Sigmund Freud

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.