WHAT KILLED LOVE? -- PART TWO -- WAS IT FREUD?

WHAT KILLED LOVE? PART TWO

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 23, 2009


WAS IT FREUD?

Sigmund Freud knew better. He was not only a doctor of medicine but also a student of neurology. He had studied the great religions, the Greek philosophers and the early cultures of man. He was singularly ambitious and desperate to make a difference. His greatness was a manifestation of his egoism. Krishnamurti claimed Freud was swept away by his own conception of self and the problems with which he wrestled. “The Western world,” the mystic added, “was shamelessly inclined to adopt the great physicians neuroses as its own.” It is an engaging story how Freud succeeded.

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He took many false steps, some working with a dentist, where they experimented with cocaine. Some gave them credit for discovering Novocain. In his persistence, he proved quite the fictioneer, that is, having a natural novelist’s panache at case descriptions. His agile prose reveals a poet’s sense of nuance and a novelist’s grasp of gravitas. Yet, as Janet Malcolm (“The Purloined Clinic,” 1992) has noted, Freud’s talking cures are as porous as a sieve, albeit still very much in vogue today.

Psychiatry has vacillated between the absurd and the ridiculous as esteemed psychiatrists and authors R. D. Laing (“Wisdom, Madness & Folly,” 1985) and Thomas Szasz (“The Manufacture of Madness,” 1970) have pointed out. Now, in the early twenty-first century, psychiatry is relegated to pill pushing and brain anatomy, while Western society remains preoccupied with Freud’s erogenous zones.

Szasz is brutal. He claims psychiatry is not an advancement over the superstitions and practices of witch-hunts. Nor is it a retrogression from the humanism of the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment period, but an actual continuation of the Inquisition. All that has changed, he argues, is the vocabulary and social style.

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Freud began his psychiatric practice in Vienna treating the very rich, mainly women, suffering from boredom and unrequited love after being shelved by their prosperous but possessive husbands and lovers. He burrowed into these psyches to expose their early sexual awakenings for answers. It was a prescription for provocation. Novelist John Updike once said, “We want to read about life in full tide, in love, or at war, the wretched childhoods, the fraught adulteries, the big deaths, the scandals, the crises of sexuality.” Freud understood this, laying more claim to his novelistic bent.

Materialism failed to placate restive minds for loveless lives. Starved of affection and erogenous fulfillment, the affluent, who had everything and nothing at all, found solace on Freud’s couch. “Citizen Kane” (1941) gave an American twist to this hysteria with the symbolic “rosebud” of the film, a snow sled that stood for sexual angst.

Freud distilled the psychosexual hysteria from his clients’ panic and then reported it to his readers with the breathless thrill of schadenfreude. His focus on Eros was bold, but consistent with his conviction that repressed sexual love was the underlying neurosis of Victorian bourgeois society. There, Catholicism had locked love out with its dogma, while Protestant Puritanism had placed a chastity belt around sexual mores. Given this programming, he wasn’t short of clientele.

His initial patrons in Vienna were Jewish as were his professional medical associates. This changed when Protestant Carl Jung joined the group. Freudianism would prove far more successful in the United States than Europe. Americans conveniently misread his thesis as they were looking for an excuse to let it all hang out. Western society on both sides of the Atlantic dared now to cease to be Christian but instead attempted to out-Christian each other, while following a theology of more, which led to pervasive decadence.

The Jazz Age and Roaring Twenties of the last century considered Freud “Dr. Feel Good,” giving them permission to put their anxieties behind in libidinous liberation. “The War to End all Wars” (i.e., WWI) had been successfully concluded with the world everyone’s oyster.

“War,” exclaimed Thomas Mann as the European powder keg exploded in 1914 with World War I, “is purification, liberation, and an enormous hope.” War, in other words, is beautiful. For a hundred years, aggression had lurked beneath the surface of bourgeois culture splitting the social order into insiders and outsiders with the infrastructure in shambles. Polite society had lost its way while power was changing hands from the aristocracy to corporate barons, and women were coming out from under the shackles of domesticity and one dimensionalism.

Freud, they mistakenly believed, had taken the wraps off morality. Modern man was entering an undefined period. Peter Gay captures this in a most readable study: “The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud: Vols. I – IV” (1984 – 1995). In this study, Gay traces “The Education of the Senses” (Vol. I) through “The Tender Passion” (Vol. II) on to “The Cultivation of Hatred” (Vol. III) to “The Naked Heart” (Vol. IV). It was the Freudian Age with sensual man being put through this Austrian’s strainer.

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With a bow to Sophocles, Freud identified the “Oedipus Complex,” as a son’s desire to kill his father and bed his mother, and the “Electra Complex,” as a daughter’s desire to kill her mother and bed her father. Sexual fantasies, Freud believed, were repressed in early childhood only to lead to hysterical symptoms in adulthood.

In “Freud: A Life for Our Time” (2005), Peter Gay shows how the creator of psychoanalysis delved into his own subconscious to lead to a new age of thinking. The wonder is how the twentieth century so willingly and enthusiastically took his findings to be its own. Whatever you think of Freudianism, you must admit he had an uncanny way of reducing life’s grammar to easily understood principles:

(1) The Morality Principle: The “Superego” identifies how we should behave. This is the domain of the parent or the authority figure. Authority can be either nurturing or critical but it is always judgmental. It dictates the moral tone and code of how we are expected to think, behave and judge others.

(2) The Reality Principle: The “Ego” identifies how we actually behave. The adult is the mature individual who sees, accepts and deals with reality, or “what is,” defining and solving our problems, not denying them or pointing fingers.

(3) The Pleasure Principle: The “Id” identifies how we want to behave. It is the restless child in the man. It is the person suspended in permanent adolescence and arrested development no matter what age. It is the spoiled brat, the person who is unwilling or unable to grow up. The impulsive “Id” blames others for its failure to make satisfactory progress. The “Id” personifies a current cultural concern (see Diana West’s “The Death of the Grown-Up,” 2007). With the “Id” there is little capacity for delayed gratification. The cry is, “I must have it now, see it now, be it now!” It is the “nowness” of everything that is central to the “Id” character.

Freud could see a repressive (parental) culture spawning a juvenile society (see “Civilization and Its Discontents,” 1961) with the soul of the child under the armor of the warrior. The evidence today is alarming. Patriarchal institutions -- governments, religions, educational institutions and corporations – have become pusillanimously top heavy and lethargic being continuously frustrated by apathetic constituencies, urban gangs and rogue nations.

No one is in control. Everyone is posturing and lecturing, while rhetoric has become surrogate for leadership, which is skin deep. To be fair, so it has been off and on since the beginning of time, especially during transitional periods. We are all marching forward wearing blindfolds with a cockiness that is scary.

The Office of the President of the United States resembles that of a potentate but often acts like a puppet on a string in the discharge of its duties.

There are 545 members of Congress (445 in the House of Representatives and 100 Senators) duly elected by 307 million Americans. Precious few act as the voice of the silent many.

Governance is a function of some 55,000 lobbyists in Washington, DC who dictate trade policy. The fate of the economy is in the hands of former Wall Street insiders who are now running the Department of Treasury. This has become something of a laugher as lobbyists and the appointed let the elected hold public hearings while they pull the strings off stage.

Taxpayers are where the buck stops. In praise of folly, taxpayers received modest checks from the stimulus package, but now they may have to pay back nearly twice as much as they received in the form of income taxes. In Florida, the unemployment compensation tax for small businesses is set to go up by 1200 percent in January or from $8 to $100.31 per employee. Misguided fiscal policy has made these draconian measures necessary.

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American corporations, fronted by an army of lobbyists, keep putting the brakes on healthcare reform legislation while claiming to be passionately for it. Few things are what they seem. There are some 60,000 American military personnel fighting in Afghanistan, but more than 60,000 private military and civilian contractors operating there at the US government and taxpayer’s behest.

This shadow militia of hired guns represents the child in armor playing cowboy at the government’s expense, sometimes with acute embarrassment as we saw in Iraq. Blackwater Security, a private military company, paid Iraqi government officials a million dollar bribe to cover up the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in September 2007.

Freud wasn’t the first to see through the complicit gamesmanship played between the lines of the sacred and profane. He was but one of the more eloquent voices. The State Department, incidentally, was found to be complicit in the Blackwater Security cover up. Freud saw hypocrisy at the root of modern society and the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity. He writes in “The Future of an Illusion” (1961):

“If religion brings with it obsessional restrictions, exactly as an individual obsessional neurosis does, it comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find in an isolated form nowhere else but in amentia, in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion.” Then he goes on to say, “It tallies well with this that devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.”

This was years before jihadists and al-Qaeda crossed our consciousness, but the germ of Holy War was not far below his radar. My sense is that he would see delusional man in charge today across the global spectrum.

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Not so long ago the child on a rampage (Pleasure Principle) was personified during the HIPPIE revolt of the 1960s and 1970s. Young people took Freud at his Eros word and made love not war, burned their draft cards and escaped to Canada, or formed communes and polygamist relationships. They attacked the system that gave them the right to express their angst while embracing self-indulgent self-destructive lifestyles with impunity.

This hysteria had much in common with Freud’s first clients in Vienna. The unfulfilled Viennese turned to self-absorption. Peter Gay called this “the naked heart.” Young people in the 1960s did the same. Such academic luminaries as Harvard professor Timothy Leary advised them to “tune out and turn off” from the material culture of their parents. Leary gave them permission to trip out, as their parents had been too busy making money to love, protect and nurture them.

So, they became their own parents and an authority on to themselves. They rebelled against the system that killed love and escaped into psychedelic dreams. Parents, teachers and other authority figures lost control, gave up, and retreated off stage. Home, school, and work were reduced to combat zones.

Not surprising, they created a society that mirrored the one they held in contempt. They thought that they were free, but were they? The HIPPIE movement was as dictatorial and repressive as the society they had abandoned. Hippies claimed they didn’t trust anyone over thirty, looked down on anyone who was not of their kind, that dressed, talked, believed, or behaved differently than they did. They came to worship their genitals as their new god as primitives had centuries before.

Hippies now are AARP old, seemingly still unable to shake free of their societal angst. They created, and now are custodians of, a one-dimensional society where sameness rules, still struggling with identity. This struggle is a legacy passed on to their children, and their children’s children. The psychedelic haze of yesteryear has transmogrified to texting, twittering, Facebook and surfing the Internet. Everything is connected in disconnection; only acid trips are now virtual reality escapades.

If sameness were not enough, people have become billboards of self-advertising, no matter the social status, with identity personified in tattoos, body piercing, hair pieces, and wide exposure of naked flesh regardless of how unflattering it is to the naked eye.

Freudianism has become Orwellian. Not only is war interchangeable with peace, hate with love, conformity with individuality, the ridiculous with the sublime, but the profane with the sacred. After all, Freud elevated description to the level of solution, as solutions are more fun than testy problems. Everything is upside down while those in charge don’t seem to mind the discomfort of standing on their heads:

(1) A general declared in the Vietnam War that he had to destroy a village to save it.

(2) The Secretary of the Treasury and Federal Reserve Chairman in 2008 claimed greedy irresponsible banks and investment houses were “too big to fail,” and so taxpayers had no choice but to bail them out. No one had a vote on this.

(3) Credit card companies, part of the grand scheme of these reckless rogues on Wall Street, tossed ethics aside once bailout money brought them back to profitability by imposing usury fees on the very taxpayers that rescued them. Justification? They needed to make a profit.

This brings me to my next consideration.

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WAS IT SOCIETY?

There is evidence we are experiencing a dystopian nightmare. The times defy logic. It is as if we cannot help ourselves.

Who would have thought Wall Street, months after being resuscitated with billions of taxpayer dollars, would return to its old ways awarding itself bonuses in the billions?

Who would have thought after putting Watergate and Nixon’s “enemy list” safely away in the archives of history that the Obama Administration would launch an attack in the same paranoid Nixonian fashion on the conservative Fox News Network reminiscent of those earlier days?

Who would have thought Afghanistan would become chillingly reminiscent of Viet Nam?

Who would have thought a dysfunctional healthcare and educational system, costing more than any other on the planet, but failing on both fronts, would be redesigned and repackaged costing more than a trillion dollars over ten years, meaning it will actually cost three or four times that much, as cash as solution has always found Congress doing little more than breaking wind?

Who would have thought that the Lyndon Baines Johnson presidency, which collapsed on its “guns and butter” policy, would rise from the dead with the Barak Hussein Obama “guns and butter” presidency?

Something is terribly wrong with a society that has little capacity to learn, or courage to change other than rhetorically, choosing instead to repeat its missteps or misdeeds ad infinitum. When a society has leadership afraid to lead, hesitant to create enemies or lacks the courage to oppose friends, then it is a society on life support as it is killing love which is the energy of resilience.

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We are not happy campers and have misplaced our soul, the site of our moral compass and viable center. We have settled on distractions.

Everything in the mind emanates from the soul. It is not something that can be measured by any kind of mechanistic or electronic probe, for it is a nonmaterial something that guides us nonetheless. The soul is something we share with the ancients who lived thousands of years ago, and who expressed it in paintings on the walls of caves as they hid from the wild beast, who were far larger, faster and stronger than they were, but lacked their consciousness.

Consciousness was not enough then. Consciousness is not enough now.

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WAS IT RELIGION?

Primitive man invented religion to connect his frightened center or soul with the reassuring spirit world or God beyond his comprehension. It was necessary as he was conscious of being alone in a hostile mysterious planet.

Man invented time to measure his presence in a timeless universe for he gradually became aware of his impermanence. Yet, he was reassured by the mysteries of darkness and reappearing light, of the clap of thunder and bolts of lightning in the sky that came when the heavens opened up and showered him with life’s essential substance, rain.

Man witnessed the earth as it changed colors, became naked and fallow, then like magic bloomed again, and he worshiped the heavens for this.

Man’s religion took thousands of years before it became anthropomorphic, before he saw man in the image and likeness of his God. Primitive religions, fragments of which are buried deep in our collective human psyches, reappear in some form in all religions, as they are based on mystical wonders and intangible fears that make us human beings, human.

Man is different than the animal and plant kingdom that was here first. This makes man forever an interloper. He must not forget that.

Animism is still prominent in African religions. It is a belief system that finds a soul in everything, animate and inanimate. All religions believe in a soul. Whether the soul is real or not, the fact that people believe in it makes the soul real. The concept of soul is reconfirmed in art, music, and architecture, in cultures that have emanated in the past 12,000 years across the planet. That apparently is not enough.

Man must know. He must understand. It is the nature of man and his restless mind. He is not content to live in harmony with nature. He must conquer it, solve its mysteries so that he may “have dominion over the earth and subdue it.” It prompted Albert Schweitzer to observe, “Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.”

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The new religion is neural theology. It entered the fray more than a decade ago attempting to find the “God spot” in the brain by doing brain scans of nuns. It was without success. In this age of science, the sublime can become ridiculous with the intensity of the search. Balance is seldom a factor in human consciousness in an obsessive quest for understanding. Are we not still searching for the Holy Grail?

It was Francis Bacon who said in his “Essay of Vicissitude of Things”:

“Solomon saith, there is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon given his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion. We peel away the darkness to reveal the light only to encounter more darkness.”

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If you look at the great religions of man, God and love are inextricably wrapped into the politics and life of the time. Unconditional love of Jesus, alas, did not survive his death.

The early Christians were stumbling in the dark until Paul came along in the first century Christian Era (CE.). At the “Incident at Antioch,” he confronted Peter about the role of gentiles in the Church, a blowup that revealed Peter’s incomprehension of Paul’s ambition. From that point forward, Christianity became Paul’s faith. His Acts and Epistles gave structure to the faith, but also a retreat from the unconditional love and message of Jesus, as Paul advocated a conditional love of sin and atonement.

Apostle Paul is pivotal to the Church. Early Christian scholars track the apocryphal second century writings of Peter and James, Thomas and Judas, some who believed Paul a tool of Satan. In “What Paul Meant” (2006), Garry Wills discredits such claims or the legendary belief that Paul was anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and critical of the teachings of Jesus. The evidence suggests Wills argument is weak.

Everything changed with Paul’s conversion in Chapter 9 of the Acts of the Apostles when he fell off his horse on the road to Damascus hearing the Lord say, “I am Jesus, whom you persecute, arise and go into the city, and persecute me no longer.”

Imagine Saul now Paul, an epileptic, tent maker, and fractured figure of assorted complexities, physically blinded by the event for three days, suddenly sees the Christian message as his appointed task. Passionate by temperament, intellectually gifted with an indomitable spirit, his life reversed direction.

Apostle Paul abandoned the Jewish roots of his fathers and created a proselytizing faith among the gentiles, clearly expressed in the “Letters to the Romans.” The skeletal structure of this new religion was sparse in its reference to the teachings of Jesus but dense in what Christians should believe and how they should live. His Christology of atonement, that Christians are redeemed from sin by Jesus’ death and resurrection, centered around baptism as the free gift of membership in the Mystical Body of Christ.

Scholars dispute all of this with various interpretations because of the sketchy accounts and histories extant of Christian leadership in the first century.

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Fast forward to St. Augustine. His foundational work on the gospels in the fourth century brought attention to grace as a gift, on morality as the life of the Spirit, on predestination as the rationale for eternal life, and on original sin as confirmed by Paul's "Letters to the Romans."

Augustine was a late convert to Christianity. Born in North Africa in the fourth century (354 CE), his mother was a devout Catholic, his father a pagan. He received a Catholic education but was not baptized until a man.

During his youth he had a series of love affairs, but was a serious student of philosophy. His youthful dalliance would trouble him the rest of his life. It would also influence his repressive theology and philosophy

At the age of 32 (386), he read an account of the life of St. Anthony of the Desert and heard a childlike voice tell him, “take up and read.” He took this to mean Christian theology. In 391 at the age of 37, he was ordained a priest. Five years later in 396 he became Bishop of Hippo. The rest is history.

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The theology of Original Sin and the necessity of Baptism to remove it is largely that of this saint. It was Augustine that visualized Hell as a terrible place. Hell had only been a vague notion before. As a man of the cloth, he painted sexual love with Satan’s brush. Before his time, Satan was also a vague notion. Now, Satan took on an anthropomorphic character, a dastardly creature that evolved, over time, into a red devil with horns and a tail, the personification of evil. Augustine didn’t create this caricature but he did help seed it.

This would have unintended consequences. James Cleugh in “Love Locked Out” (1963), shows how this increased, rather than reduced, promiscuity fueling a new industry, pornography. A mental chastity belt confined love making to marriage and procreation. This Augustinian influenced dogma commenced to see sex and love in dualistic Manichean terms of immorality and sin. My wonder is if St. Augustine would be surprised to learn that some sociological studies indicate a disproportionate number of prostitutes have a Catholic background.

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Dante Alighieri would perfect the imagery of Hell (“Inferno”) in his “Divine Comedy” (1320). Dante, who was an engineer as well as a poet and artist, created Hell on a grand architectural scale marrying the grotesque with the comical. For instance, fortune-tellers in Dante’s Inferno have to walk with their heads on backwards, unable to see what is ahead, as that was what they had tried to do in life. Catholic popes are depicted as the greatest sinners of all, residing in the ninth or lowest circle of Hell for their pride and corruption.

Still, Hell down through the ages has frightened little children with images of sinners burning for eternity in fire and brimstone. Priests and nuns used this in my day to get students to behave, and it worked.

Fear, not love, has been the prescription for order. Consequently, there appears little evidence that the Jesus message has survived. Jesus never spoke of the “seven deadly sins” (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride) much less mortal sin. These descriptions didn’t come into vogue until the fourteenth century.

Christianity is an evolving religion, and has changed progressively from its conception more than 2,000 years ago. It still professes to be about love but appears obsessed with sin. Blame it on St. Augustine. He was fixated with sin (see his “Confessions”). Catholicism in particular and Christianity have an Augustinian aspect. With television evangelists, love is silent; sin is loud. Hell and the seven deadly sins are largely part of their corporate theology.

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Religion is dominated by politics, by the need for power, not love, for strength, not goodness, for souls, not spiritual fulfillment. The Catholic Church was founded on politics. Constantine in the fourth century made it the religion of the Roman Empire. The Catholic Church for centuries had its own army, and was a powerful feudal landlord, as a matter of fact, it still is.

The Holy Crusades were a religiously sanctioned military campaign waged by Christian Europe to restore Christian control of the Holy Land. These wars were fought over a period of nearly 200 years (1095 – 1291), depleting the treasury of the Church, France and the Holy Roman Empire. They fueled mistrust and hostilities across the empire, and were not holy and certainly not Christian. They had far reaching political, economic, and social consequences extending into contemporary times.

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It could be argued that without the Roman Catholic Church there would be no Western Civilization. Modern science was born in the Church. Catholic priests developed the idea of free-market economics five centuries before Adam Smith. The Church invented the university. Western law grew out of Church canon law, which was introduced by St. Augustine and St. Aquinas. Indeed, the human aspect in all its sublime to ridiculous sojourns can be traced back to that foundation. With such formalism, love hardly had a chance.

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Love was not on display in the twelfth century when the Church resorted to an ecclesiastical proscription of torture and execution for heresy. The interrogating body formed for this work was known as “the Inquisition.” Dark as the Inquisition, it still survives. Twentieth century Pope Pius X, later canonized a saint, renamed the Inquisition the “Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office.” Then in 1965, it was renamed the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” which it remains to this day. Punishment in the modern era is more likely to be ostracism from Church membership in the Mystical Body of Christ.

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Whether you believe in God or the Christ of Christianity, there is historical evidence that Jesus did live and died on the cross, and that his death was an expression of love. Christianity since has claimed to be the religion of love although it has often stumbled and displayed quite the opposite. Distortion of message and fanaticism is seemingly common to all religions. Lest we forget Christian missionaries supported by sixteenth century Spanish Conquistadors annihilated Latin American cultures and decimated their pagan religions and imposed Christianity. How’s that for love?

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