoanalytic Association, representing over 3,000 members, has turned a blind eye to this trend—and one can understand why. The psychoanalytic movement is already embattled, and too much about the historical ties between Freudianism and recovered memory would prove embarrassing if attention were called to it. The elected custodians of Freud’s legacy have no desire to confront his early phase as a self-deceived abuse detecter; or to admit the precedent he set, during that phase and thereafter, in treating dreams, tics, obsessional acts, and agitation in the consulting room as “behavioral memories” of inferrable traumas; or to revisit the grave doubts that have been raised about repression; or to be reminded of the way psychoanalysts, until quite recently, insulted real victims of molestation by telling them that their “screen memories” covered a repressed desire to have sex with their fathers. No longer given to excommunicating dissidents, the tottering Freudian patriarchy has made its peace with “recovered memory psychoanalysis” by pretending that it doesn’t exist.

* This reluctance to challenge the judgment of its therapist members is deeply rooted in the APA’s philosophy. Ever since 1971, when the association gave its blessing to Ph.D. and Psy.D. programs that omitted any scientific training, the APA has guided its course by reference to studies indicating that the intuitive competence of clinicians, not their adherence to one psychological doctrine or another, is what chiefly determines their effectiveness.

* PTSD, like Victorian hysteria and like recovered memory itself, can now be understood as an artifact of its era—a sociopolitical invention of the post-Vietnam years, meant to replace “shell shock” and “combat fatigue” with an enduring affliction that would tacitly indict war itself as a psychological pathogen. However crippling the symptoms associated with it may be for many individuals, the PTSD diagnosis itself has proved to be a modern contagion.

Once certified by the American Psychiatric Association as natural and beyond the sufferer’s control, post-traumatic stress disorder began attracting claimants, both civilian and military, who schooled themselves in its listed symptoms and forged a new identity around remaining uncured. By now, as McNally relates, PTSD compensation is demanded for such complaints as “being fired from a job, one-mile-per-hour fender benders, age discrimination, living within a few miles of an explosion (although unaware that it had happened), and being kissed in public” (p. 281). According to Paula Jones among others, PTSD can even be the outcome of a consensual love affair. In view of such examples, the attempt to subsume forgotten abuse under post-traumatic stress makes more cultural than scientific sense; the same atmosphere of hypersensitivity and victimhood brought both diagnoses to life.

* Attention to the chimerical task of divining a patient’s early traumas is attention subtracted from sensible help in the here and now. The reason why psychotherapists ought to familiarize themselves with actual knowledge about the workings of memory, and why their professional societies should stop waffling and promulgating misinformation about it, is not that good science guarantees good therapy; it is simply that pseudoscience inevitably leads to harm.

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Tom Wolfe – Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast

Posted on April 14, 2021 by Luke Ford

00:00 What do novels do better than movies/TV?
02:00 Why Authors Are Important: Tom Wolfe On His Favorite Books, Writing, Art, Style (1996),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8IVA_iVofo
05:00 Tom Wolfe on realist fiction, https://harpers.org/archive/1989/11/stalking-the-billion-footed-beast/
27:00 From 2006: Writer Tom Wolfe on journalism and voyeurism, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe11E2u4jkk
37:00 Gay Talese and the art of “New Journalism”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ1WRbRjcpE
42:20 Dennis Dale joins
45:00 Tom Wolfe – race realist, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/09/09/is-tom-wolfe-a-race-realist-part-1-of-3/
1:03:00 Crossroads: A Novel (A Key to All Mythologies), https://www.amazon.com/Crossroads-Novel-Key-All-Mythologies/dp/0374181179
1:15:00 Tom Wolfe: The 60 Minutes interview, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tW9RNE0gyQ
1:22:00 RICHARD SPENCER & ED DUTTON | Aliens: Where Are They? Would They Kill Us?, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oydAqCpC8o
2:02:00 Is Atheism Even Possible? (RS, Ed, Devon), https://www.spreaker.com/user/altright/atheism-and-the-west
2:07:00 The Bachelor comes out as gay, gets closer to God
2:08:00 Laura Loomer Is a Victim Of ‘Digital Extermination’ on Social Media
2:19:00 The Word According to Tom Wolfe, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdFs0eTeHOA
2:25:00 NICK FUENTES: TUCKER AND THE RISE OF RACIAL CONSCIOUSNESS, https://www.bitchute.com/video/OfS1f1UR8o3Q/
2:27:00 Tucker Carlson On The White Replacement Theory And The Importance Of It, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHIRjNZRRJU
2:29:30 Tucker fires back at criticism over immigration, voting comments, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0e4QjoJ4wc
2:35:00 Fauci SLAMS Tucker Carlson, “Typical Crazy Conspiracy Theory”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ceig5ePU6y8
2:38:00 Why the Last Geniuses of Mid 20th century were in California, and Why the Remnant is Moving to Texas, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI5fvfhYUPk
2:42:40 Alex Jones v the ADL, https://www.bitchute.com/video/wQGRyXNiHsMZ/
2:47:00 Jerusalem, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_5BLTdukAY&t=32s

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