Secret History
Writing to his close friend and collaborator Wilhelm Fliess in 1890, Sigmund Freud explained that he couldn't pay a visit because, in a struggling psychiatric practice that suckered rich society women in Vienna, "My most important client is just now going through a kind of nervous crisis and might get well in my absence."
No, Freud wasn't being ironic: He depended on grandes dames to stay in business. On another occasion, referring to a cartoon in which a yawning lion grumbles, "Twelve o'clock and no negroes," he wrote, "The worries begin again whether some negroes will turn up at the right time to still the lion's appetite." That appetite, as Frederick Crews makes clear in his exhaustive, reputation-pulverizing book Freud: The Making of an Illusion, was from an early age for fame and riches, which Freud relentlessly pursued by championing one faddish quack remedy after another, backing away when justified criticism made his position untenable, covering his tracks with misleading or even completely false claims about what he'd been up to, then bustling on to the next gold mine.
In 1884, for instance, in the giddy throes of a fondness for cocaine that Freud would indulge on and off for some 15 years, he had the marvelous idea of treating a brilliant young scientist, Ernst Fleischl von Marxow, for a mild morphine addiction (resulting from surgery) by putting the patient on cocaine. Instead, Fleischl became hugely addicted to both morphine and cocaine - sleepless nights, strung-out dozy days - and wasted away into a scarecrow while Freud, writing about the patient under a pseudonym, bragged in a paper about the tremendous success of his experiment. Meanwhile, a colleague of Freud was discovering an actual useful application of cocaine, as a topical anesthetic that opened the door to new kinds of surgery (such as on the eye). This was a truly revolutionary breakthrough and Freud had nothing to do with it. Later he would suggest that he had been on the brink of making the discovery but had been distracted by his fiancée, Martha.
The case for Freud's misogyny is ludicrously easy to make. After his cocaine frenzy, Freud headed to Paris to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, who oversaw an insane asylum full of women upon whom he freely experimented and operated under the assumption that they were suffering from "hysteria," an almost exclusively feminine phenomenon in which sex organs supposedly caused otherwise unexplained behavior and bodily disorders. Freud would carry the concept of hysteria to breathtaking extremes in his private practice: Leg pain? Morphine addiction? Asthma? Freud treated patients with these disorders under the working theory that they were suffering from hysteria, which among his mostly female clientele morphed into an assumption that the origin story of all neurosis was a childhood sexual trauma, which he called the "seduction theory" and which Crews relabels "molestation theory," since a small child who has suffered a sexual assault is not actually a seducer.
If the patient couldn't remember any childhood sexual trauma, Freud would "reconstruct" it by coaching her to devise one. Despite claiming in a typically grandiose but evidence-free 1896 lecture that his psychoanalysis had helped unveil and repair childhood sexual trauma in 18 patients - the speech was so devoid of clinical standards that a senior scientist, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, said, "It sounds like a scientific fairy tale" - Freud later revealed in a letter to Fliess that he hadn't cured even one person.
In one of the many horror stories Crews documents at length, Fliess, with Freud's eager encouragement, nearly killed a patient whose symptoms suggest she was a hemophiliac who had an ovarian cyst by operating on her nose and removing a chunk of bone, on the crackpot theory he called "nasal reflex neurosis" that the genital-based hysteria natural to women was traceable to cartilage in the nose. As the suffering woman, Emma Eckstein, nearly bled to death while Freud bungled her recovery, he blanched and nearly vomited, regaining his poise only with the aid of a glass of brandy. "So, this is the strong sex?" asked Eckstein. Freud continued to insist that "she bled out of longing" (emphasis his) and when a (female) surgeon noticed Eckstein had an abscess treatable by a single incision, she recalled that Freud "asked me with biting scorn whether I believed that hysterical pain could be cured by the knife." Later Freud observed that Eckstein for some reason reacted badly to being called unattractive after half her face had been caved in by the surgery.
Freud's Studies in Hysteria, in which he played a heroic mind-detective who dug up the patient's hidden actual troubles, simply adapted the fad for Sherlock Holmes stories (of which he was a fan) into a medical realm, adding a dollop of erotic titillation dressed up in clinical detachment. "The principal point is that I should guess the secret and tell it to the patient straight out," he wrote. Diagnosis first, then make the facts fit. When they didn't, Freud felt no compunction about using the techniques of fiction writing to play up his own prowess. As Crews shows, the idea of therapeutically talking through problems didn't originate with Freud, and though psychoanalytic theory has little to no value, what Freud brought to it was mainly borrowed from Fliess - ideas about sexual latency, bisexuality, repression, and the sublimation of sexual desire. A huge slice of Freud's work is simply plagiarism.
Today Freud barely exists in scientific literature, which has rejected his dodgy claims and outlandish boasts. In his more honest moments, he admitted his work did little to advance the cause of his supposed métier. "I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker," he wrote Fliess. "I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador - an adventurer, if you want it translated - with all the curiosity, daring and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort." If Sigmund Freud had a genius for anything, it was for chutzpah. That, and public relations.
Reader Comments
We should rediscover them and change the world into a better place
Hope I am clear on this...
it was hard to find.. for a time... I will post a link if I can.
[Link]
Mind-manipulation is seen as if 'others' do it to us - but firstly it is something we do to ourself - and use others to seek reinforcement for.
The whole mind-machine of technocracratic 'control' is the logical extension of mind-as-manipulator, controller and power over all - that everyone who judges presumes their own.
Power seems great while you're winning... but then powerlessness flips it to an addiction affliction... Doh!
Addiction to 'thinking' as if it is our first born son - because at mind level, it was. But it was thinking as a mask or filter. A kind of 'i magic' or image phishing and identity theft. Self-specialness is the wish that fathers the lie. Hooked, baited and taken for a ride.
If all that is deceptive could be gathered up and clearly labelled "Just don't Eat Me!" - would you feel you were being deprived of something 'more' than all that truth reveals - and seek someone else to 'offer it you' so as to be more or less 'taken in'.
Self-specialness can be turned to a special role in the undoing of an addiction in masking story. Not a Hero or a Martyr as such - but simply the true of being you. With that appreciation for those you meet.
Those who make Big Mistakes, also make a big signpost for where Not to go.
Really, I think everyone should watch every episode of the old original Star Trek series, the one with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.
If one is searching for 'truth', this show encapsulates the whole reality.
It successfully portrays the whole vision of what humankind, -er- hupersonkind, and life itself must be like, how we are to order things and how to live and adapt to rules and organized activities within an artificial and very stylized and progressive hierarchy.
Then, we spend the rest of eternity, just flying around (at warp speed) and making sure everyone else learns the correct procedures.
Labeling (and sturdy packaging), consistent labeling (and sturdy packaging), is most important of all.
How else will we know what is in the soup?
DUH.
ned,
OUT
Focus on a personal lack of integrity CAN induce a willingness to question or challenge the accepted 'mind' of beliefs about the world.
What exactly IS unconscious - and why do you block it from awareness?
But attack on the person is also a way to divert from the real issue into the inducement to stone the hated scapegoat.
The USE of insight into the psychic-emotional patterns (of defence) of others so as to define, predict and control them is using the means for one's own healing as a weapon against accepting it - or even recognising one's need.
Psychopathy in this sense is blind to one's true need while operating the intent to take advantage of the blindesses of others - AS IF - this one sees what they don't and is therefore in superior relation.
As Rothschild found, acting and looking like you are a power, invites others to give you power. Why? Because people want OTHERS to do for them what they are unwilling to do for themself.
Where any two or more are gathered in a truly SHARED purpose - the relationship is given to truth and therefore the voice for truth is in the relationship of listening and speaking as one.
The fear of God, or fear of love or fear of a true and direct Intimacy of being is the masking mind of 'defences' that protect self-illusion, wish, lie, fraud, belief - against what FROM such identity, seems to be attack, weakness, heresy, and loss of or threat to 'self' It's a protection racket by your OWN wish, outsourced or projected to where it is seen as a self gratifying experience to point it out in others, hate and stone them.
Whatever one believes true of oneself - automatically extends to others. If your seek to get or take from others, you live in a world of others who would get you back, and a God (death) that will GET what you thought to take for your own. If you want to GET revenge - you expect and believe that this in the treacherous heart of everyone except the insane or the disgusting liars who talk of 'love'.
What you give out, is what you receive - not perhaps in form, but in its core meaning.
There is more that pertains to the ability to blag, bluff and bluster into positions of trust, power and privilege. It is said that all's fair in love and war. But that is where love is the dictate of selfishness and where selfishness is always at war - beneath whatever kind of mask - because life, and other cant be trusted and therefore should never be trusted, but only used in appearance of trust. Society limits its conscious awareness of just how selfish, selfish does, by 'moral guilting' and manipulation. While such laws and rules are needed - they can also block the law of love. No one can live a love that they have not received. And in a loveless world, we learn strategies of survival that are our personality structure - that we then live from as IF the true of our being.
When guilt first arose in our mind, it arose as a split mind. Splitting off from what is thereby made unconscious, and yet masking a hidden hate that is nonetheless active.
The nature of any evil is to shift forms, so as to escape, confuse or pass off as protector or guide. In hating and attacking evil, it shifts to operate through its 'controlled opposition'. If you are tired of such entanglements in futility and wasting of life under false flagged identity - find your willingness to desist from feeding it with intention and energy of attention, and taking pleasure in it as a loving to hate.
By your own will are you manipulated. It takes one to know one. That is - there has to be a correspondence vibrationally to 'meet'. Giving your power away is a mind manipulation - for what is truly yours is not get-riddable of! So when your denials come home for acceptance, it is to the true of you that they need. When you KNOW that you are without the sin of choosing to hide from or misuse the truth - then throw the first stone. It isn't our guilt that damns us, but the insistence in the wish of the power to put it out from ourself.
For their is a Higher Court. Take what you judged true and bring it there in willingness for the healing that only truth brings.
The last judgement is not made by self-specialness - but is shared when immersed in the living waters of being - form which your being is gifted - not stolen.
Everyone in this world is an alloy of love and fear, where fear covers in denial, and conflict, and masks in the forms of love to mitigate and make bearable. But 'in this world' is a masking identity, for you are in the Life that gives life - knowing or unknowing.
The reversals that fear makes, can serve to illuminate the true - just as mainstream media or scientific studies or legal and financial documents can be decoded rather than taken for what they seem.
Everything is witnessing to where you are coming from or rather, the core definitions and beliefs you operate from as if true.
The true of life is Unconscious - or taking no thought for yourself. Life is an unselfconscious spontaneity that knows how to be you and also knows how to pretend to be who you are not - and make it real for your own experience - and defend against waking the dream like the snooze button on the alarm.
Now sex and war are just beneath the surface, because they are pushed down like a jack in the box, or medicated to an incapacity to feel anything. But they are external means to solve an inner conflict - that never can but fuel it and waste life. recognizing the inner conflict is the honesty in which to choose differently. This is not the fight/engage or flight/evade to strike another day. Of amydala capture. It is the releasing of the compulsions rising from a dammed up life!
In this world the ego speaks first - but the 'higher court' is a truly felt acceptance in which what serves the true is gratefully used and what has none is simply no longer lived from.
So for better and for worse (as you now choose) have 'Freudian' ideas given structure to our definition of self. It is not the 'wicked people' that perish, but that which has no foundation in truth can no longer find a home in you - and in truth never can be at home in you - but can and does cost awareness of your true home as the wage or result of inviting it in and using it.
PS If we do not nip the mind of division in the bud, then we go down in the reaction of shock - which plays out whatever patterning it plays out among us until conflict no longer hijacks awareness. Humanity is in SHOCK! and re-triggering its own compulsive identities.
Demonising compulsive identities in others is itself the attempt to moral righteousness. The boot upon the face of humanity is of the same dictate or compulsion. Where exactly did an evil will come from - in our direct experience?
Comment: See also: Freud was a fraud!