Three weeks after the outbreak of the second World War a Viennese Jew, exiled from Austria after its annexation by Germany, lay in a death coma at Hampstead, a suburb of London. A casual visitor would hardly have realized that the lonely, almost penniless sufferer had for a quarter of a century fought to revolutionize scientific psychology and the accepted standards of marriage morality. Yet that eighty-three-year-old victim of heart disease was Sigmund Freud, — and when he died on the night of September 23, 1939, the father of psychoanalysis, author of twelve heavy books on this new approach to questions of sex, was mourned in many sections of the scientific world.
Freud, characterized by an enthusiastic student as standing in the same relation to the present, old-fashioned marriage attitudes as Copernicus assumed to the narrow science of his day, had become the storm-center around which a bitter battle of conflicting theories rages. To say that this psychoanalysis is discredited is to exaggerate and to ignore the claims of stick-to-the-finish Freudians, like Smith Ely Jelliffe, who asserts: "There is no bit of human behavior, sleeping or waking, sick or well, from the most trivial to the most complex, individual or collective, man to man, woman to woman, or in groups of threes to millions, that cannot be better investigated or understood or guided by inner and enlightened application of the theory of Freud." ("The Theory of the Libido," in Sex and Civilization, p. 471.)
Zealous critics of psychoanalysis may be ready to chant the dirge over Freudianism. Yet it enjoys wide popular support. Even if the meteoric ascent of the Freudian school may be checked, its claims have sickered through to the popular discussions and in this way have become more challenging issues than if they had remained sequestered in laboratories or locked behind academic doors. Freudian expressions, like "the unconscious mind," "libido," “inhibition," "Oedipus complex," "transference," have eagerly pushed their way to prominence in current literature and in class- room lectures. Haldeman-Julius's blue books and dollar-volume publications discuss the theory freely and in a popular vein.
A new guild of professional counselors has sprung up through- out the land, the psychoanalysis, who claim the ability to interpret the suppressed emotions and by this interpretation to offer — at none too modest fees — a scientific solution to domestic and personal problems. Because of the popular attention which Freudianism (and the separatist schools of Jung and Adier) will continue to receive, intelligent young people in the Church who study contemporaneous thought should know the doctrines of psychoanalysis on questions of courtship and marriage. They must understand that, when stripped of its scientific phrasings, Freudianism is one of the most vicious allies of unbridled lust with which any generation of young people has ever been forced into the lists.
What is psychoanalysis, and how does it affect the morals of marriage? I may be taken to task for proposing these questions and be charged with leading my readers into realms with which they might otherwise remain unfamiliar. Yet correspondence and contact with representative young men and women of the Church show that they are asking pointed questions regarding Freud and psychoanalysis. The Church must offer a sane analysis and estimate of the tendencies with which youth is confronted; for if the Church fails in this duty, as distasteful as it often is, to whom may inquiring minds be directed?
It may be said that Freud's is the psychology of sex and of the subconscious mind, the theory that among all instincts sex dominates and is the ultimate motivation in all human actions, the mainspring of all human behavior in business and pleasure, work and study, health and sickness, thought and action, waking and sleeping.
Freud's conception of the conscious mind has well been compared to the exposed part of an iceberg, which represents only a small part of the whole. The subconscious or unconscious mind, however, corresponds to the submerged section of the iceberg; and just as that invisible portion controls the direction and movement of the entire drift, so the unconscious mind determines the actions and characteristics of the individual. The dominating impulse of this unconscious mind is sex. Conventions of civilization, psychoanalysts claim, have combined to make men repress these unconscious desires. Repressions produce a long catalog of complexes which psychoanalysis has brought to light and which are expressed particularly in dreams when the unconscious mind has free play. Basic is the Oedipus complex (named after the figure of Greek mythology who unwittingly not only killed his father, but also married his mother), which, Freud asserts, is responsible for many of our inner conflicts.
This sounds rather abstruse and remote; not so, however, is the application of these claims to daily life, where psychoanalysis is held as the cure-all for courtship problems and domestic ills, the scientific way out of perplexing family dilemmas. A wife who is unhappy in marriage and entertains the prospect of divorce is invited to be psychoanalyzed. What happens? A writer in one of our popular magazines gives the facts: "About two years ago I wrote and asked one of the leading psychoanalysis in New York City whether he would tell me how much it would cost and how much time it would take for me to be psychoanalyzed. A letter came from him asking that I go to his office to talk it over. He gave me an appointment, twelve o'clock, Tuesday. So I went. After a short wait the psychoanalyst appeared and led me to his inner office. He was a man of sixty (he had originally been a successful neurologist). He was pale and fat, with ill-defined features, like those of a Jolly monk, or friar. He asked me to sit down. Then, getting out pen and paper, he proceeded to question me, writing down my answers. There were all sorts of questions. This was to learn from what sort of family I had sprung. How many brothers and sisters? Where did I come in the family? Oldest or youngest, or third or fourth child? Among other things he asked me how I made a living and how much my income was. After about thirty-five questions (some of which I blushed to answer) and taking copious notes, he told me that, since I was far from rich and worked in an office, he would undertake, to psychoanalyze me for only ^250 a month instead of ^300 a month and that I would have to come to him for an hour every day, six days in the week. The entire analysis, he said, might take a year. On the other hand, it might take two years or more. I tell this just to show that the process isn't cheap. Incidentally, several days later I received a bill from the psychoanalyst (I had been in his office twenty minutes) for twenty dollars." The treatment is long and expensive. The New York Times^ August 9, 1936, comments: "Country practitioners, glad to get fifty cents for visiting a sick patient on a farm, will gasp when they learn that a psychoanalyst often collects from ^5,000 to ^6,000 a case. A sitting costs the patient somewhat less than ^10 on the average, with about 250 to 270 sittings in a year. A course of treatment lasts from a year and a half to two years."
Had these visits been continued, a long, intimate, unrestrained questioning would have followed, in which past experiences would be revived, dreams retold? fears classified, wishes analyzed. One of the professional devices is to secure the complete relaxation of the patient, who sits in a well-cushioned chair or reclines on a divan in a room, often dimly lighted or decorated to reduce distraction. The psychoanalyst tries to probe beneath the conscious mind by suggesting a list of disconnected subjects and noting the patients reaction. To the extent that the "doctor" is able to secure unreserved mental reactions and associations, as embarrassing as they may be, the analysis, we are told, will be successful. (Significantly an adaptation of this system is suggested by the Subcommittee of the Federal Council of Churches [Young Peoples Relationships}. The Young Men^s Christian Association Press has issued a volume endorsing Freud's methods.)
, When the unconscious mind has thus been explored by the psychoanalyst and the repressions and complexes fully revealed, the patient will be presented with a diagnosis of the unconscious trouble. With a knowledge of this concealed condition or with the revival of some past disturbing experience comes, Freud insists, the freedom from the phobia and the release from the burdensome worries, provided the complexes have not been too serious. In that case the psychoanalyst resorts to some transference, a technical Freudian device, by which the affection of the patient is transferred to the psychoanalyst himself. The hideous climax has well been expressed in this plain English: "The Freudian psychoanalysts insist that to do a successful job the patient must fall in love with the physician, because by doing so, the patient overcomes all fixation on some unsuitable object. ... The patient then becomes docile and tractable, eager to confess all."—It is to such depths that the new psychology has dropped!
We need not indulge in a lengthy, formal refutation. Nor will enthusiastic Freudians admit that there can be any refutation. Cornelia Parker, visiting one of Freud^s "most brilliant young disciples in Vienna, a teacher and analyst," records a telltale incident in "The Capital of Psychology" (cited by McDougall, Outline of Abnormal Psychology y IX). Mrs. Parker, commenting on a recent book, declared: "It is hard to find a book where every word is beyond question. No man is God." In reply the Austrian mused: "No, of course; no man is God." Then, as she tells the story, he suddenly corrected himself and declared: " Yes, yes, one man is God—Freud!' He pointed to his newly purchased set of Freud^s writings in ten volumes, ^very word in these ten volumes is absolutely correct. Freud is 100 per cent right. No, — 200 per cent. Every word Freud has written is absolutely correct. Every word he will write is absolutely correct.5"
Well-known psychologists, from the theoretical, conservative types to specialists in neurology, have not shown this fanaticism and have pointed out scientific defects and practical difficulties. Dr. Knight Dunlap, professor of experimental psychology in Johns Hopkins University, summarizes this aspect of the investigation in his Mysticism, freudianism, and Scientific Psychology (page 92): "Psychoanalysis is essentially antagonistic to scientific psychology and the scientific method in the mental sciences." The late Sir Clifford Allbutt gave this verdict: "Popular psychoanalysis is false science; it has no units, no means of measurements, no controls, no precise definitions, no separation of objective and subjective evidence." Dr. Charles W.Burr of the University of Pennsylvania declares: "Freudianism is based on assumptions. ... The whole thing is absolutely unscientific. A large part of it is absolutely absurd. Incalculable harm, too, can be done by mental suggestion of this kind, and I have had young people come to me brokenhearted because, after reading Freud, they imagined they were abnormal, while as a matter of fact they were perfectly normal. Freudianism accepts much and proves nothing; yet it is the most popular psychology of today. It calls itself science, and science is the popular deity."
Passing the purely psychological and pathological facts for the contradiction of which Freud has been indicted, the reader will agree to the force of these two considerations:
First of all, psychoanalysis lays grossly exaggerated emphasis on sex. The financial depression has made the world a laboratory in which neurosis may be investigated and catalogued as never before. To ascribe these present-day nervous disorders to Freud^s origin, sex, is to ignore the pervasive causation of worry, financial fear, fatigue, and frustrated hopes in a dozen directions as well as the conflict of environment. Dr. R. J. Berry, dean of the Faculty of Medicine of Melbourne, Australia, challenges: "Is it true that sex is the greatest driving force of life? Hunger is even greater, because it means the life of the individual, whereas a repressive sex does no one any harm-" Freud makes man, from the first days of childhood to his last hours, a helpless tool of libido^ with even his unconscious desires irresistibly focused on some sex complex or problem, as it ruthlessly crowds out pure emotions, presses its heel on the esthetic, swashbuckles through decency; and emerges on that animal plane in which man is just another lust-controlled creature.
Besides, the conclusions of Freudianism, overdrawn as they are, are based on a type of evidence which compromises their validity. It is essentially a psychology of the abnormal, and the study of its case work reveals a preponderance of neurotic subjects. Dr. Eduard Westermarck, whose investigation of marriage covers decades and who does not shrink from radical theorization, declares in his Critique of Freudianism: "For my own part I doubt whether the study of neurotic persons can be regarded as a safe guide to the proper understanding of normal manifestations." Myerson asserts: "The largest part of the theory is derived from the analysis of hysterics, who, as every clinician knows, lie very readily, are suggestible, and will take their cue from the physician, in a mimetic way." ("Freud's Theory of Sex: A Criticism," in Calverton and Schmalhausen, o. c., p. 519.)
Freudianism is also unmistakably pornographic. With an abandon it offers discussions which recall St. Jude^s denunciation of "these filthy dreamers" who "defile the flesh" (verse 8). Dunlap remarks (o. c., p. 104): "It [psychoanalysis] is a part of the general problem of the circulation of pornographic literature, complicated, however, by the circumstances that a bolder front is put upon the^ salacious propaganda by the labels of ^ychoW or science*
Indeed, the procedures of psychoanalysis are often obscene. An impressionable mmd that is saturated with its claims will receive a perverted outlook on life. We can understand why enraged parents in various sections of the country have risen up in the anger of formal protest; but we cannot understand why the trustees in many American schools have permitted this academic filth to flourish.
Our immigration authorities bar undesirable aliens on grounds of moral turpitude; yet treatises on psychoanalysis that revel in symbol pictures, images, dreams, and the plainest proposals, all ot wiuch I do not dare mention even in veiled allusion, are thrust into the eager hands of psychology classes and avidly studied by thousands of young readers throughout the land.
Psychologists have also invoked wide-spread and justified criticism oh their practices. They are not all willful charlatans by any means; but that many have crossed the border-line of propriety and indulged in a sort of blackmail is admitted even by professional Freudians. The files of any modern newspaper will reveal homes broken and lives wrecked through the application of Freud's theories. Must not a system capable of provoking such extremes stand condemned by the forum of common decency?
Even greater is the destructive effect that psychoanalysis must exert _ upon immature minds, particularly when employed by inexperienced or unscrupulous analysts. To a person who believes m purity this wallowing in perversions must leave an unfortunate impress. Utterly remote suggestions are pushed into unholy prominence and cling with that clutching ^^ by which the ^sordid survives, while the good is buried and forgotten. In more serious cases mental derangement is inevitable.
Professional testimony to the force of these assertions comes in an arraignment of psychoanalysis by two French authorities, Hesnard and Perrin, whose opinions are summarized by René Sudre in the European (Paris): Instead of healing, it [psychoanalysis] really aggravates the ill — a malady of the mind that would have been helped by other, less inconsiderate treatments....
"A defective treatment may further double the debilitated. It may instill a sense of indignity sustained or fortify scruples in the minds of the obsessed.
"These views are shared by most psychiatrists. The psychoanalytical mode of treatment is not any more accepted as <inoffensive.'
"One expert—a Freudian nevertheless—has recorded instances in which a sound and unsound diagnosis have had like disastrous results.
"To charge the mind of a perfectly moral character, for instance, with a theory that his difficulty is due to ^a ... complex^ might drive him into a pernicious melancholia or even to suicide.^
Finally, psychoanalysis serves no necessary purpose in a life illumined by Christian consciousness. Psychologists who reject the theory assure us that the investigations which it provoked may shed new light on some of their problems. In its practical application, however, it stands opposed to Chrises teaching and to His emphasis on true morality. Whatever the influence of Freudianism may be, ultimately it offers nothing constructive to the Christian. He will have his problems, it is true; and he has no protection to keep him untouched by the onslaughts of temptation. He will often declare with the great apostle (Rom. 7:19 ff.): "The good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that'I do. . . .' For I delight in the Law of God after the inward man; but I see another law in my members warring against the Law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. 0 wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" But he has a solution for his problems and a spiritual strengthening in temptation; he can continue with the apostle: "I thank God through Jesus Christ, our Lord." He has his God, the privilege to approach the throne of divine power and mercy in the name of Jesus Christ (see chapter 4); the strengthening power of the Sacrament (see chapter 5); the gift of an enlightened understanding of the purifying work of the Holy Spirit (see chapter 6); the power of prayer (see chapter 7); the friendly, consecrated counsel of spiritual advisers; and altogether an outlook on life which needs no psychoanalysis.
The deliberate appeal of the Church resolves itself into "Keep away from the psychoanalyse" To cross the threshold of his office may be the first step to rob you of your peace of mind, disturb the delicate balance of your emotional life, and conjure up the endless procession of phantasmagoria which these ghouk-m-the-name-of-science have dug up from moldering graves.
Twenty-five years hence-and this is not prophecy, but a s^tement of antecedent probability based on the recurrent lessons of the past — psychoanalysis, as popularly understood and applied, will be buried m the cemetery of extinct conceits. The scientific student of the next generation, browsing around with antiquarian curiosity in these aisles of the ingloriously interred, may stumble over a tottering tombstone. Even in the presence of the dead he wilLnot be able to suppress a smile when he brushes away cluttering weeds to read that on the inscription "Here lies the Theory of Freud" irreverent, but scientific iconoclasm has changed the e m the last word to a.