OH, AND YOU'LL NEED TWO MORE STAKES (via Pepys)

Put a stake through Freud's heart (Spengler, 5/09/06, Asia Times)

The psychiatric profession observed the 150th anniversary of Sigmund Freud's birth on May 6. My modest proposal for the event is to exhume his body and put a stake through his heart. Freud's Viennese contemporary Karl Kraus quipped that psychoanalysis was "a disease posing as a cure". Kraus was closer to the truth than he could have imagined. [...]

Freud claimed to have discovered the source of all neurosis in the repression of the sexual impulse, or libido. In fairness, Freud did not think repression was a bad thing, for without it society would disintegrate. The object of psychoanalysis was not to spread universal joy, but to proceed "from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness". He did not count on the adolescent narcissism of the 1960s, when the complacent and affluent youth of the industrial world demanded something better than ordinary unhappiness. Freud provided the ideological foundation for the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s, and popularized versions of his theory dominated popular culture.

All the major religions of the world attempt to sanctify the family; Freud sought to expose it as a hypocritical viper's nest of neurosis. Religion, he taught, totemized power relations; God was the projected form of the castrating father. The mother provides sexual pleasure to the infant she nurses, whose initial polymorphous perverse sexuality focuses upon the mother; the authority of the father then represses the son's sexual fixation on the mother through the threat of castration, while little sister laments the lack of a penis. Such a chamber of horrors cannot be entrusted with the upbringing of children, the left interpreted Freud. Sexuality must be severed from reproduction, through abortion, equal status for homosexuality, and so forth.

Few psychiatrists today defend Freud's sexual derivation of neurosis, but the damage was done. Sexual liberation remains the core of the social agenda of the left.

With all due regard to Spengler, "sexual liberation" is just a means to the Left's end of absolute equality. Such equality obviously requires that we deny there are any differences between the genders but, less obviously, requires that all social structures that intercede between the individual and the State be destroyed--only in complete dependence can be parcelled complete equality--and on the annihilation of morality, so that no behavior can be judged inferior to any other.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 11, 2006 4:46 PM