The Freudian Conception of Human Nature
At the core of Freud's ideology lies a specific and somewhat pessimistic view of human nature. He believed that hidden deep inside the minds of all human beings are primitive sexual and aggressive forces.
Being Jewish and an Atheist, he explained these forces as the remnants of mans "animal" past, and believed these forces to be dangerous. Freud asserted that if these violent and libidinal drives were not controlled, they would inevitably lead individuals and societies into chaos and destruction.
This perspective presented a picture of the human being not as a rational actor made in the image of God, but as a creature driven by unconscious, irrational drives that were constantly threatening to erupt.
This biological and materialistic view reduces the human experience to base desires and impulses. Implicit in this argument is the notion that the ideal of individual freedom, which lay at the heart of democratic theory, is impossible.
Human beings can never be allowed to truly express themselves without restraint because their inherent nature is too dangerous; they must always be controlled and consequently will always remain discontent.
This view stands in stark contrast to the Christian understanding of man, which acknowledges Theology/Catechumens/The Fall but also the potential for redemption and the existence of the soul. Freud, however, operated strictly within a naturalistic framework, viewing man as a sophisticated animal.
Freud's worldview was significantly shaped by his early life and education. His father was Jewish and read the Bible regularly at home in Hebrew. However, Freud did not harbour a great deal of respect for his father, viewed him as a pushover and a loser, particularly because he saw his father bullied and failing to stand up for himself.
This lack of respect for his earthly father translated into a lack of respect for religious authority and the concept of God the Father.
Freud possessed a deep sensitivity to the enemies of Judaism, and despite his atheism, he maintained an interest in Roman history and the Catholic Church, to which his nanny had taken him. Curiously, he harboured a strong dislike for music, a trait considered unusual for a man of culture in Vienna.
His intellectual lineage can be traced through specific philosophical streams.
He studied under the philosopher Franz Brentano, who is relevant to phenomenology and the idea of intentionality. Brentano was situated in a tradition of psychologists and materialists.
Freud is connected to the lineage of German idealism turning into materialism; the sequence runs from Hegel to Feuerbach, and then to Freud. Feuerbach, an atheist and student of Hegel, influenced the intellectual climate that Freud inhabited, making him amenable to the project of explaining human behaviour solely through psychological and material mechanisms.
The Attack on Religion
Freud positioned himself as an advocate of an atheistic philosophy, determined to destroy every possible reason for accepting a spiritual worldview.
He categorised all people into two distinct groups: believers and unbelievers.
He championed a scientific worldview, premised on the assumption that knowledge comes only from research. It is a philosophical assumption that cannot itself be proven by scientific research, yet it underpins the entirety of the Freudian scheme.
Freud viewed religion as a mass delusion. He termed it a universal obsessional neurosis, likening religious practices such as prayers and chanting to the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
In his analysis, believing in God was tantamount to mental illness. He proposed that the basis of human worship of God was connected to the Oedipus complex.
According to this theory, individuals derive their ideas of who God is by observing their fathers. When they mature and discover that their father is merely human, or when they realise they have projected false qualities onto him, they engage in wish-fulfillment. They conjure up a figure like the one who protected them as a child to cope with their long-drawn-out helplessness and need for aid. Thus, Freud argued, God does not create man in His image; rather, man creates God in the image of his parents.
Freud offered two primary arguments against the existence of God. The first is the psychological argument of wish-fulfillment: the idea that God is a projection of human needs and deep-seated wishes.
The second argument concerns human suffering. He questioned why, if God exists, there is evil and suffering in the world. These arguments, while rhetorically powerful, rely on the fallacy that the emotional origin of a belief dictates its truth or falsity.
Nevertheless, Freud used them to portray religion as a coping mechanism for the weak, a crutch for those unable to face the meaningless nature of a universe comprised solely of matter in motion.
Civilization and Society
In the 1920s, while suffering from cancer of the jaw, Freud retreated to the Alps and penned _Civilization and Its Discontents_. This work served as a powerful attack on the idea that civilization was an expression of human progress.
Instead, Freud argued that civilization had been constructed primarily to control the dangerous animal forces inside human beings.
He viewed the outbreak of World War I in 1914 as terrible evidence of the truth of his findings.
He wrote that the saddest aspect of the war was that it was exactly the way one should have expected people to behave based on the knowledge of psychoanalysis. Governments had unleashed the primitive forces in human beings, and no one seemed to know how to stop them.
Following the conflict, Freud became increasingly pessimistic.
He felt that man was an impossible creature, a ferocious animal that enjoyed torturing and killing, and he did not believe that the species could be improved. This pessimism extended to his view of social order.
He believed that education and establishing a dictatorship of Reason were the only solutions to solving the cruel and immoral behaviour that characterises human history. In his mind, the intellect and laws must establish a dictatorship to curb the unruly Id.
However, this reliance on reason and education ignores the reality that highly educated societies, such as Germany in Freud's own time, were capable of descending into barbarism.
Morality and Ethics
For Freud, ethics were remote. He stated that he did not trouble his head very much about good and evil. He adhered to a form of moral relativism, where moral codes are seen as changing from culture to culture.
He did not believe in an objective moral law or a God-given conscience. Instead, he proposed that what is termed conscience is merely an internalised part of the parent, which he called the super-ego.
Guilt, in the Freudian paradigm, is simply a repressed desire. The solution to guilt is not confession and repentance, as in the Christian tradition, but acceptance. Psychoanalysis urges the patient to be open about their repressed drives so they need not feel shame.
Freud measured his own moral code by the conduct of others, believing himself to be better than most people and therefore good enough. This attitude reflects a state of spiritual blindness where one refuses to accept one's own inferiority.
Freud believed that civilisation has little to fear from educated people who live ethical lives because reason tells them it is in their best interest to do so. This utilitarian view reduces morality to a calculation of self-interest and social contract, devoid of any transcendental obligation.
Influence on Public Relations and Culture
Freud's influence extended far beyond the clinic, shaping the very mechanisms of modern society and commerce. His nephew, Edward Bernays, played a crucial role in disseminating his uncle's ideas in America.
Working as a press agent, Bernays was fascinated by Freud's books, particularly _General Introduction to Psychoanalysis_. Bernays adopted Freud's idea that human beings were driven by irrational forces and used this to invent the profession of public relations.
Bernays believed that by stimulating people's inner desires and then sating them with consumer products, one could manage the irrational force of the masses. He termed this technique the engineering of consent.
This application of Freudian theory transformed citizens into consumers, manipulating their unconscious drives to serve corporate and political ends. When Freud faced financial disaster in Vienna, Bernays arranged for his works to be published in America, securing the funds necessary for Freud's survival and ensuring the propagation of his theories in the New World.
Internal Schisms and the Sexual Revolution
The psychoanalytic movement was not without its internal conflicts. In the 1920s, a devoted disciple named Wilhelm Reich challenged Freud over the fundamental basis of psychoanalysis.
While Freud argued that the job of society was to repress the primitive animal instincts to maintain order, Reich believed the complete opposite. Reich asserted that the unconscious forces inside the human mind were inherently good and that it was their repression by society that distorted them and made people dangerous. Reich argued that the underlying natural impulse was the libido or sexual energy, and if this were released, human beings would flourish.
This led to a direct conflict with Freud and his daughter Anna Freud, who maintained that sexual forces were dangerous if uncontrolled.
Anna Freud maneuvered to have Reich expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association. However, the Reichian critique eventually resurfaced in the 1960s through figures such as Herbert Marcuse, fuelling the sexual revolution and the counter-culture movement. These movements accepted the Freudian premise of the centrality of sexual drives but inverted the moral conclusion, advocating for their unleashing rather than their control.
The Legacy of Materialism
Freud, along with Darwin and Karl Marx, represents one of the three primary anti-civilization forces that dismantled the foundations of Western Christendom.
All three figures operated on the underlying presupposition of naturalism, seeking to explain the world and human existence solely through material processes.
Darwin provided the biological framework of evolution, reducing man to an animal; Marx provided the sociopolitical framework, reducing history to class struggle; and Freud provided the psychological framework, reducing the soul to a complex of warring instincts.
Historical analysis suggests that the 20th century, often termed the century of Freud, witnessed the triumph of this therapeutic ethos.
Following the horrors of the death camps in World War II, politicians and planners became convinced that Freud was correct: hidden deep within all human beings were dangerous and irrational desires.
This Post WW2 Consensus led to the rise of psychoanalysis in America, guided by Anna Freud, who believed it was possible to teach individuals to control these inner forces by conforming to accepted social patterns.
However, this worldview is fundamentally flawed.
It offers the appearance of an explanation for phenomena like evil and suffering but fails to provide a coherent solution. By redefining evil as a neurosis or a psychological drive, it strips it of its moral weight.
The Freudian worldview, predicated on atheism and naturalism, ultimately renders the universe and human life meaningless. If man is merely dust in the wind, a biological machine driven by chemical impulses, then concepts such as truth, beauty, and virtue are rendered void.
The Replacement of the Spiritual
Freud's psychoanalysis emerged as a secular replacement for religious practice. The sacrament of confession was dispensed with, and in its place, the secular world turned to therapists and psychologists.
The therapist became the new father figure, the confessor for a society that had lost its connection to the divine. Yet, unlike the Christian confessor who offers absolution and a path to repentance, the Freudian analyst often affirms the patient's uncontrolled desires, encouraging them to indulge in the very impulses that cause their distress.
This shift contributed to the rise of the self as the new deity. With the death of God proclaimed by philosophers like Nietzsche and the dismantling of objective truth by rationalists like Hume and Kant, the individual subject became the centre of the universe.
Freud's focus on the inner self, the exploration of personal desires, and the pursuit of psychological well-being fostered a culture of self-worship. This is evident in the modern obsession with identity, the rejection of objective biological reality in favour of subjective feeling, and the pervasive influence of the human potential movement.
Sigmund Freud lived his life in rebellion against the concept of God, viewing himself as a scientist dispelling the myths of a primitive past.
He escaped the Nazis in Vienna in 1938 with the help of Franklin D Roosevelt and the British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, settling in London where he died in September 1939. His legacy is a world that views itself through the distorted lens of his theories.
The vocabulary of psychoanalysis has become the language of the modern self, and the assumption that man is a beast driven by irrational lusts has become a governing dogma of the age.
Yet, this perspective remains a philosophical assumption, not a proven scientific fact.
It is a worldview that, by denying the spiritual dimension of humanity, reduces man to a creature of impulse, controlled by the engineering of consent and trapped in a universe devoid of ultimate meaning.