{"id":138489,"date":"2021-04-15T11:17:12","date_gmt":"2021-04-15T19:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138489"},"modified":"2021-04-15T11:19:37","modified_gmt":"2021-04-15T19:19:37","slug":"the-gnosticism-at-the-heart-of-freudianism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=138489","title":{"rendered":"The Gnosticism At The Heart Of Freudianism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Frederick Crews writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

* 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 \u201cscenes\u201d that had to be \u201crecalled\u201d or at least acknowledged if a cure was to occur, classical analysis didn\u2019t just resemble divination; it was the very thing itself. And in this light, Freud\u2019s lifelong paranormal sympathies\u2014almost always treated as a minor biographical curiosity\u2014deserve to be considered an integral part of the record.<\/p>\n

As Ernest Jones\u2019s otherwise flattering biography concedes in its startling chapter entitled \u201cOccultism,\u201d Freud displayed \u201can exquisite oscillation between skepticism and credulity\u201d 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 \u201cthe uncanny\u201d and \u201cthe omnipotence of thoughts.\u201d Freud engaged in magical propitiatory acts and tested the power of soothsayers; he confided to Jones his belief in \u201cclairvoyant visions of episodes at a distance\u201d and \u201cvisitations from departed spirits\u201d (Jones, 3:381); and he even arranged a s\u00e9ance 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\u2019s assertion that the day of a woman\u2019s death ought to coincide with the onset of her daughter\u2019s menstrual period. Nor, though he and Fliess fell out at the turn of our century, did he ever renounce his allegiance to such notions.<\/p>\n

Perhaps most significantly, Freud was strongly attracted to mental telepathy, an unconfirmed paranormal phenomenon which, though it needn\u2019t 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 \u201cPsycho-analysis and Telepathy\u201d (SE, 18:177-193). But Freud, who plainly told his inner circle of his \u201cconversion to telepathy\u201d (Jones, 3:394), could not be altogether hushed.<\/p>\n

* 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\u2019s thought, in Noll\u2019s words, \u201carose from the same Central European cauldron of neopagan, Nietzschean, mystical, hereditarian, v\u00f6l-kisch utopianism out of which National Socialism arose\u201d (p. 135). Thus it is surely no coincidence that Jung initially welcomed Hitler\u2019s ascension and, at least for a while, cheerfully accepted the challenge of hewing to \u201cAryan science\u201d in matters of psychology, declaring that Jewish notions were incapable of answering to the creative Germanic soul.<\/p>\n

* 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 \u201cknowledge\u201d of repressed traumas and introjected personages. There is all the difference in the world between \u201ctaking a history\u201d\u2014investigating the relationships and vicissitudes that have predisposed the patient to act in self-defeating ways\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42804],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-freud"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=138489"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138493,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138489\/revisions\/138493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=138489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=138489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=138489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}