Before getting into the subject matter of this seventh post of my Substack, I think it’s time to reiterate the scope and my intentions for this series of essays. I also want to express gratitude that Substack and similar vehicles exist to enable communication of thoughts and ideas to potentially unlimited numbers of people. I have a long way to go, though, to build an substantial audience, and I appeal to you to help with this below.
I sent out my my first post this past April (2024), in which I made a stab at describing what this newsletter is about. Having now written seven of these, I can now do it a bit better, I think. I have deep interest in art of all sorts, especially literature and music, and in ideas that relate to the biggest questions: Existence, our place in it, our relationship to the universe, etc. — not coincidentally, all the things that great art probes. These are also subjects (among other, less cosmic ones) that I write about in my song lyrics. I hesitate to get more specific than that, since I don’t care to limit myself, so to get a better idea, please read my previous posts, which you can find on my Substack home page. Please also subscribe (free), share, and leave comments.
Now, on to today’s post:
I’ve been reading Earnest Becker’s landmark book from 1973, “Denial of Death” as I continue to process the implications of my new understanding of the Fall of Man story in Genesis, which I posted about here a few months ago. Becker was an acclaimed cultural anthropologist keenly interested in psychology and philosophy, and wrote this book at a time (coincidentally, in the same year my mother earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology) when the tide was turning against the Freudian dogma of psychology. I became interested in the book from the title alone (though moreso as I read an excerpt), since the central part of my understanding of the Fall of Man story was that it is an allegory about our consciousness of our mortality. A book with this title was therefore irresistable to me.
I don’t intend to write a book report or review — you can find plenty online, if you like. My main interest here is to convey my thoughts and understanding about the whole enterprise of psychology, especially where Freud’s largely wacky ideas came from. Freud’s life work was to fulfill his half-genius idea of setting this field on the same footing as medical science of the body (he was trained as a physician). I say “half-genius” because while the idea of doing so seems more than laudible goal, and provides a north star for a whole emergent discipline of psychology, in my opinion it was doomed to failure anytime in the near future (by which I mean for at least hundreds of years, if ever). This opinion rests on the notion that human psychology is so fantastically amorphous, complex, and individual that developing a theory that encompases much of human psychology is something we are nowhere near ready for. It reminds me of the old saw about why physicists don’t do biology: Because it’s too complicated. Pretty much everyone has the same organs, bones, anatomy, etc.; on the other hand, everyone has a different psychology, so the prospect of erecting a theory that encompasses everyone seems rather hopeless to me.
Nevertheless, one can imagine that some progress might be possible and even useful in the psychological realm. One area of hope is to categorize and describe the gross emotional conditions that cause suffering. Deep depression and schizophrenia are two examples. Another is to understand what the origins of these conditions might be — what is their ontology? I think it’s reasonable to say that some modest progress has been made in these areas, though only, it appears, in such extreme conditions as mentioned above. Describing and categorizing what Freud, along with most psychologists today, label as “neurotic,” a much milder “condition,” is frought with difficulty, to the point of being nonsesensical. As far as I can tell, a “neurotic” person is simply someone with anxieties. I.e., all of us. This is not productive science.
I would suggest — with the caution that I am no expert — that the treatment of psychological “conditions” (scare quotes due to the doubtfulness of universal identifications and descriptions of such supposed conditions) is far less developed and useful than the categorizations described above. I say this not only as someone whose mother was a clinical psychologist for decades, but as one who has been “treated” for much of my life by at least half a dozen psychologists (and known many others). I can see clearly now (which I couldn’t before; otherwise, I’d not have tried again and again) that none of them did a bit of good for me (I am considered a “neurotic” by the establishment).
But, as I mentioned, the ontological aspects might have merit, and do interest me. I think it’s not hard to understand, for example, that trauma of varying types, might be followed by suffering in response (PTSD). You can use your imagination here, as I don’t think this is controversial. Freud sought to find the earliest universal traumatic experiences that shaped everyone’s psyche, and to describe categories of variations on these experiences that result in psychological disease. I believe he failed spectacularly.
I will interject here that I am not one who thinks that Freud was entirely wrong about everything. He was a very powerful and lucid writer, and had plenty of ideas that had at least some kernel of truth to them. His model of the mind, composed of id, ego, and superego, for example, seems to have some utility, and is not far from ancient Buddhist constructs of the mind. I am addressing here only Freud’s ontological theories of psychological development, though these are admittidly what he is most famous and best known for.
Freud postulated — and maintained the correctness of these ideas to his death — that the root traumas of most phychological development and disease were sexual in nature. The castration complex, the Oedipal complex, etc. These have been broadly discredited. It’s amazing to me that they were ever seriously credited at all. For example: The castration complex is about the universal anxiety of small boys, upon discovery that they mother has no penis (she lost her penis!), that they will lose theirs, too. Even apart from the content of it, it seems to me that the idea fails simply on the basis of universality: I don’t believe that more than a tiny number of infant boys are exposed to their mothers’ genitals, and thus, this “trauma” cannot be close to universal.
Becker seems to have a highly ambivalent attitude toward Freud. He clearly considers him to be a genius of the first magnitude, and credits some of these ontological ideas (including the castration complex, which I’ll return to in a moment). But overall, he sides with Otto Rank (an apostate disciple of Freud whose esoteric work Becker’s book is largely a distillation and summary of), who instead believed that the universal trauma is the death awareness, not sexual in nature. With this, I agree entirely. It at least passes the “universality test” that Freud’s sexual ontology fails at miserably.
However, Becker does accept much of Freud. For example, when he discusses fetishes, Becker claims (without support) that shoes are by far the most common fetish (somehow related, he claims, to the ugly, animalistic appearance of human feet), and goes further to say why the shoe fetishist becomes obsessed with them: Because they are the last thing the small child sees before he looks up to see his mother’s penis missing (thus hooking into the castration anxiety)! Wow. I mean….wow. Again, I ask first: How many mothers of infant boys are running around with their genitals exposed while wearing shoes, and how many infant boys are observing that? Never mind the doubious psychological and ontological connections with such an imagined “trauma.”
This brings me to the main question of this post: How on earth could such ideas have originated and promulgated so broadly and gained such acceptance in the period between the writings of William James and Freud’s death, which is, in some sense regarded as the “golden age” of psychanalytic theory development? (I may return in another post to the much more sensible and intuitive — and, I think, much more powerful — replacement of these ideas with the trauma of awareness of death, but I’ll set that aside for now.)
There seems to have been something in the water when Frued was starting out. I am not nearly well enough read in Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, and others of the period even to pretend to understand the details of how these ideas developed and became accepted. However, I do have an analogy to offer that I think may help to explain. First, though, I have to provide a little background on literary theory.
I have written elsewhere about the literary critic Harold Bloom. Perhaps his most famous work is “The Anxiety of Influence,” about the effect of a writer’s literary ancestors on the writer herself. One can already see a parallel with Freud: Both Bloom and Freud are interested in accounting for the psychological responses to trauma — in the writer’s case, the trauma and anxiety of having to “measure up” to the great writers who came before. (Writers are almost universally voracious readers, so the literature they consume becomes analogous to their family of origin.) I find the use of the word “anxiety” by Bloom particularly fascinating.
Out of this question, Bloom develops, among other ideas, the notions of “weak” and “strong” misreadings of literature. Weak misreadings are the common ones, where the reader is too ignorant, lazy, or otherwise incompetent to accurately and fully understand what the writer is saying. Shakespeare, judging by pretty much every performance of his plays I’ve ever seen, provides endless examples of weak misreadings. Academics like Bloom sought to erdicate weak misreading (by teaching, for example, close reading techniques).
Strong misreading, though, are very different, and much more interesting. This is where the anxiety comes in for Bloom: Creative types — and here, we are talking about writers, but the idea could be extended to other arts — anxiously desiring their work to be influencial, interpret their predecessor’s work to their own advantage. From Hillel Halkin’s review of Bloom’s “The Book of J”:
Strong misreadings are rare, and occur, according to Bloom, when vigorous and original minds take possession of literary texts or traditions for their own purposes by creatively distorting them, seizing on possibilities of interpretation that ordinary strong readers would reject as implausible. Such forceful appropriations are a new talent’s or generation’s way of clearing a space for itself, an antidote to the anxiety of influence. To resort to a psychological metaphor of which Bloom is fond, the sons become the fathers of their literary progenitors by recasting them in their own image. An example Bloom has given of this is what he takes to be rabbinic Judaism’s strong misreading of the Bible, which robbed it of its primal power while laying a foundation for the grand edifice of rabbinic thought.
The Christian strong misreading of The Fall of Man story in Genesis, as I wrote about previously, as “original sin” is clearly a much more far-reaching example. Wordsworth’s strong misreading of “Paradise Lost” (some might say that who he actually misread was Satan) is another famous example.
A creative person will often strongly misread (or misinterpret a painting or a piece of music, etc.), since the reader (viewer, listener) can only bring his own sensibilities and experience to bear. Since he is creative by nature, there will be a tendency to reformulate and reinterpret the material in a creative, original way. Bloom went further, characterizing such strong misreadings as a type of defense mechanism, enabling the writer to carve out space for his own creative work. It is not that the creative person is intentionally misreading; she simply can’t help it; it’s how she’s built. (Bloom remarks that the only correct reading would be to recite the work word for word, a rather empty act for a creative type.) Adding ambition — or, if you like, anxiety to have influence — to the mix results in a situation where the strong misreading may take on a life of its own, even to the point of inaugurating a movement or a school of thought.
Freud began his career in the context of William James’s astonishing breadth of insightful writings on psychology and philosophy, and not long after the incredible flowering of philosophical writers in the nineteenth century, notably: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Emerson, Neitzsche, and many others. There was little to no separation then between philosophy and psychology. How could a great creative thinker like Freud distinguish himself — “clear space for himself” — in this group? I submit that it was by strongly misreading his predecessors and inventing a wholly new understanding of the human mind. The correctness of this new understanding was of less importance than its originality. This, I believe, is how we got Freud. How beautifully ironic that it centers on his own anxieties!
To the extent I have read Freud and others, my sense is one of wonderfully creative people tossing around wonderfully creative and fanciful ideas with one another, getting “high on their own supply.” The ideas are heady — after all, they are aiming at uncovering the origins of emotional suffering! They are also creative and original, which adds to their appeal. The anecdotal evidence they had — which I strongly suspect was really a compilation of what we now call information bias — was soft enough to shape to fit their “theories.” (I put “theories” in scare quotes to denote that, as a scientist, I cannot recognize them as true theories, since they are not formulated as proper hypotheses, nor are they testable in controlled ways, both necessary to qualify as theory.) I suspect that Freud’s sexual ontology ideas solidified before anywhere near enough evidence had been collected to even begin to confirm them. I also suspect that his disciples began to peel away as they began to see that they were not sustainable. On at least two occasions, Freud famously begged Jung, as the latter began to waver, not to publicly call his sexual ontology ideas into question — which I recount to show that this is not how honest scientists behave. It’s how corrupt and/or anxious ones do.
Again, I admit that I am no scholor of psychology, nor of its development, but as a big part of this substack is about connecting various ideas and strands from different fields, I think there’s something here connecting Bloom’s anxiety of influence to the creation of Freud’s frankly wacky ideas. Just my thought of the week.
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