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Anyone reading Sigmund Freud's original works might well be seduced by the beauty of his prose, the elegance of his arguments and the acuity of his intuition. But those with a grounding in science will also be shocked by the abandon with which he elaborated his theories on the basis of essentially no empirical evidence. This is one of the main reasons why Freudian-style psychoanalysis has long since fallen out of fashion: its huge expense — treatment can stretch over years — is not balanced by evidence of efficacy. Clinical psychology at least has its roots in experimentation, but it...

A question for the ages is why the class of people we call the “intelligentsia” always seems to get the really big questions wrong. The three great movements that captured their attention: Freudianism, Marxism and Darwinism (and the present-day, “man-made global warming”) have now all been proven wrong by events or by scientific advances, but you would never know it from the positions of the organizations and bureaucracies that represent them, pushing on and trying to ridicule those calling attention to the events and to the science.

The End of Morality ... Like the Marxist who claims that everything is determined by socio-economic forces (except for himslef who, of course, has no class interest), and the Freudian with his determinant sexual urges and primal psychological forces (except for himself who somehow developed rational psychological theories), the Darwinist is a man at war with himself. For he is engaged in mortal combat with rationality itself...

Kinsey, Darwin and the sexual revolution by Jerry Bergman Alfred Kinsey is the father of the modern Western sexual revolution. A review of the life and work of Kinsey reveals Darwinism was critically important in his crusade to overturn traditional sexual morality. He tried achieving this goal by convincing the public and the scientific world that what was widely regarded as deviant behaviour then, including adultery, fornication, homosexuality, sadomasochism and paedophilia, were all widely practiced and therefore ‘normal’ and acceptable. Kinsey’s conclusions have now been shown by extensive empirical research to be fatally flawed. Kinsey’s sexual revolution has caused major...

Of Monsters, Moms, and Metal Men by: Bethany Stotts, February 04, 2009 What do psychology, Jurassic Park, Star Trek, and Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have in common? They represent lessons in developmental miscarriages, deadly toilet training, and inflamed bestial passions, according to three Modern Language Association (MLA) professors. Jurassic Park Robert Samuels’ interpretation of one of the more humorous scenes in the first Jurassic Park movie—where Lloyd is consumed by a female T-Rex who finds him cowering on the toilet—is unorthodox, to say the least. Ignoring the original intent of Steven Spielberg, Samuels, a lecturer at the...

In his essay, The Empire of the Ugly, the great Belgian Sinologist and literary essayist Simon Leys recounts the story of how, writing one day in a café, a small incident gave him an insight into the real nature of philistinism. A radio was playing in the background, a mixture of banal and miscellaneous chatter and equally banal popular music. No one in the café paid any attention to this stream of tepid drivel until suddenly, unexpectedly and inexplicably, the first bars of Mozart’s clarinet quintet were played. “Mozart,� Leys says, “took possession of our little space with a serene...

SIGMUND Freud died 68 years ago today, and it remains uncertain whether he is what W. H. Auden called him, “a whole climate of opinion / Under whom we conduct our differing lives,” or whether he is completely passé. Our confusion about Freud is something he predicted — and also provoked — particularly in his later work, now largely unread, which is preoccupied with the question of authority. It sheds light on our confused attitudes toward Freud, who always strove for cultural authority. But more important, books like “Totem and Taboo” and “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”...

Researchers who wanted to find out why it is not only taboo to kiss your sister, but also disgusting, said on Wednesday they have discovered why in a discovery that challenges some basic tenets of Freudian theory. The instinct evolved naturally and cannot be taught, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides of the University of California Santa Barbara wrote in their report in the journal Nature. Spending time in the same household and watching your mother care for your brother or sister is all it takes. This is all subconscious, of course, reported the researchers, who worked with Debra Lieberman of...

Freud's Will to Power BY RONALD W. DWORKIN November 29, 2006 Legend has it that Freud, although educated in the philosophies of his day, studiously avoided the work of Nietzsche to preserve the originality of his ideas against external influence. Nietzsche's analysis of the human psyche, how values were supposedly projections of people's unspoken jealousies and fears, ran dangerously close to Freud's idea (still a work in progress at the end of the 19th century) that the roots of conscious behavior lay in unconscious desires. But after reading Dr. Peter Kramer's outstanding new biography of Freud (HarperCollins, 213 pages, $21.95),...

One of the reasons why most MSM political writing is so shallow, is that it is analogous to a person with no knowledge of the unconscious writing about the mind. Such a person will necessarily place undue emphasis on conscious motivations, when for most people, the conscious mind is a fleeting jumble of patchwork improvisations compared to the more enduring patterns the unconscious mind. This applies both individually and collectively, for as I have stated in the past, a culture or subculture is like a public neurosis, while a neurosis is like a private culture. Religion, in its proper sense,...

VIENNA, Austria -- Organizers of a campaign trying to clear Vienna's streets of dog droppings urged residents Thursday to record how many turds they see in the space of five minutes and report the figure as part of an impromptu census. The Vienna Dog-Dropping Initiative said it would compile the figures and present them to city officials on Monday as part of its stepped-up effort to pressure the Austrian capital to deal with the problem.

A recent cover of Newsweek magazine jarred me. In bold type across the face of the magazine cover were these words: “Freud Is Not Dead.” Just being reminded of Sigmund Freud, the Viennese psychiatrist who redefined modern psychiatry and dismissed God as the figment of our imaginations, gave me cold chills. Here was the man whose influence has ushered in the age of therapy—excusing anyone’s behavior because they sucked their thumb too long as a baby. He’s also one of the great intellectual influences that led to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, for which we pay dearly to this...

It is time to rescue Freud from his detractors. He deserves a place alongside Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Kant as one of the authors of modernity and one of the greatest intellectuals of all time. (snip) There would have been no sexual revolution without his insistence that the repression of our deepest primal sexual urges can be profoundly costly. Without his introducing us to the world of the subconscious and how it responds to our deep twin urges, we would have understood ourselves immeasurably less well, even if some of his secondary theories have not stood the test of time....

(AP) PHILADELPHIA -- Barry Bonds is heading home, one behind the Babe. Bonds hit his 713th homer Sunday night, moving within one of tying Babe Ruth for second place on baseball's career list. The San Francisco Giants' slugger hit a mammoth shot in the sixth inning off Philadelphia right-hander Jon Lieber, sending a 2-1 pitch off the facade of the right-field upper deck during a 9-5 loss to the Phillies. "They tell me that's the way the Babe used to hit them," Giants manager Felipe Alou said. Bonds' fifth homer of the season was estimated at 450 feet, one of...

Considered the father of psychoanalysis, his influence continues to dominate modern medicine's view of how the typical human mind is organized. VIENNA, Austria — At the Cafe Freud, a watering hole two doors down from the apartment where Sigmund Freud plumbed the human psyche, a famous poster commands instant attention. It's a cartoon profile of the frowning father of psychoanalysis, with nose and eyebrows blending into the image of a naked woman. "What's on a man's mind?" reads a wry inscription in English, but the real question might be: What would your mother think? Mirth and melancholy, hubris and humor...

The grandson of pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud has been awarded $168,000 in the case against Swiss banks accused of betraying their Holocaust-era customers in favor of the Nazis. The estate of Anton Walter Freud, who died last year at age 83, will receive the money as part of a $3 million payout to 23 claimants, according to a written ruling Wednesday by US District Judge Edward Korman. The judge approved the payment in federal court in the New York City borough of Brooklyn based on the recommendation of a court-appointed tribunal that disburses funds set aside under a settlement between...

Protestors dressed a condoms hold a demonstration in front of the U.S. Federal Courthouse as U.S. President George W. Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove, appears before a grand jury in Washington, DC, October 14, 2005. The condom reference is towards the continuing investigation into the leak of a CIA operative's identity. REUTERS/Jim Young

‘The Question of God' The PBS ShowBreakPoint with Charles Colson September 14, 2004 It’s hard to imagine two institutions less associated with a classical Christian worldview than Harvard University and the Public Broadcasting System. That’s why it comes as a pleasant surprise that, starting September 15, the two will come together to give Christianity a chance to make its case against the secular alternative. The two-part series, airing September 15 and 22, is called “The Question of God.” It’s based on the book by my good friend Dr. Armand Nicholi, a professor at Harvard Medical School and editor of the...

Sigmund Freud had a concept he called “projection, which has been defined as a defense where the ego deals with unacceptable impulses and/or terrifying anxieties by attributing them to someone in the external world. In many ways I think that explains the behavior of the media’s current patron saint, Cindy Sheehan, whose hate rhetoric aimed at President Bush is really meant for someone else who she can’t admit even to herself is her real target. To do so would represent one of those “unacceptable impulses” Dr. Freud was talking about. In this case it could well be that Cindy Sheehan...

Ukraine played an important role in life of the famous Viennese doctor and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud. As a matter of fact, the family roots bound him to Halychyna in Western Ukraine, while his professional contacts were mainly in Odesa Solomon Freud, grandfather of the renowned psychiatrist, was born in the western Ukrainian town of Buchach in the Ternopil oblast, where his family had been living for several generations. Dreaming of getting an education, he went to the town of Tysmenytsia, which was known for its Yeshiva, Jewish school for studying the Talmud. Having married a local girl, the...

My father, a psychologist, once attended a public lecture by a student of Freud named Dr. Reich. The presentation was to grapple with the peculiar fact that every major culture has in its historical record a facsimile of the Biblical Flood story. All recount a deluge that shrunk the Earth's inhabitants into a very small cadre of survivors who then rebuilt. Reich hypothesized that there is a deep-seated fear of global annihilation that undermines humanity's confidence in its own existence. People then project backwards to fashion a mythology mirroring their insecurity. Dad raised his hand and offered an alternative solution...

Book Review: The Question of God By: Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr. There would surely be strong evidence to support the statement that C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud were two of most influential thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The similar threads that run thru their lives were quite striking, including great losses at early ages; disconnected relationships with their fathers and their materialistic atheistic worldview. Their lives were quite similar until that fateful day, until Lewis became a Christian. Dr. Armand M. Nicholi tells a truly fascinating tale of these two great thinkers and pulls...

Qualified psychiatrists would have to say whether John Kerry is mentally ill. But any layman should have no trouble recognizing he’s conducting one sick campaign. In the study of mental illness is a definable aberration known as “projection.” Sigmund Freud said that’s when a patient, threatened by or afraid of his own darker impulses, resorts to attaching those unacceptable qualities to someone else. One description in the psychiatric literature puts it this way: “Projection reinforces guilt by displacing it onto someone else, attacking it there and denying its presence in one’s self – an attempt to shift responsibility to others.”...

<p>Looking for more reading? Another book newly available on bookshelves is "The Clintons Meet Freud: A Psychohistory of Bill, Hillary and Chelsea," written by Dr. Paul Lowinger, a retired psychiatrist, and released yesterday by Knoll Press.</p> <p>The book examines former President Bill Clinton's "unconscious mind and personality," and looks at his "infancy, childhood, colorful mother, absent father, alcoholic stepfather and the Arkansas milieu in which he was raised," states a release by Knoll Press. "Clinton's sadomasochism, narcissism, Oedipus complex, fear of death, and his sexuality are central to the story of his accomplishments and mistakes."</p>

LONDON, May 28 — Who owns psychoanalysis? That question is at the center of the most recent battle here in the Freud Wars, the epic (or as the man himself might say, interminable) struggle over the legacy of Sigmund Freud, pioneer psychotherapist, cartographer of the unconscious and former resident of Hampstead, the leafy corner of Northwest London where the concentration of therapeutic couches per square mile may be even higher than on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Late last year a new group calling itself the College of Psychoanalysts sent out a letter inviting British therapists who met certain...

Studying the mechanisms of religious belief could lead to a better understanding of what goes on in the minds of people with psychiatric delusions. An international conference in Sydney this week will hear that some religious beliefs - including that a virgin gave birth to the son of God - qualify as delusions. Macquarie University PhD student Ryan McKay, who has been studying under one of Australia's leading authorities on delusions, Max Coltheart, said the idea that religion was a delusion dated back to Sigmund Freud about 100 years ago. In his presentation to the Cognitive Science Conference today Mr...

Sources: Suspect Bought Used Car With False ID Just Before Arrest LOS ANGELES, Calif. -- Accused double murderer Scott Peterson used an alias to purchase a used car in San Diego shortly before he was arrested, raising the possibility that he may have been trying to cover his tracks before fleeing, KNSD, the NBC affiliate in San Diego, learned. Three independent sources confirmed that Scott Peterson bought a car under suspicious circumstances less than two weeks ago, NBC's Steve Walker reported. None of the sources would appear on camera, but all of them agreed that the revelation is more evidence...

Sex ed and the destruction of American morality Posted: January 18, 2003 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have bad consequences. The ideas behind sex education have done more to destroy biblically based moral values than any other secular force in America. The first idea to become a battering ram against traditional sexual morality was Sigmund Freud's dictum that sexual repression causes neurosis. If sexual repression creates dysfunction, then the remedy, of course, is free sexual expression. That was not the cure Freud recommended, but Freud's ideas so strongly influenced American culture that...

They are: Machiavelli, the inventor of "the new morality"; The most amazing thing about this brutal philosophy is that it won the modern mind, though only by watering down or covering up its darker aspects Kant, the subjectivizer of Truth; He gave impetus to the turn from the objective to the subjective, including the redefinition of truth itself as subjective. The consequences have been catastrophic. Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed Anti-Christ; Nietzsche, the insane inventor of the "superman" was not only the favorite philosopher of Nazi Germany, he is the favorite philosopher of hell. Freud, the founder of the sexual revolution; Freud...