Freud

Freud is a Fraud? Lots of people say yes. Others swallow his story. Sigmund Freud invented psychoanalysis. Some people think he was a genius. Others think he was a charlatan who used the sexual witterings of neurotic women to produce dubious claims. Freud was a Jew, of a tribe of liars and deceivers. He was one of the most successful of them.

Sigmund Freud ex Wiki
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Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical method of psychoanalysis for investigating the mind and treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst. Freud established sexual drives as the primary motivational forces of human life, developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association, discovered the phenomenon of transference in the therapeutic relationship and established its central role in the analytic process; he interpreted dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was an early neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy, and a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the history, interpretation and critique of culture.
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The Wiki has an agenda. Concealing the truth about Jews is very much part of it.

 

Charlatan Or Genius
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There are no neutrals in the Freud wars. Admiration, even downright adulation, on one side; skepticism, even downright disdain, on the other. This is not hyperbole. A psychoanalyst who is currently trying to enshrine Freud in the pantheon of cultural heroes must contend with a relentless critic who devotes his days to exposing Freud as a charlatan. But on one thing the contending parties agree: for good or ill, Sigmund Freud, more than any other explorer of the psyche, has shaped the mind of the 20th century. The very fierceness and persistence of his detractors are a wry tribute to the staying power of Freud's ideas.

There is nothing new about such embittered confrontations; they have dogged Freud's footsteps since he developed the cluster of theories he would give the name of psychoanalysis. His fundamental idea--that all humans are endowed with an unconscious in which potent sexual and aggressive drives, and defenses against them, struggle for supremacy, as it were, behind a person's back--has struck many as a romantic, scientifically unprovable notion. His contention that the catalog of neurotic ailments to which humans are susceptible is nearly always the work of sexual maladjustments, and that erotic desire starts not in puberty but in infancy, seemed to the respectable nothing less than obscene. His dramatic evocation of a universal Oedipus complex, in which (to put a complicated issue too simply) the little boy loves his mother and hates his father, seems more like a literary conceit than a thesis worthy of a scientifically minded psychologist.

Freud first used the term psychoanalysis in 1896, when he was already 40. He had been driven by ambition from his earliest days and encouraged by his doting parents to think highly of himself. Born in 1856 to an impecunious Jewish family in the Moravian hamlet of Freiberg (now Pribor in the Czech Republic), he moved with the rest of a rapidly increasing brood to Vienna. He was his mother's firstborn, her "golden Siggie." In recognition of his brilliance, his parents privileged him over his siblings by giving him a room to himself, to study in peace. He did not disappoint them. After an impressive career in school, he matriculated in 1873 in the University of Vienna and drifted from one philosophical subject to another until he hit on medicine. His choice was less that of a dedicated healer than of an inquisitive explorer determined to solve some of nature's riddles.

As he pursued his medical researches, he came to the conclusion that the most intriguing mysteries lay concealed in the complex operations of the mind. By the early 1890s, he was specializing in "neurasthenics" (mainly severe hysterics); they taught him much, including the art of patient listening. At the same time he was beginning to write down his dreams, increasingly convinced that they might offer clues to the workings of the unconscious, a notion he borrowed from the Romantics. He saw himself as a scientist taking material both from his patients and from himself, through introspection. By the mid-1890s, he was launched on a full-blown self-analysis, an enterprise for which he had no guidelines and no predecessors.

The book that made his reputation in the profession--although it sold poorly--was The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), an indefinable masterpiece--part dream analysis, part autobiography, part theory of the mind, part history of contemporary Vienna. The principle that underlay this work was that mental experiences and entities, like physical ones, are part of nature. This meant that Freud could admit no mere accidents in mental procedures. The most nonsensical notion, the most casual slip of the tongue, the most fantastic dream, must have a meaning and can be used to unriddle the often incomprehensible maneuvers we call thinking.

Although the second pillar of Freud's psychoanalytic structure, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), further alienated him from the mainstream of contemporary psychiatry, he soon found loyal recruits. They met weekly to hash out interesting case histories, converting themselves into the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1908. Working on the frontiers of mental science, these often eccentric pioneers had their quarrels. The two best known "defectors" were Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. Adler, a Viennese physician and socialist, developed his own psychology, which stressed the aggression with which those people lacking in some quality they desire--say, manliness--express their discontent by acting out. "Inferiority complex," a much abused term, is Adlerian. Freud did not regret losing Adler, but Jung was something else. Freud was aware that most of his acolytes were Jews, and he did not want to turn psychoanalysis into a "Jewish science." Jung, a Swiss from a pious Protestant background, struck Freud as his logical successor, his "crown prince." The two men were close for several years, but Jung's ambition, and his growing commitment to religion and mysticism--most unwelcome to Freud, an aggressive atheist--finally drove them apart.

Freud was intent not merely on originating a sweeping theory of mental functioning and malfunctioning. He also wanted to develop the rules of psychoanalytic therapy and expand his picture of human nature to encompass not just the couch but the whole culture. As to the first, he created the largely silent listener who encourages the analysand to say whatever comes to mind, no matter how foolish, repetitive or outrageous, and who intervenes occasionally to interpret what the patient on the couch is struggling to say. While some adventurous early psychoanalysts thought they could quantify just what proportion of their analysands went away cured, improved or untouched by analytic therapy, such confident enumerations have more recently shown themselves untenable. The efficacy of analysis remains a matter of controversy, though the possibility of mixing psychoanalysis and drug therapy is gaining support.

Freud's ventures into culture--history, anthropology, literature, art, sociology, the study of religion--have proved little less controversial, though they retain their fascination and plausibility and continue to enjoy a widespread reputation. As a loyal follower of 19th century positivists, Freud drew a sharp distinction between religious faith (which is not checkable or correctable) and scientific inquiry (which is both). For himself, this meant the denial of truth-value to any religion whatever, including Judaism. As for politics, he left little doubt and said so plainly in his late--and still best known--essay, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), noting that the human animal, with its insatiable needs, must always remain an enemy to organized society, which exists largely to tamp down sexual and aggressive desires. At best, civilized living is a compromise between wishes and repression--not a comfortable doctrine. It ensures that Freud, taken straight, will never become truly popular, even if today we all speak Freud.

In mid-March 1938, when Freud was 81, the Nazis took over Austria, and after some reluctance, he immigrated to England with his wife and his favorite daughter and colleague Anna "to die in freedom." He got his wish, dying not long after the Nazis unleashed World War II by invading Poland. Listening to an idealistic broadcaster proclaiming this to be the last war, Freud, his stoical humor intact, commented wryly, "My last war."

Yale historian Peter Gay's 22 books include Freud: A Life for Our Times
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The main stream media take a position. Read for yourself. Think for yourself. Decide for yourself.

 

Peter Swales, Former Assistant To The Rolling Stones Said To Have Discovered Sigmund Freud’s Guilty Secret
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He worked on the Stones’ gig in Hyde Park and claimed that Freud had arranged an abortion for his wife’s sister after getting her pregnant

Peter Swales, who has died aged 73, was a former assistant to the Rolling Stones and self-taught Freud scholar who scandalised admirers of the “father of psychoanalysis” with his delvings into the historical Sigmund Freud.

In 1998 the New York Times praised his “remarkable detective work over the last 25 years, revealing the true identities of several early patients of Freud’s who had been known only by their pseudonyms”.

But Swales, who described himself as “the punk historian of psychoanalysis” and as the “Philip Marlowe of Freud studies”, became notorious when, in 1981, he maintained that Freud had had a secret affair with his wife Martha’s younger sister Minna Bernays – “bonking, as they say in the British press” – and had arranged for her to have an abortion after she became pregnant.

Minna was known to be close to the Freuds. She moved in with them in the 1890s, and Minna and Freud would sometimes holiday together. Nonetheless the traditional view, promoted by Freud’s followers, was of a scientist of flawless integrity with a reputation for rigid personal morality.

“I was inclined to think, well, what guy who went off on at least twelve documented occasions on holidays to the Alps with his wife’s sister, beginning when he’s 44 and she’s 35 and at the prime of her life, and with whom he has a strong intellectual rapport – my gut reaction was, well, if the man didn’t f--- her, then he’s got to be nuts,” Swales told Rolling Stone magazine in 1984.

Swales had, however, come to his controversial conclusion after examining a case study, described in Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), of a young man who has forgotten the word “aliquis” from a line from Virgil: “Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor” (“Let someone rise up from my bones as an avenger!”).

Encouraged by Freud, the patient then “free-associates” the meaning of aliquis to “Italy”, to “liquid”, and then to “blood”, leading Freud to conclude that the lapse of memory represented an unconscious expression of the man’s fear that a certain young woman might miss her period.

“It stank,” Swales recalled. “It was too good to be true.” The young man, Swales believed, was Freud himself, and the “aliquis incident” concerned his affair with Minna and reflected his own feelings of guilt over her pregnancy and its termination.

In 1900, he noted, Minna had spent some weeks at a health spa in Merano in the Italian Alps, supposedly for respiratory troubles. Swales argued that Minna’s subsequent symptoms fitted those of a septic abortion.

Swales’s claims were rubbished by Freud admirers who had also dismissed a claim by Carl Jung, Freud’s disciple turned archrival, that Minna had confessed to an affair with Freud, as malice on Jung’s part.

In 2006, however, a German sociologist found evidence in the register of the Schweizerhaus, an inn in Maloja in the Swiss Alps, that during a two-week vacation in August 1898, Freud and Minna had stayed in a double room as a married couple – a discovery that led at least some defenders of Freud’s moral probity to change their minds.

Swales hailed the find as “the icing on the cake”. Freud and Minna, he observed “were playing out an imposture. This discovery makes Freud much more interesting as a human being but more dubious as a sexual scientist because he was less than honest about his own sexuality.”

Peter Joffre Swales was born on June 5 1948 in Haverfordwest, Wales. His father, Joffre, was a musician and his mother Nancy, née Evans, ran a music shop.

A bright boy and a youthful steam locomotive buff, Peter was educated at Haverfordwest Grammar School. In the early 1960s, however, growing his hair long, he began bunking off to London to hear his favourite rock bands and was expelled from school in 1965.

He landed a trainee position in the record-sales division of EMI in London and soon moved into the promotions department of Marmalade Records, where he caught the attention of Giorgio Gomelsky, the first manager of the Yardbirds and the Rolling Stones.

In 1968, through Gomelsky, he landed an interview for a promotional job with the Stones and walked into a Georgian town house in Chelsea to find a 25-year-old Mick Jagger in a drawing room furnished with a dark altar covered with drapes and candles.

Swales was unimpressed: “Jagger talked such a lot of rot,” he told Rolling Stone in 1984. “All this revolutionary stuff… It was pretty weird, because he kept poncing about in front of a mirror in his long hair and make-up. A right little Narcissus.”

Jagger gave him a job as a general assistant to the band and the following year he was involved in organising the “Stones In The Park” gig in Hyde Park.

But Swales was wary of getting too close to band members: “I remember once smoking a huge joint in the studio of Jagger’s Chelsea home. Mick made tea, then took me around to look at his new Moog. Suddenly I got incredibly paranoid, partly under the influence of a bit of dope, and I started thinking, ‘He’s coming on to me; he’s gay! He’s always pouting and doing these weird things at me.’ And I got really scared... I fled the house at the earliest possible moment.”

He left the Stones in January 1970 “because most people who go to work for the Rolling Stones tend to become swallowed by the myth and spend all their time being appendages. I felt that I had my own life to live.”

With financial assistance from Prince Rupert Loewenstein, the Stones’ personal financial adviser, he founded a rock management company called Sahara, and in 1972 moved to New York, where he was appointed vice-president of Stonehill, a new publishing venture that was planning to issue a collection of Sigmund Freud’s writings about his experiments with cocaine.

Swales had become interested in drug culture while working with the Stones, and working on the book , published as Cocaine Papers in 1974, triggered a fascination with the psychoanalyst. He left Stonehill having decided to devote himself to researching Freud’s life.

Returning to Britain he sequestered himself in the British Museum reading room and travelled across Europe to interview experts before returning to the US.

Reading through Freud’s writings, along with associated literature from medical journals, Swales began to put the fragments of Freud’s life into chronological order. He discovered huge gaps in the narrative, partly because of Freud’s reluctance to divulge much about his personal life.

The picture that emerged from his researches, published in numerous papers, was not a pleasant one. Freud, he felt, was not a man of science but an inventor of personas who misrepresented the outcomes of the treatments on which he based his theories, a man who could brook no dissent among his followers, and who bullied his patients into accepting his ideas.

Far from being the “ultra-rational” paragon of psychoanalysis, Freud, Swales argued, “was a man torn by all kinds of secret lusts, passions, thirst for revenge, murderous wishes, and hostility toward the Church and political establishment”.

To his proponents the ideas Freud introduced – a way to look at inner desires and hidden motivation – are central to understanding the human psyche. Many reacted with fury when Freud’s work and ethics began coming under attack from sceptics like Swales, who duly gave as good as he got.

The “Freud Wars” as they were known, reached a vituperative intensity over a much publicised Library of Congress exhibition, “Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture”, that was scheduled for 1996.

The exhibition was nearly stopped in its tracks when Swales initiated a petition of protest complaining that it would be a “Freudfest” designed to airbrush Freud’s darker side, and demanding that the show should “adequately reflect the full spectrum of informed opinion about the status of Freud’s contribution to intellectual history.”

About 50 people signed it, including Oliver Sacks, Gloria Steinem and Frederick Crews, the author of books critical of Freud.

The show finally opened in October 1998, the effect of its assemblages of Freud’s writings tempered somewhat by quotes emblazoned above the displays such as Germaine Greer’s observation: “Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.”

Swales did not go and see the show, claiming that “it’d be a bit like inviting a gourmet to go eat at McDonald’s.”

In 2007 Swales and his wife Julia moved to live near Izmir in Turkey.

She survives him.

Peter Swales, born June 5 1948, died April 15 2022
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Freud was a shit? I believe it.

 

Errors & omissions, broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.
 
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Updated on 22/05/2022 17:57