The Pillars of Unbelief—Freud by Peter Kreeft 30/9/19 4(26

The Pillars of Unbelief—Freud

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Just as we have pillars of

Christian faith, the saints, so Source: Jan-Feb 1988
National Catholic Register
are there individuals who
have become pillars of
unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers with an
enormous impact on everyday life, and with great harm to the
Christian mind:

Machiavelli - inventor of "the new morality"

Kant - subjectivizer of Truth
Nietzsche - self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"
Freud - founder of the "sexual revolution"
Marx - false Moses for the masses, and
Sartre - apostle of absurdity.

He was the Columbus of the psyche. No psychologist alive escapes

his influence.

Yet, along with flashes of genius, we find the most bizarre ideas in
his writings—e.g., that mothers cuddle their babies only as a
substitute for their desire to have sexual intercourse with them.

Sigmund Freud's most influential teaching is his sexual

reductionism. As an atheist, Freud reduces God to a dream of man.

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As a materialist, he reduces man to his body, the human body to

animal desire, desire to sexual desire and sexual desire to genital
sex. All are oversimplifications.

Freud was a scientist, and in some ways a great one. But he

succumbed to an occupational hazard: the desire to reduce the
complex to the controllable. He wanted to make psychology into a
science, even an exact science. But this it can never be because its
object, man, is not only an object but also a subject, an "I."

At the basis of our century's "sexual revolution" is a demand for

satisfaction and a confusion between needs and wants. All normal
human beings have sexual wants or desires. But it's simply not true,
as Freud constantly assumes, that these are needs or rights; that no
one can be expected to live without gratifying them; or to suppress
them is psychologically unhealthy.

This confusion between needs and wants stems from the denial of
objective values and an objective natural moral law. No one has
caused more havoc in this crucial area than Freud, especially
regarding sexual morality. The modern attack on marriage and the
family, for which Freud set the stage, has done more damage than
any war or political revolution. For where else do we all learn the
most important lesson in life—unselfish love—except in stable
families who preach it by practicing it?

Yet, with all his faults, Freud still towers above the psychologies
that replaced him in popular culture. Despite his materialism, he
explores some of the deeper mysteries of the soul. He had a real
sense of tragedy, suffering and unhappiness. Honest atheists are
usually unhappy; dishonest atheists happy. Freud was an honest

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atheist.

And his honesty made him a good scientist. He believed that the
mere act of raising up some repression or fear from the hidden
darkness of the unconscious into the light of reason would free us
from its power over us. It was the faith that truth is more powerful
than illusion, light than darkness. Unfortunately, Freud classified all
religion as mankind's most fundamental illusion and materialistic
scientism as his only light.

We should distinguish sharply among three different dimensions in

Freud. First, as an inventor of the practical, therapeutic technique of
psychoanalysis, he's a genius and every psychologist is in his debt.
Just as it's possible for a Christian philosopher like Augustine or
Aquinas to use the categories of non-Christian philosophers like
Plato and Aristotle, it's possible for a Christian psychiatrist to use
the techniques of Freud without subscribing to his religious views.

Second, Freud as a theoretical psychologist is like Columbus,

mapping out new continents but also making some serious mistakes.
Some of these are excusable, as Columbus' were, by the newness of
the territory. But others are simply prejudices, such as the reduction
of all guilt to pathological feeling and failure to see that faith in God
could ever have anything to do with love.

Third, Freud as a philosopher and religious thinker is strictly an

amateur and little more than an adolescent. Let's explore these
points one by one.

Freud's greatest work is certainly "The Interpretation of Dreams."

Investigating dreams as a printout of the subconscious seems
obvious today. But it was utterly new to Freud's contemporaries. His
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The Pillars of Unbelief—Freud by Peter Kreeft 30/9/19 4(26

mistake was not to overemphasize the subconscious forces that

move us, but to underemphasize their depth and complexity, as an
explorer of a new continent might mistake it for simply a large
island.

Freud discovered that hysterical patients who seemed to have no

rational cause for their disorders were helped by what he called "the
talking cure," using "free association" and paying attention to
"Freudian slips" as clues from the subconscious. In a word, the thing
worked despite the inadequacies of the theory behind it.

On the level of psychological theory, Freud divided the psyche into

the id, the ego and the super ego. This seems at first to be quite
similar to the traditional and commonsensical division into
appetites, will and intellect (and conscience) that began with Plato.
But there are crucial differences.

First, Freud's "super-ego" is not the intellect or conscience, but the

unfree, passive reflection in the individual's psyche of society's
restrictions on his desires—"thou shalt nots." What we take to be
our own insight into real good and evil is only a mirror of man-
made social laws, according to Freud.

Second, the "ego" is not free will but a mere facade. Freud denied
the existence of free will, he was a determinist and saw man as a
complex animal-machine.

Finally, the "id" ("it") is the only real self, according to Freud, and
it's comprised simply of animal desires. It is impersonal; thus the
name "it." Freud thus is denying the existence of a real personality,
individual I-ness. Just as he denied God ("I Am"), he denies God's
image, the human "I."
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The Pillars of Unbelief—Freud by Peter Kreeft 30/9/19 4(26

Freud's philosophical ideas are most candidly expressed in his two

most famous anti-religious books, "Moses and Monotheism" and
"The Future of an Illusion." Like Marx, he dismissed all religion as
infantile without seriously examining its claims and arguments. But
he did come up with a detailed explanation of the supposed origin of
this "illusion." It has basically four parts: ignorance, fear, fantasy
and guilt.

As ignorance, religion is a pre-scientific guess at how nature works:

If there is thunder, there must be a Thunderer, a Zeus. As fear,
religion is our invention of a heavenly substitute for the earthly
father when he dies, gets old, goes away or sends his children out of
the secure home into the frightening world of responsibility. As
fantasy, God is the product of wish-fulfillment that there's an all-
powerful providential force behind the terrifyingly impersonal
appearances of life. And as guilt, God is the ensurer of moral
behavior.

Freud's explanation of the origin of guilt is one of the weakest parts

of his theory. It amounts to the story that once, long ago, a son killed
his father, the head of a great tribe. That primal murder has haunted
the human race's subconscious memory ever since. But this is no
explanation at all; Why did the first murderer feel guilt?

Freud's most philosophical book was his last, "Civilization and its
Discontents." In it he raised the great question of the summum
bonum—the greatest good, the meaning of life and human
happiness. He concluded as Ecclesiastes did, that it is unattainable.
"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," he says in effect. Instead, he
promised to move us through successful psychotherapy, "from

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The Pillars of Unbelief—Freud by Peter Kreeft 30/9/19 4(26

unmanageable unhappiness to manageable unhappiness."

One reason for his pessimism was his belief that there's a
contradiction inherent in the human condition; this is the point of his
title, "Civilization and its Discontents." On the one hand, we are
animals seeking pleasure, motivated only by "the pleasure
principle." On the other hand, we need the order of civilization to
save us from the pain of chaos. But the restrictions of civilization
curtail our desires. So the very thing we invented as a means to our
happiness becomes our obstacle.

Toward the end of his life, Freud's thought became even darker and
more mysterious as he discovered thanatos, the death wish. The
pleasure principle leads us in two opposite directions: eros and
thanatos. Eros leads us forward, into life, love, the future and hope.
Thanatos leads us back to the womb, where alone we had no pain.

We resent life and our mothers for birthing us into pain. This
mother-hate parallels the famous "Oedipus complex" or
subconscious desire to murder our father and marry our mother—
which is a perfect explanation of Freud's own atheism, resenting
Father God and marrying Mother Earthiness.

As Freud was dying, Hitler was coming to power. Freud

prophetically saw the power of the death wish in the modern world
and was unsure which of these two "heavenly forces," as he called
them, would win out. He died an atheist but almost a mystic. He had
enough of the pagan in him to offer some profound insights, usually
mixed up with outrageous blind spots. He calls to mind C.S. Lewis'
description of pagan mythology: "gleams of celestial strength and
beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility."

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What raises Freud far above Marx and secular humanism is his
insight into the demon in man, the tragic dimension of life and our
need for salvation. Unfortunately, he saw the Judaism he rejected
and the Christianity he scorned as fairy tales, too good to be true.
His tragic sense was rooted in his separation between the true and
the good, "the reality principle" and happiness.

Only God can join them at their summit.

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