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Freud and the Scientific Method [1980]

[EDITOR'S NOTE: This monograph is organized into two parts of five sections each. You can jump directly to any of these by clicking on a title in the table of contents below. You can also jump directly to the text of any endnote by clicking on the bracketted number referring to the endnote. Return to the main text by clicking on the number preceeding the note itself. ]

PART I: The Origin of the Neuroses Introduction The Libido and its Frustrations The Oedipus Complex Childhood and Psychopathology The Unconscious and Repression PART II: The Nature of Social Life Introduction Social Life and the Death Instinct The Influence of Religion Why War Freud's Personal Psychology REFERENCES

PART I: The Origin of the Neuroses

Introduction. I have never believed that the world needs a St. George to conquer the dragon of Freudian error. I believe that ordinary rational men who are not captured by professional status images can see the artificiality and lack of genuine love for humanity that characterizes his theories. Once this insight has become established in men's minds, what use can it be to follow Freud into all the byways and sidetracks with which he sought to cover up his own sense of being on shaky ground? How many times does an individual have to prove that one and one is two?

Freud obviously had some kind of high impact influence on the psychological thinking of his time. I wish to identify the nature of that influence without getting lost in the kind of polemics which becomes invective, a fate which has overcome many of his critics. It is necessary for the critic to be firmly oriented toward the search for truth about human nature in his own life if his analysis of Freudian error is to be a contribution to the building of a science of human nature.

This monograph is not primarily adversarial in structure. Truth will stand on its own feet, just as error will die of its own weight. Although I repeatedly point out that Freud made significant and undermining errors, I am doing this to emphasize that every thinker in the human field need not be lost in the same way. I am primarily interested in creating a bridge for the communication of my own insights. Polemic writing always makes for easier comprehension, and no one has ever accused me in the past of presenting psychological material in a fashion that makes it good vacation reading.

Freud was not the scientist he thought he was. He was a towering literary figure, a communicator of the highest talents, who did his share to raise the consciousness of the civilized world in psychological matters. Now it is up to others to make something substantial out of the opportunity thus afforded by his pioneering zeal. Freud forged a one stage revolt. It did not reach truth, but it broke down the conspiracy of silence surrounding psychological mechanisms. There is no area of scientific inquiry where truth is as unacceptable as in the human field. Exploration of truth in this area threatens to touch people's lives in a very personal way and is generally treated as non-communication by society. Freud accepted the task of forcing the world to pay attention to psychological data. He took the position that there are psychological reasons for psychological events, and made it clear that sexual phenomena could not be ruled out of the world's attention. He was the leader of a liberation movement, declaring that human psychological events are a fit subject of scientific inquiry.

Freud's scientific position was undermined by his need to utilize controversy for competitive ends. He needed to be recognized and rewarded in conventional ways. His radicalism ended at the point where his ability to lead a respectable professional movement would have been compromised. Freud accepted the social system in which he lived. He saw that it bred mental illness, but he protected it from the threat of a revolutionary thrust by declaring its defects to have biological roots which made psychopathology inevitable. Freud's conceptual depth was marred by the limitations he accepted in the scope of his personal experiences. He lived an ivory tower life and found himself in the grip of compulsive self-serving rigidities which were incompatible with the scientific method.

Freud's unorthodoxy was only a surface phenomenon. The civilized world has many secrets from itself. When new human truth emerges it is generally scorned. The greater its revolutionary potential, the less social support it will get, and its influence must be allowed to develop as slowly as necessary so that people will not be overwhelmed by it. The truth seeking process generates its own rewards and must not become dependent on the need of the individual for recognition. Human truth and right have only a localized influence in the moment of their emergence. Freud's ambition would not let him rest in such an isolated position. He chose to deal with subjects which only seemed to be radical because they violated the canons of good taste current in his community. A distinction is to be made between what is shocking and what is revolutionary. Shocking ideas are first ignored or denounced until it becomes apparent to conventional society that its institutions can survive the challenge without significant alterations. Because of his emphasis on sexuality and the evil nature of man, Freud thought he was delivering a serious challenge to social stability. His image of his radical status is belied by the relatively short time it took for his ideas to spread around the world. Actually his approach to human nature was welcome, because it gave people an apparently scientific explanation for the fact that their socially exemplary lives were clouded by a sense of emptiness and frustration. If sadness and misery are seen to be inevitable, the individual is spared from a sense of personal responsibility for his own fate.

Freud exposed society to a phase of psychological embarrassment and discomfort which it soon learned to overcome. Such challenges to conventionality are only rhetorical in structure, as when children insist on introducing four letter words into family conversations. To straight laced parents it seems like their world is crumbling around them, but children know such threats are only shadows which destroy nothing. Once the adaptation to the new and strange has taken place, peace returns to the same old social structure. The world came to accept Freud's unorthodoxy in a very short time, historically speaking, and during his lifetime he became a famous and honored member of the aristocracy of thinkers of his day. The opposition that continued was based on the recognition of the defects of his scientific thinking. He continued to cling to the belief that such opposition was a resistance to the boldness of his exposure of forbidden topics.

There are those who say that Freud avoided controversy, offering as evidence his disdain for answering critics and his avoidance, whenever possible, of face to face arguments with others. He remained intensely aware, however, of the conventional opinions of mankind on every subject that touched his interests, and he formed his rhetoric on a framework which was always controversial. In his written work he repeatedly constructs the image of a critic whom he then answers. Freud's writings have the structure of a dialogue with an unseen adversary. He never saw that this kind of structuring of ideas impedes truth seeking. Truth cannot be found by identifying error, but this style of procedure does greatly facilitate communication. Through argument with socially supported error the thinker is guaranteed a substantial access to the avenues of communication which are already in existence.

The Freudian vocabulary has entered common parlance in many aspects of the human scene, including art, literature, philosophy, politics, and psychotherapy. Freud's apparent influence on the social life of man is only a mirage. Because of his stature as a courageous liberator, he has brought reflected prestige to his followers, and has given them a rhetoric with which to cover their ignorance of the whole personality. Men cannot turn to Freudian insights to make a better world because Freud did not deal with the constructive forces in human nature. He has fed society's hunger for the kind of mythology which functions to protect men from the threat inherent in facing the unknown. The myths that men use to avoid a vacuum in human understanding change as new movements bring new vocabularies into being. If the influence on common parlance were the test, astrology would be seen as a more powerful influence than psychoanalysis. As far as psychiatry is concerned, it is always ready to cannibalize any intellectual system which contributes to its prestige with the gullible. This public acceptance of Freud does not go so far as to know what he really said. Myths are part of man's esthetic life and have nothing to do with the kind of scientific insight the world requires to overcome disabling neurotic symptoms and to guide social development toward a constructive world order.

The libido and its frustrations. The cornerstone of the Freudian system is the assumption that blocked sexuality underlies neurotic symptoms. The term libido refers to warmth and love as well as sex, but Freud saw sex as the fundamental instinct from which all other manifestations of affection are derived. They take their form from the repression of their original sexual nature. He wrote:

He often returns to the theme of powerful repressing forces struggling to keep Pandora's box securely sealed:

There are two crucial and undermining errors in Freud's theory of libido. He did not understand the importance of describing an instinct in its most basic and general form. To compound the problem, he failed to recognize that libido has a partner of equal biological influence, namely the instincts which underlie the drive toward mastery or power.

The attraction between members of the same species depends on a cohesive cement which is observable throughout the animal world. Sexuality is a surplus which develops out of this basic cohesive instinct when circumstances favor its expression. Sexuality is an application of the cohesive instinct, not its root cause. It is important to make a clear separation between sexual events and the operation of warmth and love in the human scene. Love is recognized when warmth is felt without arbitrary limits, and it has two main forms. There is the kind of love which is felt as an esthetic experience for the pure pleasure of its intensity, and the kind which commits the individual to an ongoing relationship with the loved object, characterized by a devotion to the inner growth of both for the purpose of increasing their ability to meet each other's needs without pre-established limits. This is creative love which uses its harmonious tension bearing capacities to build knowledge and understanding as a tool of giving. It is love which goes to work in the human scene. It calls on the individual for the best he has to offer and becomes a powerful force in establishing the independence of the individual. He is then able to be the judge of what is worthy in himself, choosing the direction of his self-development without prior commitment to old meanings and values. The workmanship of love sends him into new territory, and this lays the groundwork for the psychological growth of the adult individual. Simple warmth can become an intense form of liking which sometimes is called love, as when people say they love a kind of food or a trip to their favorite vacation spot. It idealizes readily, and just as easily loses idealization if disappointed, as when an adored athlete is deserted by his fans when his performance is not up to expectations.

Freud's concept of the sexual origin of libido spread its obscuring influence over the entire subject of the personality. It effaced his ability to see that there was another elemental instinct paired with cohesion, namely the drive toward experience. This instinct feeds curiosity, enterprise, and the spirit of adventure. It strives to bring happenings and events into being. Animals are organized by their biological inheritance to interact with each other and their environment for this purpose. Puppies and kittens not only snuggle together, they also explore and play. The experiential instinct leads to pride and a sense of power. Simple pride is an esthetic experience guided by the pure enjoyment of its invigorating quality. It does not commit itself to responsibility in the human scene. It exploits its environment only when there is no resistance to its expression. On the other hand, creative power uses skill and manipulative experimentation to increase the value of the object or situation being possessed. As with creative love, the lasting commitments of creative power lay the groundwork for psychological growth. Freud was unable to recognize that a surplus existed in the experiential instinct, analogous to sexuality, which is here called celebration. When he saw celebrative phenomena he invariably classified them as narcissistic or sadistic, losing awareness of the whole area of constructive power development.

The task of civilized individuals is to retain access to their instinctual drives in their basic or general form so that constructive and healthy choices of channels of expression can be made. When instincts take pathways of decreasing generality, they commit the personality to certain needs without recourse to change. Prematurely frozen instinct channels undermine the independence of the individual. Both freedom and security require flexibility in the way instincts will be expressed. There is no way to build self-knowledge and self-control without the ability to find new gratifications when old ones are given up.

The cohesive instinct leads to a tendency to submission, and the experiential instinct opens the channels of dominance. Submission feeds the warmth of the personality, and dominance supplies pride. Warmth and pride have a high level of generality which permits multiple choices. This is very important in the dealing with sex and celebration. They are surpluses which develop out of warmth and pride. If there is little choice about identifying sexual and celebrative situations, these strong drives can destroy the ability of the individual to enrich his warmth and pride capacities. Without choice, all deepening warmth appears sexual, and all expanding pride is on the edge of overflowing into celebration.

An example of the need for generality can be seen in the instinctual based need for nourishing food. If an individual is required by circumstances to give up a particular kind of food, he chooses to sustain himself with others that are available. If the mistaken conclusion is drawn that he has an instinctual need to ingest one particular kind, such as beef, and beef is no longer available, an entire theory of psychopathology can be built on the thesis that his frustrated need for beef is undermining his warmth capacity and therefore his adjustment to life. This kind of formulation has considerable appeal to those who are blind to the real causes of disabling psychological symptoms. The clinical condition known as anorexia nervosa, in which individuals may literally starve to death, is an example of false specificity in the appetite for food. Such individuals have severely damaged warmth for themselves, and look on their response to food as a reassurance that they can feel. They seek the ideal food, one so appetizing that it will magically cancel out their emotional emptiness and the helplessness that goes with it. All other foods become disgusting, and as this process expands, there is nothing left that they can eat.

On the experiential or mastery side of instinctual capacities, the same need for generality can be seen. When man is assumed to have an aggressive or combative instinct, it has been a favorite formulation that such drives need to be sublimated into harmless competitive forms such as the struggle for superiority in sports. When the basic instinct is seen as a need to expand the world of experience, there is no need for the concept of sublimation. When men live in a world favorable to the development of their pride capacities, their energies will not take reckless directions. Violence is a distorted and pathological expression of a basic instinct, not the instinct itself. When violence serves survival it has an adaptive place, but this is a phenomenon regulated by adaptive reality and not a general tendency of the personality. Kleptomania supplies an example of false specificity in the need to experience the possession of material things. These individuals lack independent access to pride, and respond to the attractiveness of objects as other people see them. They do not want or need the things they steal. It is the desire to possess something that other people value that gives them an evanescent and reckless gratification of their desire for power. They cannot find any other channel for the bringing of an event or happening into being. Their possessiveness has no relationship to the real nature of the thing possessed. A constructive mastery drive, on the other hand, increases the value of all that it owns. The inability to choose alternative patterns of experience underlies addiction in general.

The Oedipus complex. Freud equated all intensity of feeling with sexuality, and this error distorted his view of the development of the child. He believed that the nursing infant is having a sexual experience, as is the child who defecates and urinates. The growing child is therefore required to build up a prohibitionistic system against the abuse of these pleasures. It is certainly true that it is in the nature of feeling intensity to be vulnerable to sexualization, but this distortion only occurs when feelings cannot find outlet in a world of experience. It is the task of the growing personality to keep intensity and sexual excitement separate. If an oversupply of feeling meets an undersupply of experience, helplessness intervenes, and in this disoriented state sexuality may enter with or without anxiety, destroying warmth and the ability to become more aware of the self and others. Freud treated human beings as if they were consistently overwhelmed by feelings which had no constructive outlets. He was quite deficient in his observations of the animal world. All mammals nurse, defecate, and urinate, and they have no prohibitionistic system to create barriers of disgust against the erotic abuse of these functions. Cats bury their feces without the threat of punishment and birds do not foul their own nests.

Freud's image of a lurking eroticism ready to wipe out mankind arose from his failure to understand that intensity can find a healthy balance with the life of action. He struggled with the question of differentiating between bodily pleasure and sexuality. He invents a critic who asks him:

Freud could not answer this question because he was mystified by the nature of the psychological release point where sexual excitement emerges. He was blind to the existence of the celebrative power surplus which is of equal importance to sexuality. It is the interaction between the two which brings the courtship of the lower animals into being, and this occurs when they are biologically mature. In civilized human beings submission and dominance are no longer necessarily tied to gender, but it is still the combination of sex and celebration which determines the release point of sexual excitement. Human beings use the mated mechanism to find an atmosphere where sexual activity flows in a natural and unimpeded way, but they do not require an actual domain with a partner for this to happen. Masturbatory fantasy and self-induced celebration are an important part of civilized man's inner psychic life, and they depend on the ability to set up independent images of submission-dominance relationships. When individuals regard masturbation as an unsatisfactory experience, it is because their fantasy life is not sufficiently anchored in their inner identity and is therefore not adequate to the requirements of the situation. Self-induced celebration requires the capacity to put the self in a mental position where obstacles vanish in a miraculous way. This is an entirely internal psychological experience, and only becomes antisocial if the individual lacks the resources to keep his untrammeled willfulness out of his real relationships with others. When an individual believes it is better to blot out awareness of frustrations through the use of drugs, or to play Russian roulette, or to rob a bank, than to induce his own celebrative states, it is because his resources for independent psychological play are inadequately developed.

Since Freud saw sexuality everywhere, it was a short step for him to invent the Oedipus complex. Whenever Freud saw sexual moments in the life of the infant and child, he assumed that they were goal directed needs which could only be abandoned as a result of severe prohibiting and repressing forces. His view of the sexual aspirations of children ignores the real need of the child to build his warmth and love capacities. Children are very vulnerable to overstimulation, leading to anxiety and restlessness, and they require parental guidance in directing their psychological needs into healthy channels. The small child must be protected from stimuli which seem commonplace to adults but become an overwhelming exposure to the unknown and the chaotic for the child. He is not yet able to provide his own insulation from such potentially noxious situations. Frustrations endured by infants are real frustrations, not the blunting of mysterious needs undergoing repression. Infants desire nutrition in rhythms that their needs dictate, physical nurturing by the parent in warm and reassuring ways, and freedom to exercise their dawning interest in the world around them without encountering threatening obstacles. When parents attempt to program them into some pre-established image of how an infant should feel and act, the frustration level becomes very high. Parents learn to grow in their parental function by interacting with the developing infant and child. When the rigidity of the parent makes this mutual growth impossible, the child experiences disabling helpless and reckless reactions. Freud undertook to understand childhood without taking the problems of parents into account. Since his insights into childhood psychopathology were too superficial to explain anything, he fastened on frustrated sexual goals as the royal road to understanding the origin of neuroses. This sidetrack was easy for him to follow since he had successfully insisted that childhood sexual feelings and activities at a masturbatory level do exist.

Freud's blindness to parent-child relationships is shown by the following statement from the Wolf Man case history:

Children raised by rigid formulas that do not take the developing independence of the child into account suffer phobic and depersonalized symptoms which appear mysterious to the parents. The child who is exposed to excessive hate and anger reactions in his world lacks the warmth and pride levels he needs for his development. In this frustrated state sexual feeling may become a problem to the child, and there are no doubt episodic and transitional moments when his sexuality produces images and impulses of an object directed variety. To assume that the child really needs and wants such relationships is a pure invention of Freud's mystical psychological world. The desire of the little child to use a parent as a mated object carries grave dangers of overstimulation which the child can clearly recognize as an oppressive threat. Freud took these thought fragments as proof that the Oedipus complex and the castration anxiety it generates were the primary cause of childhood developmental difficulties. The truth is that children want parents to be parents, not the objects of disintegrated and floating sexual fantasies. Because Freud was the first to identify the presence of these fantasies in childhood, he thought it was his prerogative to assign them meaning in an authoritarian way.

Freud regarded children as Lilliputian adults. He seized on by products of frustrated states as evidence of the universality of the needs he thought he was identifying. He says:

Here Freud shows his ignorance of constructive parent-child relationships. The growing child does not necessarily receive less affection, but instead gets the kind of affection which is geared to his developing personality. The exception to this statement, the only state of affairs which Freud recognized, occurs in those parents whose inability to grow in their parental function limits them to the simplicities of the nurturing care of tiny infants. The demands of education, and even the occasional punishment, are recognized by the healthy child as pathways to a fuller psychological life.

Freud's Oedipus complex is based on the assumption of a goal directed mated need in the child. He says:

Freud's picture of childhood motivation was thoroughly unrealistic. Any child who took such fantasy fragments seriously would be undermined by his own internal loss of the cohesive warmth which binds him to his family attachments. There would be no need to postulate an external prohibition. If an occasional child can be found who really wants to marry his mother and kill his father, such an individual is disastrously frustrated in his family relationships and would be well on his way to a major adult maladjustment. Freud's view of the Oedipus triangle rests on a misinterpretation of the original Greek Oedipus story. Oedipus was trapped by fate into an intimate relationship with an older woman whom he did not know was his mother. The story is a tragedy which says that the innocent killing of his biological father and the events that followed put him in an oppressive and untenable position. There is no way to see what happened as a fulfillment of anything of psychological value to Oedipus himself.

Because Freud saw that his Oedipus fantasy lacked substance, he strove to reinforce it by postulating that the Oedipus complex rests on inheritance of thoughts and impulses from the distant past. He says:

Freud believed that social life as we know it began with the murder of a tyrannical father by his sons and that memory of this event is inherited genetically:

Freud's view of evolution was based on the discredited Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, but even biologists who continue to show some attachment to this theory never imagined it would be used to include patterns of thought in the Freudian fashion. The accumulation of inherited mental processes would reach a staggering total as the millennia roll by. Dr. Wortis reports a discussion of this topic during his analysis with Freud:

Here Freud uses the word science in the same sense that Mary Baker Eddy used it in founding Christian Science. It is Freud's confession that he needed an anti-scientific mysticism to support his theories. Freud's search for the roots of psychopathology was conducted in the dark. Unaware of the oppressive stresses generated by parent-child relationships, he assumed that any intense psychic event which was colored by helpless reactions, no matter how transient, must be the key to the etiology he sought. In the Wolf Man case history, he reports an effort on the part of an older sister at sexual play:

The entire architecture of the boy's relationship to his parents and governess fades into insignificance compared to the fascinating aura of the sexual material. The transformation Freud refers to consisted of an "inexplicable naughtiness":

"A child that behaves in this unmanageable way is making a confession and trying to provoke punishment. It hopes for a beating as a simultaneous means of setting its sense of guilt at rest and of satisfying its masochistic sexual trend." (11)

The parents' failure to guide and support the child's warmth and pride development at a crucial time in his psychological growth, substituting instead a governess whose only qualifications lay in her ability to deal with the most mundane of adaptive details, does not appear to Freud to be worthy of his attention. It is the parents who must understand the child at such a time, not vice versa. The boy's compulsive obstructiveness was a signal of a build up of latent anxiety, and a corresponding appeal for help. If parents abandon children at times of great inner change in the child, the child must elaborate his own defenses, and the recklessness of this individual was a defense against helplessness. Such defenses have a desperate quality at the age of four years. The fascination of psychoanalysis with the dramatic reduces the human condition to the status of a soap opera. The only choices left to the individual are in the style of his adaptation to the impossible.

The psychoanalytic thesis that man is born to carry mysterious burdens is well illustrated by the theory that the trauma of birth creates a well of anxiety in every human personality. Psychoanalysis assigns fragments of experience an importance they do not have. There are episodes of severe adaptive stress in the life of any organism. It is a distinctly human problem when severe adaptive stress leads to an overstimulation of the personality, resulting in helpless and reckless reactions. When men accept the inevitable in a healthy way, and endure the consequences of a burdensome event, their submission is measured to the reality of the situation and they do not invest more of themselves than the reality requires. The birth trauma is the infant's first experience with adaptation to external stress. It is no doubt more or less difficult for many infants, but then so will many future experiences be difficult in the life of the individual. Nature is not careless in such matters. The capacity to handle adaptive stress and to dissipate its effects, once the storm has been ridden out, is built into the biological resources of the individual.

It could be said that since every child experiences frustration in learning to walk that blows to its pride in preliminary unsuccessful attempts have created a permanent well of self-doubt which surfaces in later life situations. This complex can be labeled the walk trauma and assigned an etiological significance in antisocial behavior. There is no end to this kind of game playing. Because of his fascination with sexual libido, Freud never understood anxiety. When a fundamental aspect of human psychology remains a mystery, it becomes a fertile ground for magical thinking, supporting myths which sometimes become enshrined as holy pseudo-scientific dogma.

Childhood and psychopathology. Infants and young children are extremely vulnerable to overstimulation. The self-knowledge and self-control of adults provide them with independent access to the insulation they need from overwhelming confrontation with the unknown and the chaotic in their psychological world. When adults have very little independence, society is there with its dogma and prohibitions to provide protection against entering psychological areas which the individual cannot handle. Parents provide this insulation for the child, or when overstimulation has occurred, they guide the child away from such experiences. The needs of the very young infant are elemental in nature, and many parents are adequately equipped to respond with nurturing and protective care. There is always a potential problem when the rapid biological growth of the child begins to extend his independence reactions. At this point the child has not yet been molded by outside social forces. His approach to the world is fresh, new, spontaneous, and alive. His growing capacity for independent warmth and pride encourages him to think and act for himself. His need for parental guidance now takes a new direction. He must be protected from excessive independence in areas which will certainly overwhelm him, and at the same time be given room for the rewards which come from his dawning ability to face life on his own. The child's personality is a mixture of unfettered creative capacity and biologically established limitations. If he is allowed to become too ambitious for his own mental health, psychic exhaustion quickly takes over. If the parent lacks independence in his own internal dealings with overstimulation, he will automatically impose socially reinforced dogmas and prohibitions on the child. When this assault on what is best in the child's nature succeeds, his dawning sense of the goodness and beauty of life is damaged, and if he chooses to fight back, the parents become the enemy.

Parents cannot explore what is true and right in equal partnership with a child if they have abandoned independence in their own relationship with society. The child's simple but clear eyed honesty and courage operate as a revolutionary challenge to the compulsive and obsessive defenses of the parents. If the needs of the child bring the parents to the brink of a growth process they are not prepared to handle, they are forced to fight back with all the intimidating and seductive forces at their command. The less independence they have, the more imperative it becomes that they win this battle, because without victory they cannot maintain their parental position. There is no way for the child to benefit from living in an armed camp. He is forced to accept a gradual effacement of part of his human capacities. There is a price paid for the resulting peace and harmony. When unavoidable episodes of excessive feeling or energy threaten to overwhelm the child, he cannot trust the parents to provide the guidance and help he needs. He hides his inner turmoil, and instead of an open conflict within the family, he develops symptoms which appear to come from nowhere. It is impossible for the child to maintain the kind of stable defensive system which adults reach through the use of social supports. Because of his rapid biological changes, especially in the first six years, the child is literally not the same person from one year to the next, and sometimes not from one month to the next. When he is prematurely on his own in facing unfamiliar and menacing situations, helpless and reckless reactions become inevitable. The parent who cannot grow will be threatened not only by the child's openness to life but by the unmanageable stresses the child stumbles into, which he can only regard as unacceptable, corrupt, and naughty. He will see himself as a finished product, and the child as malleable material to be beaten into line in accordance with his pre-established image of parental responsibility.

Constructive human relationships require room for growth on both sides. People cannot deal with the best in others when their differences are more important than what they share. Ostracism and punishment can only be put aside when there is a basic equality between people. Children are often deprived of their status as a person. It is easy for the parent to put the child in an inferior position because of his biological immaturity. This creation of a superiority-inferiority axis not only undermines family relationships but spreads out into social relationships in general. Superiority-inferiority relationships, which should not be confused with submission and dominance, destroy the fabric of civilized man's greatest asset, his ability to share growth with others. It is the only reliable cement which holds families together, and carried out into the world becomes the basis for negotiation and compromise in man's social life. It is a powerful antidote to the domain mechanism where individuals are treated as non-human entities if certain traits they have are found to be alien or frustrating.

Of all the liberation movements of the modern world, including the liberation of women, homosexuals, and old people, the one most needed and least emphasized is the liberation of children. Freud could not understand equality because he granted to society an authority in regulating human relationships which was beyond appeal. He reserved the right to criticize, and to blame society for the sufferings of the individual, but the capacity of the adult to choose his own human environment, guided by his own self-knowledge and self-control, was beyond his comprehension. Freud's mind covered a wide variety of conceptual territories, but his ability to act in independent ways was severely compromised. Because of his supine submission to social control, his awareness of growth was confined to career development and the ability to abandon needs which were a threat to social status.

There was no area of human interaction which escaped from Freud's adherence to inequality. He was quick to see the weaknesses of others, but he was never able to evaluate the level of importance of the information.

On men and women:

On husbands and wives, talking to his patient, Dr. Wortis:

On leaders and followers:

On psychoanalyst and patient:

On teacher and student:

On children and adults:

Equality based on shared growth means that individuals are sharing a community of goals. Without this sense of purpose within each personality, there is no way to evaluate either the human accomplishments of each or the problems generated by shortcomings in their psychological capacities. Growth confers on the individual the right to make his own mistakes without damage to his warmth and pride levels. It cuts across the divisionary lines which more superficial human characteristics depend upon, such as ethnic identity, class distinctions, gender roles, and religious beliefs. Kipling had the strength of this fundamental basis for human sharing in mind when he wrote: "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, . . . . But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, when two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!"

Since Freud regarded parents as finished products, he had no way to understand the vicissitudes of the psychological growth of children. He divested the child of the integrity of its childishness. The real cause of childhood psychopathology can only be found when the rebellion of children against parental rigidity is understood. Freud saw the psychological life of the infant and young child as a journey through dark passageways beset by a succession of traumatic events. The vulnerability of the child to overstimulation produces many difficult moments, but when the child and parent work together, the child is well equipped by nature to seal off any lasting consequences of such episodes. The child is not put together with adhesive tape and chewing gum. He is endowed with the capacity to show his need for help in clear and impelling tones. When a child is overstimulated by human events he can neither understand or control, the transient oppression of this reaction can be put aside without damage through the banishing of such stimuli from his psychological world. It is a matter of choice, and with parental cooperation he goes toward those harmonious feelings and experiences which are appropriate to his stage of development. Freud did not recognize choice as a significant tool of the personality. Instead he saw the operation of repression everywhere. Each traumatic moment was seen as a demand on the child to give up an instinctual drive he really needed and wanted, and growing up became a matter of submitting to harsh and tyrannical rules which ignored his real nature. Freud's traumas are not based on genuine goal directed needs of childhood. The helpless and reckless reactions they generate do not come from the frustration of the child's real nature, but rather from the fact that the child's relationship with the adult world is already deficient in the understanding and support he requires. Freud's traumas imputed a goal structure to children which transformed them into crippled versions of adulthood. The ghosts of traumatic residues were everywhere, emerging from a series of assaults on the personality, such as the birth trauma, phobic reactions to primal scenes, primitive and chaotic homicidal impulses, prohibited sexual tendencies, frustrated Oedipal aspirations, and castration anxiety. To Freud, nature had made some gigantic mistake. It had endowed the child with adult-like psychological goals it was not mature enough to handle.

Freud regarded the young child as the helpless victim of forces predestined to be frustrating and hostile. In discussing what he regarded as man's helplessness before the forces of nature:

This use of the word helplessness, although it agrees with much common usage, is woefully lacking in psychological substance. The child is really only helpless if it is abandoned in time of need. Parent and child form an interacting unit, each supplied with instinctually rooted drives which complement and fulfil each other. A healthy infant is biologically weak, not psychologically helpless. The crying infant is not helpless as long as his signal of need is reaching the parent in the way that nature intended. Genuine helplessness or recklessness in any infant produces major disturbances in its physiological functioning, such as lethargy, digestive disturbances, and hypermotile rage reactions. Fledglings throughout the animal world know what it is to claim parental attention and help. Genuinely helpless reactions by adults to overwhelming forces do occur, but to say that such reactions are only a continuation of the small child's relationship to his parents is to cut the heart out of the parent-child relationship.

Contrary to Freud's view, mature adults are not required to feel helpless before the forces of nature. Man had adaptive resources which permit him to select those areas where he can understand and control nature, and when this is not possible, to accept the inevitable and endure the whiplash of nature's fury. Such submission is measured to the reality of the situation, and he does not invest more of himself than the reality requires. It is when men lack sufficient objectivity to limit their response to such disasters that helpless and reckless reactions take over. They are then in a state of overstimulation, and this is the source of the phobic anxiety and depersonalized restlessness which develops. Some survivors of disasters are quite cheerful. These are the ones who have met the adaptive challenge and surmounted the threat of overwhelming stimulation in their internal psychic life.

When Freud saw helplessness in an adult, he assumed he had returned to an earlier stage of development. He called this process regression, and the point to which the individual had regressed was regarded as a fixation. Since he saw children as bundles of neurotic phenomena, he had no great difficulty selecting a fixation point which had some superficial resemblance to the symptoms of mature persons. In fact, there is no stage of development of the healthy infant and child which is the same as the psychological state of helpless or reckless adults. The dependent child has a constructive relationship to parents. The helpless adult is concerned with defending himself against oppressive anxiety and restlessness. Any dependency he may have in no way advances his personal development. The neurotic adult who is afraid to leave the house or who indulges in weeping temper tantrums is not relating to his environment, and any resemblance to the biological weakness of children is entirely superficial and inaccurate. Because mumps is usually a childhood disease does not mean that an adult with mumps is regressing to a childhood state. Helplessness can occur at any level of development, childhood included, and when it appears it must be understood in terms of the psychological forces acting on the personality at that time. An overwhelmed adult is not a child. He is a psychologically crippled adult, and the fixation point to which he is supposed to be returning is a mirage which never really existed.

Freud believed his childhood traumas tended to drive the personality back to a time when real happiness existed, but since such circumstances could not actually be recovered, this regression could only lead to suffering. It did not matter whether evidence existed for the presence of these traumatic events. Freud agreed that usually the events which lead to fixation of the libido in infancy and early childhood never really happened. He saw them as fantasies which he believed had to be given the same psychological place as actual events. These traumas are observation of parental sexual activity, called the primal scene, seduction by an older person, the threat of castration, and many others. Fantasies dealing with these topics he calls primal fantasies, and he believed memory of them is inherited from actual experience of man's early ancestors. In Freud's world, man's gene pool is very busy. Freud says:

To Freud, neurotic symptoms were substitute gratifications for blocked libidinal drives, especially sexual, even though the individual perceived only suffering. Once he got on this track his otherwise agile mind ceased to explore reality. If he had offered milk with a skin on it to a cat he would have seen the same distaste. Animals do not like strange textures which coat the mouth. As far as the taste for milk is concerned, infants are biologically equipped to digest mother's milk. As the individual gets older, he may lose some or all of the enzyme necessary to digest milk sugar. It is inappropriate to describe the infant's ingestion of milk as voracious or ardent. These words would not ordinarily be used to describe the behavior of a hungry individual who is enjoying an appealing meal.

Freud was able to set up circumstances under which a great deal of recall was possible of oppressive moments in the history of the patient's childhood. His method consisted of hypnosis in the early days and then free association under the influence of the transference. Having labored long and hard to collect his new data, Freud espoused the position that psychopathology encountered in adult life was to be understood by recovering the memory of childhood experiences which before therapy had become forgotten. Recollecting these events, if they met the criteria of being traumas, with the affect associated with them, a process called abreaction, was supposed to reduce their influence on adult psychology, making it possible for the individual to liberate himself from old fixations and complexes. This method provided a system of understanding of neurosis which could successfully ignore the complexities of the child-parent relationship.

The truth is that there is no way for the individual to understand his early relationship with his parents without having grown sufficiently in his adult psychological life to put himself beyond the world of their human limitations. Only when the individual has experienced something more can he identify what was lacking before. The child has no chance of accomplishing this task. He must remain loyal to his parents, whether it brings neurotic symptoms in its wake or not. He has no choice of any other world. This loyalty, which is a survival measure, can be found even in those who are grossly neglected and abused. The recovery of childhood memories cannot touch the real issues of the causes of psychopathology, because the child never had such insights, and the adult obviously cannot recover by recall what was never there in the first place. On the other hand, when the individual has thrown off the limitations imposed by early influences, through growth in his adult life, he can look back and through ordinary recall, which requires no emphasis on hidden traumas and abreaction, gradually learn to reinterpret the architecture of the child-parent relationship. Once attained, such insights become an essential tool in the building of self-knowledge and self-control. The individual can see both the assets and the limitations which his parents, acting as the agents of society, passed on to him in the time of his rearing. This situation means that the present sheds light on the past, and not vice versa.

The mere gathering of data gives no guaranteed access to either a therapeutic function or to scientific insight. Freud oscillated between being therapist and investigator, accepting the easy misconception that a favorable therapeutic result was evidence of scientific validity. In the Wolf Man case he explored every nook and cranny of the patient's childhood memories, but the actual impact of the therapeutic process came when he stumbled on the interpretation of the patient's conflictful submissive nature and the homosexual stresses it provoked. If the goal of the therapy is to be found in improving the welfare of the patient, the rest of his complicated venture into the exposure of childhood memories becomes window dressing. Freud is writing about the Wolf Man's inhibited social relationships:

There are many therapies, and they share the common quality of giving apparent insights into symptoms in an authoritative fashion, thus dispelling some of the aura of mystery and menace which is so undermining to the patient. Preoccupation with symptoms limits the scope of the personality. If the disability is altered in a way that is greeted by the patient as an improvement, the therapy is considered successful. This process resembles what happens when a person has worried about a mysterious pain in his body, only to find after a visit to a physician that he does not have a serious physical illness after all. Freed from the oppressive thought that he harbors a fatal disease, the pain becomes less or disappears entirely. There is no reason to quarrel with any therapist who produces such benevolent changes. Such results are accessible to any therapeutic system which directs the patient's attention away from disabilities. This method is inadequate to guarantee long term results. Often the price is only paid years later through a gradual constriction of the patient's participation in the life process, a condition which is sometimes more disabling than the original symptoms. Psychotherapists do not take well to long term follow ups, primarily because they have no way to evaluate the quality of life for themselves or others. Symptom manipulation can never provide an adequate basis for a science of human nature. Psychoanalysis has had its share of successes in reducing the menace of oppressive symptoms, but its record cannot equal that of various consciousness raising groups, including Christian Science, evangelical religious movements, transcendental meditation, encounter groups, or for that matter the record of witch doctors in the Gobi desert, according to Roy Chapman Andrews. (26)

The unconscious and repression. The brain records much information not immediately available to recall. To function effectively, the mind needs to focus on useful goals and their associated data. Much of the information which lies somewhere in the brain will never be retrieved by the individual. It requires an appropriate context to bring such data to consciousness. As the child grows physically and psychologically, the world in which his mental life is taking place is subject to the most rapid changes he will ever experience in a lifetime. Without the old contexts, forgetting becomes a characteristic aspect of the life of the growing child.

It is an essential part of brain function to insulate itself from the useless recall of inappropriate data. Freud was able to bring otherwise forgotten memories into awareness by putting the patient into a mental state foreign to healthy mental functioning. He used hypnosis and later free association for this purpose. He postulated that the recovered data had been forgotten through the action of a prohibitionistic repressing force. He entirely ignored the possibility that the individual had chosen to seal off his response to certain situations because of their disharmonious and overstimulating quality. When a rational choice is being made in the interests of mental health, there is no need to postulate a repressing force. The growing child turns away from situations which threaten to be overwhelming, using parental guidance wherever necessary. The amnesias of childhood are the natural consequences of such choices. Anxiety producing situations are forgotten because the personality turns away from the human contexts which produce such anxiety. When the efforts at insulation are unsuccessful, exhaustion patterns take over. When the personality is in a helpless or reckless situation, the brain can no longer integrate and synthesize in a healthy fashion. Ideas and impulses float around like disembodied ghosts. These are psychological fragments which lack direction and cannot be assigned a rational meaning. It is simply a fact that the brain, with its 16 billion neurons, has a great potential for producing meaningless fragments when its goal directed functioning is disrupted. The mind is a larger concept than the brain because it includes the circumstances which make effective brain function possible. The brain is a far more complex computer than man has ever built, but like the computer it must be programmed in order to function.

When the healthy goal directed mental functioning of the individual is temporarily put to sleep using drugs, hypnosis, or the free association of the Freudian transference, it is quite possible for the therapist to direct the patient's attention to previously forgotten material from the past. The psychological helplessness induced by such techniques creates a context where previous states of helplessness are more accessible to recall. Certain vulnerable patients were able to provide Freud with a wealth of such never before uncovered material, and Freud seized on this data, declaring it to be the royal road to the understanding of the neuroses. Without the concept of repression, however, such recalled fragments lose their psychological significance. If the child has no mysterious drives that are being driven underground by a tyrannical repressing force, the recall of distressing episodes, thoughts, and moods gives no key to anything except the fact that childhood is a time of vulnerability to such transient difficulties.

The psychic content arising from the psychoanalytic transference is dream-like in atmosphere. The patient's personality is detached from any disciplined need to understand or to accept responsibility for the self. The control of the situation is given over to the rules of procedure of the analyst. The patient floats in a world of disembodied words and images, guided only by the expectation that understanding will emerge from the interpretations of the analyst. This abandonment of self-knowledge and self-control leaves the personality without any self-generated goals. All major functions of the mind are suspended, including esthetic experience, communication on an equal basis using logical reasoning and skill in dialogue, and all adaptive strivings save one, namely an unquestioning submission to the method of therapy set up by the analyst.

In the artificial architecture of the transference, the obedient patient is sometimes able to develop high hopes that the oppressive stress that exists in his life outside the analyst's office will somehow be erased by his success inside it, success being defined as the recovery of forgotten material. The patient's extreme submission is colored by idealization and an unreliable warmth for the analyst, but it cannot be characterized as a genuine love reaction. The therapist remains in the shadows, and no service is asked of the patient's feeling intensity save submission itself. The process has the structure of a relationship with a controlling power which is inaccessible to the influence of an obedient conformist. It resembles hypnosis, out of which free association grew. It also resembles the relationship of a child to an arbitrary and tyrannical parent who is beyond being influenced by the reactions of the child. There is a further resemblance to traumatic neurosis in general, which is characterized by a general constriction in the access of the personality to self-expression. In traumatic neurosis the individual is guided by a narrow and singleminded submission to a set of rules. As long as he sees no choice, his submission can be kept within adaptive bounds and the individual will not be overwhelmed. On the battlefield, the good soldier accepts the fact that he has no choice, and he does not ask the guns, bombs, and enemy advance to take cognizance of him as an individual. It is when submission has lost its adaptive anchoring in such situations that symptoms of personality disintegration emerge. Then the unheeding powerful force is seen as evil and malignant, and the individual responds as if he could communicate with it or somehow alter it by his own reaction.

Episodes of personality constriction, due to the operation of powerful and unheeding forces, are occasional events in the life of any individual. In this inhibited state, where the individual accepts an inner automatic setting, putting aside reason and initiative, he can find greater access to recall of previous situations in his life which were similarly constricted in their human scope. The facilitation of recall is increased by an overlapping of present and past emotional states, and wherever the mind is deprived of self-generated goals, its insulating capacities are reduced. Successful forgetting requires that the mind has somewhere else to go. Painful memories are most successfully replaced by states of contentment and happiness. The formulas of many religious and uplift movements are based on this shift from negative to positive thinking. The inner search for the mental resources needed to stay on a positive and constructive course is an essential aspect of the growth process. When growth is temporarily stopped by a traumatic constriction, the personality is open to the recall of much useless information. This kind of overflow increases helpless and reckless reactions. Keeping the channels of growth open is the primary task of a science of human nature. The scientific method can do a superior job to uplift movements because the individual who is armed with independent human insights and skills can do a much better job of selecting a human environment suited to his personal needs. Independent choice requires a strong sense of inner identity.

Freud brought his belief in the existence of powerful repressing forces to the data uncovered by the transference, and he was unable to see the possibility of alternative explanations. His difficulty is clearly seen in his work on the interpretation of dreams. He saw the strange and bizarre language of dreams as the product of an ever present prohibiting censorship, acting on libidinal and destructive drives which were unacceptable to the personality. He believed psychoanalysis could unlock the real meaning of dreams because it understood these repressing forces. In discussing individuals who had no neurotic symptoms:

The problem with Freud's dream censorship is that it operates in a blind and mindless fashion without any relationship whatsoever to the need of the individual to deny or ignore his allegedly forbidden drives. No matter how well acquainted the individual becomes with the defensive part of his personality and with psychic material which was formerly unknown, the dream censorship goes on its independent way, distorting and disguising the dream images. The fact that the dream content is not correlated to the psychic needs of the individual should have told Freud to look elsewhere for the explanation of the dream language. The true situation was much too mundane to satisfy Freud. It is simply a biologically rooted fact that the sleeping brain, during rapid eye movement phases, fires off hallucinatory images from its vast store of recorded material. Without the guidance of the rational and enterprising mind, such hallucinatory images are mere fragments which lack significant meaning at any level. The dream is like a bad joke or an unsuccessful esthetic production. It is replete with potentially symbolic material which can be assigned meaning at the will of the interpreter. Freud never really succeeded in interpreting dreams. What he did was to interpret associations to dreams, and these associations were guided by the transference, producing the kind of material which the analyst was already committed to find. He thus dealt with the dream, not as it really existed in the form of a hallucinatory fragment, but as a stimulus to a waking associative process which provided fertile ground for intuitive speculation. Freud's powerful censorship turns out to be nothing more than the biologically rooted capacity of the sleeping brain to produce hallucinations which have no purpose, direction, or goal. Freud preferred not to look at this explanation of the dream language:

In becoming the modern advocate of dream interpretation, Freud joined an historical procession dating back into antiquity. It has always been a favored activity of those who aspire to a shortcut to wisdom. Dream interpretation is especially attractive because of the capacity of the human brain for symbolization. The fact that many symbols have a universal quality does not mean that they reach a level of significance which permits insight into the personality. Manipulating these symbols becomes a magical game which covers up the need to ask serious questions about man's psychic life. All that the study of symbolism shows is that man's cerebral equipment readily symbolizes. It adds images to the vocabulary in the service of the esthetic life. Once it is established that a tower symbolizes an erect penis, vocabulary has been expanded to produce a kind of joke. Symbolic recognition contributes to the production of poetry and works of art. The symbolism of the dream floats around in a disorderly way, making the dream an unsuccessful literary effort. Symbolism readily invades man's rational life when the personality is undergoing restriction, as for example in intimidating situations. In a classroom where young people find themselves deprived of individuality they seek to be entertained, and raucous laughter may greet some word which sounds to them like a sexual reference. The phenomenon is common in late night television talk shows, when the audience insists on finding sexual references in otherwise neutral material. The more constricted the personality becomes under the influence of adaptive stress, the more the dream fragments resemble the thinking of waking life. Then the sleeping individual cannot forget the impelling needs which will be present when he wakes. A man deprived of food dreams of eating. A man trapped in a mine dreams of rescue. Small children who have suffered deprivations during the day dream of gratification of their desires at night. Such material led Freud to conclude that all dreams represent wish fulfillments. This style of analysis decorticates the human animal.

Just as twelve poets will write twelve different poems watching the same sunset, so did Freud's dream interpretation become a literary production which was not answerable to the discipline of scientific thinking. When Freud was the premier authority on dreams he could ignore the multiplicity of meanings which could be attached to dream imagery. The same conditions prevail in seminars at psychoanalytic institutes when the teacher with the most prestige can take an authoritarian position. The truth is that no matter what interpretation is made, an ingenious analyst can always go farther or in a different direction. The fact that trained and experienced analysts rarely interpret a particular dream in the same way is information which loyal Freudians do not choose to share with the public. The meanings that Freud found were not fundamental and universal. He wrote:

Freud's ability to be critical of his own conclusions was compromised by his competitive and controversial nature. He was too quick in believing he had dispelled the unknown in the human personality. His naive belief that he could measure truth by his subjective sense of discovery is like saying that those who find meaning through astrology are in the presence of truth. There can be no truth without exposure to a world of expanding information, and in the human area this means psychological growth. Insight cannot come from immersion of the thinker in an insulated world of fragmented thoughts and impulses.

PART II: The Nature of Social Life

Introduction. It is a favorite formulation of psychoanalysts that psychic phenomena are overdetermined. This simply means that whatever interpretation is given, alternative views must be given their place. This arrangement spares an authoritative figure from loss of face when colleagues make different formulations. It is an intuitive world where all insiders have the right to their own interpretations. Everything psychological does have some level of meaning, even the chatter of schizophrenics and the delirium of the physically ill, but a science of human nature cannot breathe in such an atmosphere. A science of the personality needs a context in which human goals are real. Significant data pertains to the ability of individuals to adhere to constructive human purposes. Without these goals life itself is deprived of meaning, and in this disoriented and disorganized maelstrom a great deal of psychic data can be found which goes nowhere. The practitioners of the magical arts build internally logical systems, buttressed by a high level of communication skills, and they are well protected from the challenge of reality as long as they stay within their insulated superstructure. The system only collapses when they are forced out of their safe position by the needs of others to apply their alleged insights to the real problems of human beings.

After World War I Freud felt the necessity of dealing with the larger issues of a social kind which touched the welfare of all civilized people. His ambition would not let him rest. He had often been accused of insensitivity where social factors were concerned. He now chose to leave his explorations of the neuroses behind, with all the controversy they entailed, to move forward into a brighter and less metaphysical land, where he could deal with the issues that were generally recognized to be important. In his own words, in the Wolf Man case history, he addressed himself to "the great common concerns of mankind." In taking this step he lost the protection of his intuitively grounded world. The record of this undertaking constitutes the best rebuttal to the claim of psychoanalysis to having attained genuine human insight. Freud revealed himself to be a cynical thinker whose main contribution was to rationalize man's helplessness in the face of his instinctual drives. He could not grasp the real substance of social progress. An anti-democratic snobbishness repeatedly forced its way to the surface. The farther he went down this road the more his surrender to the forces of depression in his own personality became evident. He found a kind of submission within himself, but it was a futile one guided by hate, without recognition of anything worthy of a submissive reaction. His inherent honesty was rooted in a narrow vision and had no value when dealing with the aspirations of mankind. Time and again it was revealed that the depth which he had so carefully cultivated in his early days had metamorphosed into a compulsive superficiality in dealing with the broad sweep of social problems.

Social life and the death instinct. As Freud turned his attention toward man's social problems, he felt the need to balance the concept libido with a different and complementary force. He always preferred to deal with thoughts, feelings, and neurotic symptoms as opposed to actions, attitudes, and antisocial behavior. It would be quite impossible, however, to continue to ignore the mastery side of the human personality if the real dimensions of social problems were to be brought into focus. He found a method of including an analogue to sexual libido which spared him the necessity of revising his theory of the primacy of libidinal frustration. He identified a force which did not require him to look at either the experiential instinct or the creative functions of power. Since the sexual libido was the basic life force in the Freudian system, what could be more convenient than to identify its polar principle as a death force, thus opening the door to explanations of destructive aspects of human behavior. Freud wrote:

Armed as he was with something more than libido, he was able to recognize that civilization is an evolving process:

By postulating the death instinct, Freud reduced the dynamic balance between the psychic life of perception and mastery to a meaningless generality. There can be no substitute for the interplay of two constructive forces in man's personality. The problem with the death instinct is that it leaves out the psychologically dominant half of man's relationship to his world, substituting instead a supine submission to destructiveness as an inevitable phenomenon. Freud's death instinct might have been a harmless example of his ability to multiply complexities for their own sake, a display of intellectual fireworks destined to die with the passing of the darkness which made it bright, were it not for the fact that he tied the death instinct to the presence of violence in the human scene. Few people care a whit about his death instinct, including most otherwise loyal psychoanalysts, but they do care about the need to understand violence.

The death instinct is one of those concepts separated off from experience whose existence can neither be proved or disproved, and therefore it becomes a rich playground for magical thinking. The argument that all life becomes inorganic can be countered with the position that the inorganic processes of nature tend to become organic. It can go either way. Freud was never free of his personal struggle to deal with a lifestyle depression. In his philosophical moments he often described life as a burden. "Living is an eternal nuisance" and "to endure life remains the first duty of all living things."

What Freud left out is man's position in the animal world. It is true that nature is often careless of the life of individual animals, putting its supreme emphasis on the survival of the species. It is man who has utilized his reproductive potential in the service of creative productivity. When men pursue knowledge and ability they are bringing human assets into being that live after them. Instead of the survival of the species per se, their goal becomes the improvement of the quality of life for themselves and other people. It is a parallel drive to species survival and carries all the goal directed behavior that nature has given to reproduction. Men's ideas and skills are in a very true sense their children. This civilized human faculty lights the fire that makes life burn brightly to the end. The individual lives at the center of his own world and finds himself bigger in psychological dimensions than mere membership in a species could entail.

Nature does not create instincts for frivolous reasons. There is no need for a death instinct in the animal world. Individuals will die when their biological equipment wears out, and dealing with the fact of death is just one more adaptive requirement of the life process. It is true that some individuals look forward to death, but this attitude is a response to an unmitigated sense of exhaustion in living. Suicides are not a response to a death instinct, but a rational choice dictated by the finality of overwhelming oppressive stress in their lives, a condition from which they can find no appeal. The irrational part lies in their acceptance of circumstances which make the oppressive stress inevitable.

Having put some distance between himself and his fascinated preoccupation with libido, Freud turned his attention to the architecture of man's social life:

Freud preferred to deal with social phenomena in their most elemental form. He did not want to distinguish between culture and civilization:

The aspects he refers to are the control of nature and the establishment of social rules. Freud's refusal to recognize the psychological complexities of the civilization process leads to an impoverishment of his approach to social life. The all encompassing power of the community which he describes best fits many primitive societies which have not yet reached the civilized level. It is characteristic of advanced civilization that community power is limited to those adaptive areas where such controls are needed to serve the interests of all its members. The individual search for independent strength through the establishment of what is right in the conduct of his own life goes on without bondage to such practical areas of group control. Freud failed to distinguish between what is right and conventional views of justice and morality. The social standards on which justice is based change according to the time and place where they occur. The death penalty as well as many forms of cruel and unusual punishment are examples of the changing fashions which govern justice and morality. The establishment of the right stands on much higher ground. The essence of the right is that it has an existence of its own. The right exercises mastery in such a way as to enrich the lives of all who come under its influence. The right takes the whole human situation into account without preconceived limitations and prejudices. It is unalloyed with recklessness. What was moral yesterday may be immoral today, but the right never loses its constructive nature, even though its methods may be replaced by a larger capacity for responsibility which includes old human skills. Truth and right interact together to produce a higher level of human functioning. If a farmer abuses his land, failing to rotate crops or add enriching substances to the soil, he may obtain good crops for a few years, but he reaches a diminishing return. When he cares for his land properly, its value increases as he uses it. This is the heart of constructive mastery. It uses and exploits in such a way as to increase the value of the assets it possesses. When this method is applied to the human scene, the right emerges along side of truth as an expression of the best in human nature. This kind of mastery is well known in non-human fields where engineering skills have produced bridges which do not fall down, airplanes that fly, and trains that run. Such mastery is not under the control of local fashion and custom, except in those details which are an esthetic elaboration. The problem with civilization is that the reaching for the right, as well as the companion process of recognizing truth, has had such a difficult time in establishing a consistent influence in human affairs, primarily because local beliefs and customs maintain an influence far beyond their proper area of function. Civilization is not just a more complicated form of a primitive society. It has brought new human faculties into existence in which love and power interact in a creative way, and if men do not honor these developing capacities, they pay a heavy penalty for their failure. Freud could not understand civilization because his recognition of the constructive uses of personal power was entirely inadequate.

Freud saw submission as a rag doll kind of helpless reaction. Without recognition of the constructive uses of power, there was no way to see submission to its modalities of mastery as an enlargement of human capacities. He regarded love with grave suspicion, considering it a kind of confidence game practiced on the personality. He wrote:

Without an understanding of the constructive interaction between submission and dominance, Freud has no way to see the psychological value of the mated mechanism. This mechanism, which has brought surpluses into being which are used in the animal world for the nurture and protection of the young, is one of the great accomplishments of the evolutionary process. Its influence is further extended in the civilized world through its application to man's creative life. Freud saw love as a kind of victimization:

Freud regarded submission as an involuntary state, requiring intimidation to make its influence effective. This view reduces the individual to the status of damaged goods. The only kind of groups which could enforce this social structuring were dogmatic and authoritarian ones. It was the groups led by all powerful priests and brain washing dictators which attracted Freud's attention. Here he found evidence that group members behaved like hypnotized automatons, and that leaders were a special class of supermen, taking their characteristics from long ago, when, as he postulated, the father dominated a "primal horde:"

This analysis might make some sense if it were a description of the behavior of Bighorn sheep, but it neglects the subtleties of the evolution of human group life, as well as espousing Freud's usual devaluation of the constructive function of dominance. The reason men grant leadership to individuals is that this pattern promotes adaptive effectiveness. Good leaders have the ability to consider the welfare of the entire group. Their function contributes to the stability of social institutions. Men willingly give up that part of their independence which makes group life function smoothly, provided that the goals of institutions are limited to their proper area of operation. Good institutions take the stress out of many survival needs because the satisfaction of these needs can be taken for granted. When this system works well, a vast space is left for independent personal development. Under such conditions science, engineering, and the arts can flourish, and the pursuit of the goodness and beauty of life becomes man's primary concern. Freud's inability to understand the constructive nature of power, combined with his numbing preoccupation with sexuality, made him unable to comprehend group life in any terms save abject submission and tyrannical dominance.

Freud's concept of the all powerful leader is a fantasy. Political leaders are awarded an idealized position only insofar as they serve the needs of the same masses whom Freud scorned. When their personal influence tends to undermine the efficient performance of their stewardship, expanding into areas that belong to human wisdom and strength, their imperial tenancy becomes insecure and often short lived. Freud always had trouble distinguishing between genuine human strength and social influence based on posturing. He was fascinated by the surface play acting of the masculine gender roles of his time.

Freud attempted to fill the gap in his understanding of mastery by postulating an aggressive instinct:

In discussing the Christian injunction to love one's neighbor as one's self:

In a footnote Freud quotes Heine to the effect that his wants are very simple and elemental, but before he dies he would like God to grant him the joy of seeing six or seven of his enemies hanging from his front yard trees.

When Freud undertook to discuss the violence in man's nature, he betrayed the shallow state of his understanding of the action side of human psychology. He saw all the constructive forces on the side of love, and then belittled that love by insisting that its real nature consisted of aim inhibited sexuality. At the level where Freud identified an aggressive instinct, he was dealing with data which was nothing more than common sense, since it was a name for destructive behavior which could be recognized by reading the headlines of any newspaper. The real question pertains to the roots of violence. Is it a formed and goal directed instinct, or is it a distortion of otherwise constructive forces within the personality?

There is no way to understand violence without recognizing man's experiential instinct and its associated drive to mastery, as well as the celebrative surplus it is capable of generating. Freud saw sex everywhere and celebration nowhere. If he had understood that love and power work together in the human scene, he would have been in a position to understand the domain mechanism, which divides the world into those that are friends and those that are enemies. This mechanism has great adaptive advantages to the lower animals, but tends to draw artificial lines between human groups which block negotiation and compromise. When such divisions are confined to the esthetic life of man, contributing to special and unique tastes and styles in the area of pleasure and enjoyment, they do no harm, but when they are used to deprive any group of its basic human rights, they are not in the long term interests of human beings. When any group is deprived of its human dignity, a disruption is created in man's instinctually based cohesive feelings, and although groups may readily convince themselves that objects of violence are not worthy of membership in the human race, sanity has a way of returning with the passage of time, leaving a scar in the psyche of those who have participated in this process. Furthermore, if the basic rights of others are that unstable, there is no way to tell when the same destructive tendencies will be turned against the group that thought themselves chosen and protected.

The Christian injunction to love they neighbor is a statement in opposition to the domain mechanism and its overemphasis on parochial fashions and customs. It expresses the highest ideals of human community, as does the statement that all men are created equal as found in the Declaration of Independence. This does not mean that each individual has to like the way others dress, eat, or entertain themselves, nor is he required to ignore differences in intelligence, education, or skill levels. It does mean that if human beings are treated like grass under foot that the life of man will suffer severe damage, and the cost of this folly must be paid. Freud's sneer at the concept of universal love rings strangely on the ears, coming as it does from a man who saw libido everywhere. Freud's formulation that love reduces human relationships to a level appropriate for insects, earthworms, and grass snakes leaves out entirely man's need to use love as a constructive tool for the expansion of his human knowledge. If men do not apply the same creative reachings to their relationships with grass snakes, it is because grass snakes lack the biological equipment to take part in this human exchange. The domain mechanism can be applied without harm outside man's social fabric. When a man destroys the weeds in his garden, he is using the domain mechanism in a small and insignificant way. The weeds become his enemy, and he can eliminate them without the slightest damage to his psychological welfare.

Freud's quotation from Heine is typical of his ignorance of the celebrative component of the personality. He did not understand that the personality can keep untrammeled power images in an insulated pocket. Heine's mental picture of seeing his enemies hanged contributed to the poet's simple pride and sense of liberation from oppressive stress. If his enemies were really to be hanged for Heine's benefit, he would not only be horrified but he would do everything he could to oppose it. If he did not, his image of himself as a worthy human being would be seriously damaged.

Freud's abhorrence of democracy rests on his personal need to dwell in a land hospitable to dogma and arbitrary authority. In such a place, true leaders (like himself) are granted the influence they deserve. He saw too much independence in the American scene. With so much equality in the air, his ivory tower compulsive system was in danger. He retained a phobic reaction to America to the end of his life. Freud never believed in the human potential of his own species. He thought automatic submission to the aristocracy of talented intellectuals, in command of the channels of communication through their rhetorical fluency, was the only path to being civilized. The truth is that such communities cut off the mass of people from access to self-knowledge and self-control and in the end breed corruption and violence. Freud's point of view, in spite of his high level of personal humanity, became the logical precursor to the holocaust that was to follow.

Freud believed that the heart of the process of being civilized lay in man's capacity to turn his aggressive instinct against himself. He wrote:

Like the song in Cabaret which says money makes the world go round, in the Freudian world it is guilt that does this job, but only at the cost of great suffering for all. At least in Cabaret money is tied to a celebrative release, and though life as a whole may be seen as an empty process, there are islands of happiness along the way. Freud's civilization exists only at the pleasure of a harsh and tyrannical super-ego. This astigmatic view is the inevitable consequence of a psychology which is unable to understand the constructive uses of power. With this defect in comprehension goes an equal inability to give guilt a constructive place in man's psychology. Guilt is essential to the growth of the mastery capacities, just as shame guides the individual in the deepening of love and its workmanship. This guilt is not harsh and tyrannical, based as Freud saw it on the need for punishment, but is a signal that the individual has suffered a temporary loss in his world of opportunity. Without enough awareness to effectively manipulate a human situation, he suffers a sense of impoverishment. Something he could have possessed as a valued part of his life has faded from the picture, and the sense of loss is real to him. In a state of guilt men undergo a diminution in their energy for action and this opens the door to a deepening sense of self and of the nature of others. The ability to use guilt as an ally of the personality is essential to the expansion of human skill and responsibility.

A world cut off from the influence of constructive mastery is a helpless place. Freud's tyrannical super-ego is part of a psychology of abject submission, where self-control can only proceed from renunciation and a hunger for punishment. In such a world, civilization is only a thin veneer. The submission which Freud could not find in his personal life, a submission which could have enriched his love capacities and his search for truth, emerges at last as the role he assigns to civilization itself. Freud justifies this position by saying, in effect, look around you, see what a mess everything is in, but social progress does not follow a smooth path. There are limbo states to be endured, when the old is dying and the new has yet to demonstrate its full potential. Civilization is a succession of such periods of death and resurrection.

In spite of his personal courage in giving a name to topics not mentioned in elegant drawing rooms, Freud remained to the end a defender of the past. He was part of a rear guard action against the right of the common man to understand and control his own life. Freud's band of brothers, organized to murder a tyrannical father, is a myth. This idea took its being from Freud's celebrative self, a part of his psychology which he mistrusted and consequently never understood. He only gave it room in his love of the witty and humorous anecdote. He never saw his right to make enemies in his head and destroy them at will, entirely separate and apart from real experience. His band of brothers is like the fantasies of a child who creates the image of a pet lion to protect him from evil forces. Freud's own father was an intimidating figure who deprived his son of that sense of equality which alone can make submission an enriching mental state. Freud summoned the band of brothers from the same place pet lions come, to do vengeance on the object of his frustrated idealism. Freud carried a heavy burden of shame within his personality, which he strove to overcome by a compulsive investment in career. As many men have found, this process has no endpoint, because shame cannot be overcome through the deference of others. It has internal sources, and its voice cannot be drowned by applause. Freud was a full enough personality to judge himself, and by his own standards he was repeatedly found lacking. To cover the distressing nature of shame, he saw guilt everywhere. He preferred to see himself as the heir to an ancient guilt for father murder than to face shame that would have pointed his personality toward radical inner changes.

Freud included sadism under the umbrella concept of the death instinct:

Freud could not understand sadism because he lived in a psychological world highly colored by it. Sadism must be distinguished from the violence generated by the domain mechanism. Sadism arises from a base of perverted love and is the favored tool of fanatics of all kinds. It utilizes a delusional pseudo-concern for the welfare of the object. It assumes it has a unique access to truth which is above question. Freud's analysis of sadism as part of a death instinct explains nothing and grants sadism a permanent residency in the human character. The goal of sadism is not to injure the whole object, but to defend the perpetrator against submission. When awareness of the object threatens internal disorientation and anxiety, certain traits of the object are separated off, and these traits are subjected to destructive behavior. Since the object does not exist as a whole entity, the sadist has only one task, to validate his dominance over the isolated aspects he has chosen as his target. Whatever he does, since he is acting out of inner necessity, is covered by a blanket of freedom from moral scruples. In the delusional world of the sadist he is defending what is proper and right, and the goal is one of cleansing the human scene from contamination. This means he is a public servant accomplishing a necessary task for which even the object should be grateful. Nothing could be sadder than to see Freud confusing sadism with healthy dominance in the sexual area. Dominance in sexuality is paired to willing submission, and far from wiping out the identity of the object, it reinforces and develops that identity. His view makes it impossible to distinguish rape from voluntary sexual experience.

When Freud dealt with what he called the resistance of patients, he exposed the sadistic structure of his interpretative zeal. Resistance is a phenomenon provoked by Freud himself. Unless the growth process is understood, the therapist cannot evaluate the patient's ability to enter new psychological territory. It is the patient, and the patient alone, who can set the standards for the expansion of his insights. The offering of insights separate and apart from the individual's ability to make constructive use of such information is a sadistic act. Without love and its vision of the whole individual, the manipulation of another person's life in the name of helping him cannot avoid sadistic deterioration. Free association helped Freud isolate symptoms which became subject to interpretation as separate entities, while the need of the individual to maintain warmth and pride in himself as a whole person was ignored as unimportant. When a patient receives interpretations which are shaped to the progress he is making in his own growth, there is no occasion for resistance. The bringing of love into the picture as an essential element in human understanding is a necessity, and if recognized by psychiatrists has a revolutionary impact on their accepted view of professionalism. It is a challenge which Freud refused to face, thus steering his interest in a conventional medical direction, away from the broader access to human motivation which a science of human nature requires.

Whenever Freud invented a new instinct, he was able to give it a home in his concept of the Id. The Id was a convenient formulation because it had no defined boundaries. The Id provided an image of the primitive roots of human motivation which was supposed to reflect the actual circumstances of the life of animals in a jungle. This world of chaotic impulses, perverse and destructive in nature, is only a mirage. The march of evolutionary traits deserves to be treated with greater respect. The Id can only be found as a collection of fragmented thoughts and impulses, the product of states of psychological exhaustion. It was easy for Freud to regard the behavior of predatory animals capturing prey, especially in the presence of a snarling approach and the dripping of blood, as an example of primitive violence, but it is no different in its biological function than a visit of a civilized person to a supermarket. The competition of males for females in territorial ways is not governed by the release of wild and unpredictable impulses, but is a product of programmed patterns dictated by genes which have evolved over many thousands of years. Such behavior patterns, insofar as they contribute to the survival of the species, are a triumph of nature's workmanship.

The influence of religion. Freud never understood man's esthetic life. Discussing religious faith:

Freud is impatient with any religious imagery which does not need "a mighty personality" running the universe, because he is intent on finding the origins of religion in the relationship of a helpless child and an all powerful father. Freud implies an inevitable war between comforting beliefs and the search for truth. He could not comprehend that the life of pleasure and enjoyment could occupy a different place in man's personality from that which belongs to disciplined and reasoned understanding. Man does not only rest when he is asleep. He banishes stress whenever inner messages tell him that such pursuits have lost their relationship with reality. He cannot understand things when his experience with them is insufficient, nor can he control situations where his understanding of their nature is lacking. He must have unobstructed access to a world where human rewards can be gained just for the asking. In that part of his personality he believes what he wants and does what he chooses. This great territory is his esthetic life, and without its ability to hold full sway when it is needed, there is no way to guarantee mental health.

Freud saw the magical quality of the esthetic life as a threat to the existence of scientific thinking. Actually it is just the opposite. When men keep what is serious in its proper place, their ability to handle stress in facing the unknown and the chaotic increases many fold. Freud's access to human experience was so much under the control of conventional social institutions that his ambition to understand outran his ability to gather information. The heart of science lies in its capacity to position the self where new and significant observations can be made. Freud was the prisoner of a vision of life which was not his own. The searcher for human truth must grow himself if he is to comprehend the vicissitudes of growth in other people.

Freud saw religion as responsible for the inhibited mental state of older children and adults:

Freud now adds to his imaginary picture of repressed instinctual needs the stultifying effect of religious ideas. Again he grasps at straws to cover the vacuum in his own understanding. The biologically weak child is always vulnerable to a sense of the overwhelming nature of an unheeding and impersonal external reality, especially that part of reality which lies beyond the power of parents to control. If the child is soothed at times of potential anxiety with p