Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), at a major crossroad in his life in 1896, wrote a letter to a friend expressing his desire to become a philosopher: “As a young man I longed for nothing else than philosophical knowledge, and I am now on the way to satisfy that longing by passing from medicine to psychology.”
In one sense, his philosophy was simple and can be adequately encapsulated in the maxim “knowledge through Science.” But this is not really a philosophy. Rather, it is the reduction of philosophy to scientific materialism. In Freud’s case it was psychologism. In another sense, it was complex. He acknowledged his indebtedness to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche for their contribution to his own vitalism and recognition of the irrational element in man. Freud, however, was never able to harmonize these two disparate elements in his philosophy. He remained ambivalent about whether the knowledge we gain through a purely scientific examination of man can ever be used to curb his fundamental irrationality so that the needs of the individual can harmonize with those of society.
Freud was a scientist. But science alone was not enough to satisfy his personal ambitions. He wanted to be more than a scientist. He wanted to be a revolutionary. “Acheronta movebo” (I will move all hell.). So he added to his scientific findings a mythology that would ensure that his larger view of man would secure his historical immortality. But the philosophy he bequeathed to the world, composed as it is, of two radically incompatible and antagonistic elements, is, in the last analysis, incoherent. It promises freedom, on the one hand, but on the other, it virtually guarantees chaos. It purports to understand man, but, in fact, reduces him to neuro-anatomy.
Jacques Maritain states rather bluntly, that “The whole of Freudian philosophy rests upon the prejudice of a radical denial of spirituality and freedom.”
Freud’s gratuitous and unscientific denial of the spiritual dimension of man makes it impossible for him to explain such universal activities as art, morality, and religion. Freud, in effect, reduces the world of man and all his distinctively human operations to a scientific materialism. His explorations into the unconscious and subsequent development of the psychoanalytic method ensure his lasting stature as an eminent doctor of the mind. But he saw the unconscious as nothing more than a “seething cauldron,” an interior inferno thronged with repressed monsters. By making this simplistic identification, he divorced the unconscious from the life of reason and spirit, thereby reducing it to the level of primitive instinct or, as Maritain states, “into some kind of pure bestiality crouched in the depths of man’s being.”
Thus, Freud’s method of dealing with anything spiritual is reductive, that is, reducing it to the plane of the material where it is subject to empirical analysis alone. In this way, Freud finds himself in the impossible position of trying to explain the higher by appealing exclusively to the lower. Is it at all reasonable to try to explain Beethoven’s motivation for writing his Ninth Symphony solely on the basis of what science can examine empirically? The spiritual cannot be explained by the material, though it may be related to it in some way. For example, Freud claims that the notion of God is merely a father image projected onto the sky. He theorizes that the child originally looked upon his own father as omnipotent. As the child matures and discovers that his father is not divine, he nonetheless retains the fantasy image of an omnipotent father, that is, God. His belief in God persists, although it is shifted from a real being to one who is imaginary.
It is quite logical for Freud, having dismissed the spiritual order, to explain all art, morality, and religion solely in relation to the material order. Although he has made his task of explaining spiritual activities impossible, nonetheless he proceeds dauntlessly, receiving high marks for his creative imagination, insight, and courage.
Psychiatrist Karl Stern states that the most remarkable of all Freud’s reductive statements is this: “Religion is nothing but an obsessive-compulsive neurosis.” Now it is undeniable that some obsessive-compulsive people are also religious. This does not mean, logically, that all people who are religious suffer from this abnormality just as we would not conclude that all people who are sick must have a fever on the basis that all people who have a fever are sick. The field of discourse for sick people in general is much wider than it is for its subset of those who are fevered. So, too, the range of religious people is much broader than its subset of religious people who happen to be obsessive-compulsive. To equate the two is both prejudicial and reductive. It is also, ironically, unscientific.
Because Freud operated in the arbitrarily cramped quarters of the material, he lacked the vision to be able to see things in their wholeness and thus be able to make a realistic diagnosis. He was not in a position, for example, to say, “People whose religion is tied to their neurosis do not experience the true nature of religion and therefore do not receive its appropriate benefits.” Freud simply reduced religion to a neurosis and remained blind to what he refused to see. His reductive method prevented him from apprehending a healthy religion that is free of neurotic entanglement.
Freud also reduced free will to instinctive drives, thereby reducing real guilt to mere “guilt feelings.” His notion of the “death instinct” allowed him to keep intact his earlier instinct theory by attributing human evil to a deeper organic substratum than merely the ego in conflict with sexuality. Thus, he could explain violent human aggression, hate, and evil in relation to the body. In this way, as Ernest Becker remarks in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death, Freud was able to “keep his basic allegiance to physiology, chemistry, and biology and his hopes for a total and simple reductionist science of psychology.” The price of this reduction, however, is the loss of any sense of an integrated moral person. It also brings with it a sense of utter helplessness in preventing the emergence of a Culture of Death. The notion that evil chose man is far more despairing that that of man being capable of freely choosing evil, since he has some control in the latter instance, whereas he has no control in the former. In freeing man from moral responsibility, Freud left him defenseless against himself. Being radically unfree is a greater handicap than being capable of experiencing guilt.
In America today, Freud’s intellectual influence is greater than that of any other modern thinker. He presides in the college classroom, over the mass media, in the chatter at cocktail parties, and in the advice dispensed by sex counselors. His clinical terms – repression, anxiety, guilt feelings, displacement, libido, penis envy, castration complex – are known to a large segment of the population. He has achieved that rare and remarkable transition from intellectual to household word. His name is indelibly associated with sexuality, but also with originality, daring, and liberation. He is a secular Messiah, a legend, a trailblazer.
Yet, his philosophy does not hold together, his methodology is inconsistent, and his positive contribution to the world is negligible. On the other hand, his rejection of religion, distrust of fatherhood, suspicion of morality, and reduction of love to sex has unleashed a plague of problems that has produced widespread and adverse effects.
Karl Stern, in criticizing Freud, pointed out that unspeakable things have happened, as in Nazi Germany, when “the biological was allotted a position of primacy.”
“God is not mocked. For what a man sows, that he will also reap. For he who sows in the flesh, from the flesh also will reap corruption. But he who sows in the spirit, from the spirit will reap life everlasting.” (St. Paul to the Galatians, 6:8)
