Spengler makes a modest proposal -- Put a stake through Freud's heart

By Aussiegirl

Spengler writes a powerful column about the pernicious effects of Freud on the 20th and 21st Centuries that create self-hatred and self-destructive behavior in women, such as anorexia, bulimea and self-mutilation. But the pernicious effects of Freud and his heirs go much farther than even this phenomenon. Indeed much of the societal woes can be laid at his feet. There is a lot here to cogitate on, and I have many additional thoughts on this subject, and by extension, the entire question of the status and role of women in society, the battle of the sexes, and the cultural fault-line that sexuality delineates in modern western culture and in the culture of Islam as well. Stay tuned for that in a day or two. It's not for nothing that the story of the woe of mankind begins with Eve. But I have a completely different understanding of this story than the traditional one, and one that is essential to understand if we are to comprehend what is going wrong with our societies. For I think that in many ways, the ills of our societies are mirrored in how it sees and treats the role of women in its midst. Woman has always, since the dawn of man in the Garden of Eden, presented mankind with the ultimate conundrum and conflict. And in the process, without understanding the stakes of the situation, both man and woman and society at large suffer.

Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy.
Put a stake through Freud's heart
By Spengler

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.

No one did more than Freud to reduce women to sexual objects, a condition against which women rebel by seeking to destroy the objectified body. Epidemic self-destructiveness has reached proportions that are difficult to grasp. Eating disorders reportedly threaten the lives of 10 million American women. [1] "Anorexia or bulimia in florid or sub-clinical form now afflicts 40% of women at some time in their college career," wrote the journal Psychology Today. [2]

[...]What impels so many young people in Anglo-Saxon countries toward slow-motion suicide? It is easy to blame the undernourished wraiths who haunt the runways of the fashion industry for disseminating a twisted ideal of beauty that lures young women into anorexia. But that cannot be a complete explanation, because anorexics starve themselves into extreme ugliness, and in many cases mutilate themselves as well. These women are not enhancing their bodies, but rejecting them altogether.

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. In US politics, the most embittered battles are fought over gay marriage and abortion, not war and taxes. For adolescents in the industrial world, however, the battle was lost a generation ago. Seeking a sexual outlet in the companionship of one's peers now is more common than the search for romantic attachments among American adolescents. New York Times journalist Benoit Denizet-Lewis reported in a 2004 feature:
Over the course of several months spent hanging out and communicating online with nearly 100 high-school students (mostly white, middle- and upper-middle-class suburban and exurban teenagers from the northeast and Midwest), I heard the same thing: hooking up is more common than dating ...
[...]If Freud were allowed a rejoinder, doubtless he would remind us of the "death drive" that he purported to discover in the human psyche in the aftermath of World War I. Perhaps he would blame the "death drive" for the morbid refusal to reproduce that condemns most of the industrial world to depopulation and eventual extinction, not to mention the epidemic of suicide attacks in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim world. The trouble with the "death drive" is that some people seem to have one and others don't. With a sexual "life force" and a "death drive" (which Freud attributed to a desire to return to mother's womb), you can explain everything and nothing.

Human beings are not beasts content with daily fodder and rutting in season. To be sentient is to be sentient of one's mortality. The status of wife and mother in a family within a community offers women an honored position and a link to the eternal. Sexual objectification leaves women with a foretaste of death, and it should be no surprise that Freud's program drives women into deadly behavior.