Free Republic

Millions of people around the world will crack a smile today as they watch the 33 Chilean miners finally being hoisted back to life. But Those Who Know Better, the overlords of the therapy industry, see something different: not a happy ending to a two-month nightmare, but the start of an even longer nightmare of ill-health, craziness and PTSD for these unfortunate creatures from the dark. According to the experts, what we’re really witnessing in Chile today is a volcanic eruption of human instability, as 33 ticking timebombs of emotional frailty are raised to the surface. One psycho-expert, echoing an...

Ah, civilization and its malcontents. So it turns out Emma Freud is the creative and marital partner of Richard Curtis, who wrote the blood-crazed terror video everyone's talking about -- an eco-fascist snuff fantasy that relishes publicly executing children for the sake of Gaia, now splattering on a computer screen near you. Emma is the great-granddaughter of Dr. Sigmund Freud, who knew a thing or two about bloody primal urges. Freud described people as driven by thanatos, a death drive that yearns for destruction and violence, which is repressed by civilization. But even good old Siggy might have marveled at...

Does Obama’s anti-democratic ideology result from his dysfunctional childhood? An intriguing book, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, by Paul Vitz, argues this type background is a common precursor to the classic tyrant’s personality. This suggests Barack’s beef with America might result from his own deficient past. Does it matter the source of our politician’s mental makeup? Of course it does. After all, we expect leaders to make policy based on empirical knowledge, not just knee-jerk reaction to past trauma. For example, would Americans be pleased if the president outlawed taxis because his pooch was run over by...

All those years, all that money, all that unrequited love. It began way back when I was a child, an anxiety-riddled 10-year-old who didn’t want to go to school in the morning and had difficulty falling asleep at night. Even in a family like mine, where there were many siblings (six in all) and little attention paid to dispositional differences, I stood out as a neurotic specimen. And so I was sent to what would prove to be the first of many psychiatrists in the four and a half decades to follow — indeed, I could be said to be...

Americans have always expected national television broadcasters to steer clear of degrading epithets. On April 14, 2009, CNN's Anderson Cooper established a new low in television journalism when he labeled millions of Americans in the Tea Party movement with a vulgar sexual term. Other mainstream media journalists and personalities gleefully followed suit. There was no outcry from the "anti-hate community." Many liberals do not merely tolerate contumelies against conservatives, but they delight in them. In the years after World War II, psychologists (many of whom were European Jews who had escaped Nazism) intensively studied how fascist and authoritarian states could...

The "Century of the Self" documents how Freud's ideas and various counter arguments have dominated how big business and government have interacted with the American masses over the past century. It was produced by the BBC roughly ten years ago and is regarded as one of the best documentaries of all time. The central thesis is the tug of war between the idea that the great mass of citizenry is an unstable swamp of barbaric instinctual drives and anxieties or is capable of using their better selfs to dominate these drives. It is a competition between the views of treating...

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...