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Freud emerged at a time in history when there was an extraordinary demand for a particular service that had been lost over the course of 300 years: auricular co

Freud emerged at a time in history when there was an extraordinary demand for a particular service that had been lost over the course of 300 years: auricular confession to a priest. Since most Protestant sects since 1517 had been consistently rejecting and deprecating the practice of auricular confession, men around the world, especially in Europe, were bursting with secrets. There is a basic human need to disclose our secrets to God, and to feel cleansed and regenerated and relieved of the burdens they've become. So Freud and his colleagues designed psychoanalysis as a comfortable, secular, drop-in replacement for auricular confession, and established a new priestly class among the Protestant laity. Now it's great to fill a void, but of course Catholics and Orthodox had never ceased the original practice, and so it was clear that psychoanalysis was explicitly designed to usurp and work at crossed-purposes to the religiously-branded type. In the past two centuries, the new priesthood has succeeded in establishing a secular church, even in disestablishmentarian jurisdictions such as these United States. By medicalizing defects of mind, and applying a "disease model" of diagnosis and treatment (but never cures) even to vices such as substance addiction, the new priesthood has established religious control over the populace in unprecedented ways (okay, maybe they are definitely precedented). The most recent expansion of this religion is from "mental" to "behavioral" health; i.e. not only your internal thoughts, but also your outward actions, are under scrutiny and subject to control. It is interesting that recent developments have seen Roman Catholicism take an approach of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" and wholly embrace psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry as their own, even going so far as to accept theories of homosexuality and "orientation" as givens and psychological facts. There are now explicitly branded Catholic practitioners of mental health, where you can go for drugs, psychoanalysis, and support groups, because two churches are better than one, I suppose.

nathan_compton 4y ago
Interesting, if weird, idea. Many things to take issue with, but I will take just one: ``The most recent expansion of this religion is from "mental" to "behavioral" health; i.e. not only your internal thoughts, but also your outward actions, are under scrutiny and subject to control.`` Behavioral health is arguably a shift _away_ from policing the internal state of the person to instead focus on specific behaviors that interfere with a patient's life. It is bizarre to suggest this places behavior under "scrutiny and control." You may have noticed that, in fact, all of our behaviors are already under personal, legal, and social scrutiny and control. The point of behavioral health is to help people cope with _that_ reality without engaging unnecessarily with psychological narratives which, as you and others have pointed out in this thread, may not be evidence based. Also, "In the past two centuries, the new priesthood has succeeded in establishing a secular church". This may be true in some sense, but psychoanalysis and its descendant practices have nothing like the cultural and political dominance of Catholicism in its heyday. I guess its possible to think of psychoanalysis as a church if you allow "church" to mean just any collection of ideas around which people organize and in which people believe without a level of scrutiny they apply to other kinds of ideas, but that covers quite a lot of ground. "psychoanalysis was explicitly designed to usurp and work at crossed-purposes to the religiously-branded type." I'm genuinely interested in whether Freud ever wrote anything that suggested that he was trying to usurp Catholic confession.
atdt 4y ago
There is no basic need to disclose secrets to God. The need to confess is carefully erected in the souls of the laity on top of the twin pillars of Catholicism, Shame and Guilt.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
  So by your logic, Europeans should have been gladly liberated from all that nonsense, yet they chose to reinvent and re-embrace it after only 300 years of freedom. Bizarre!
  - alehlopeh 4y ago
    What’s bizarre is how you lump people born hundreds of years apart into one big “they”
whatshisface 4y ago
>not only your internal thoughts, but also your outward actions, are under scrutiny and subject to control. Uhh... your outward actions have always been under scrutiny? What are you getting at?
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
  That's a good question; thank you for asking. Historically, with a church established with the state, the Church was in charge of the behavioral health of their subjects. The state could make temporal laws and punish people for crimes in various ways, but the thoughts and ideas of citizens was controlled by the Church, and if citizens acted against Church teachings, this was a danger to the stability of the state. Heretics were basically traitors, in other words, and heresy needed to be dealt with, in order to preserve domestic tranquility. In the best of times, the Church held the State's best interests closely, and good churchgoers were also good citizens. Of course, this could also be a love-hate relationship. Due to widespread distestablishmentarianism, the States are still in charge of crime and punishment and they have prisons for criminals, but they were somewhat unable to deal with heretics and wrongthink. People of mental defect, lunatics, and the criminally insane are also dangerous to domestic tranquility, and so, having lost the relationship to its Behavioral Health provider, the State has established a new religion to supplant it. When psychiatric drugs were new, they were heralded and celebrated as a release from chains: they are indeed a method of restraint that is viewed as "more humane" because they are invisible and chemical. But this is all they are: a newfound method of restraint and control. They are not intended to cure or treat diseases, just make the people's behavior more manageable. The Church of Psychiatry is authorized to imprison those whose behavior is not manageable. So, outward actions that are not... illegal... or subject to criminal prosecution, are still subject to scrutiny and control by the psychiatric priesthood. The power of the State is vested in them to drug, imprison, sterilize, and euthanize, just as it was in the before times. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
  - nathan_compton 4y ago
    Like I said in my previous comment, you can certainly characterize the current state of affairs this way. There is a certain qualitative similarity (an inevitable one, if you ask me, since _all_ societies require ways to manage anti-social behavior). But qualitatively things are also profoundly different. Most people who take psychoactive drugs do so willingly and involuntary commitment is relatively rare. In the United States and other places the criteria for such is typically danger to self or others and the process is subject to legal review. Compare that to the circumstances of the Catholic Church before reformation and secularization: the Church was not just a mechanism by which the state exerted a limited control of citizens. It was, in fact, a totalizing worldview which, for the average citizen, was as immovable as the earth. As you have pointed out, it even operated in parallel with, instead of as a subject to, the state. In some sense it was also a state or a meta-state. Psychology, in contrast, is hardly more than a disorganized cultural force with some minor powers given to it by the state and subject to its review. The average citizen is only vaguely aware of it and many people (I'd hazard a guess that most people) have no real interaction with its ideas or apparatuses. I would argue that even where psychology is given some temporal power to restrain citizens, this is done so not out of a blind acceptance of its content as true (or even a cynical assertion of its absolute truth by those in power), but as an attempt to "do the best we can" with our limited understanding of what makes human beings and human societies function or even what functioning might mean. There is one other critical difference (if you ask me): Catholicism and Christianity (religion and spirituality in general) is freighted with a tremendous amount of utter bullshit. Physical and metaphysical claims which are transparently false or absurd. By positioning itself as scientific, and by making substantially fewer claims about the fundamental nature of the universe and the human condition, psychology is, though imperfect, substantially better than what was, if anything, an even more disordered pile of fabulation, fantasies and weird ass ideas.

nathan_compton 4y ago

Interesting, if weird, idea. Many things to take issue with, but I will take just one: ``The most recent expansion of this religion is from "mental" to "behavioral" health; i.e. not only your internal thoughts, but also your outward actions, are under scrutiny and subject to control.`` Behavioral health is arguably a shift _away_ from policing the internal state of the person to instead focus on specific behaviors that interfere with a patient's life. It is bizarre to suggest this places behavior under "scrutiny and control." You may have noticed that, in fact, all of our behaviors are already under personal, legal, and social scrutiny and control. The point of behavioral health is to help people cope with _that_ reality without engaging unnecessarily with psychological narratives which, as you and others have pointed out in this thread, may not be evidence based. Also, "In the past two centuries, the new priesthood has succeeded in establishing a secular church". This may be true in some sense, but psychoanalysis and its descendant practices have nothing like the cultural and political dominance of Catholicism in its heyday. I guess its possible to think of psychoanalysis as a church if you allow "church" to mean just any collection of ideas around which people organize and in which people believe without a level of scrutiny they apply to other kinds of ideas, but that covers quite a lot of ground. "psychoanalysis was explicitly designed to usurp and work at crossed-purposes to the religiously-branded type." I'm genuinely interested in whether Freud ever wrote anything that suggested that he was trying to usurp Catholic confession.

atdt 4y ago

There is no basic need to disclose secrets to God. The need to confess is carefully erected in the souls of the laity on top of the twin pillars of Catholicism, Shame and Guilt.

NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
So by your logic, Europeans should have been gladly liberated from all that nonsense, yet they chose to reinvent and re-embrace it after only 300 years of freedom. Bizarre!
- alehlopeh 4y ago
  What’s bizarre is how you lump people born hundreds of years apart into one big “they”

whatshisface 4y ago

>not only your internal thoughts, but also your outward actions, are under scrutiny and subject to control. Uhh... your outward actions have always been under scrutiny? What are you getting at?

NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
That's a good question; thank you for asking. Historically, with a church established with the state, the Church was in charge of the behavioral health of their subjects. The state could make temporal laws and punish people for crimes in various ways, but the thoughts and ideas of citizens was controlled by the Church, and if citizens acted against Church teachings, this was a danger to the stability of the state. Heretics were basically traitors, in other words, and heresy needed to be dealt with, in order to preserve domestic tranquility. In the best of times, the Church held the State's best interests closely, and good churchgoers were also good citizens. Of course, this could also be a love-hate relationship. Due to widespread distestablishmentarianism, the States are still in charge of crime and punishment and they have prisons for criminals, but they were somewhat unable to deal with heretics and wrongthink. People of mental defect, lunatics, and the criminally insane are also dangerous to domestic tranquility, and so, having lost the relationship to its Behavioral Health provider, the State has established a new religion to supplant it. When psychiatric drugs were new, they were heralded and celebrated as a release from chains: they are indeed a method of restraint that is viewed as "more humane" because they are invisible and chemical. But this is all they are: a newfound method of restraint and control. They are not intended to cure or treat diseases, just make the people's behavior more manageable. The Church of Psychiatry is authorized to imprison those whose behavior is not manageable. So, outward actions that are not... illegal... or subject to criminal prosecution, are still subject to scrutiny and control by the psychiatric priesthood. The power of the State is vested in them to drug, imprison, sterilize, and euthanize, just as it was in the before times. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
- nathan_compton 4y ago
  Like I said in my previous comment, you can certainly characterize the current state of affairs this way. There is a certain qualitative similarity (an inevitable one, if you ask me, since _all_ societies require ways to manage anti-social behavior). But qualitatively things are also profoundly different. Most people who take psychoactive drugs do so willingly and involuntary commitment is relatively rare. In the United States and other places the criteria for such is typically danger to self or others and the process is subject to legal review. Compare that to the circumstances of the Catholic Church before reformation and secularization: the Church was not just a mechanism by which the state exerted a limited control of citizens. It was, in fact, a totalizing worldview which, for the average citizen, was as immovable as the earth. As you have pointed out, it even operated in parallel with, instead of as a subject to, the state. In some sense it was also a state or a meta-state. Psychology, in contrast, is hardly more than a disorganized cultural force with some minor powers given to it by the state and subject to its review. The average citizen is only vaguely aware of it and many people (I'd hazard a guess that most people) have no real interaction with its ideas or apparatuses. I would argue that even where psychology is given some temporal power to restrain citizens, this is done so not out of a blind acceptance of its content as true (or even a cynical assertion of its absolute truth by those in power), but as an attempt to "do the best we can" with our limited understanding of what makes human beings and human societies function or even what functioning might mean. There is one other critical difference (if you ask me): Catholicism and Christianity (religion and spirituality in general) is freighted with a tremendous amount of utter bullshit. Physical and metaphysical claims which are transparently false or absurd. By positioning itself as scientific, and by making substantially fewer claims about the fundamental nature of the universe and the human condition, psychology is, though imperfect, substantially better than what was, if anything, an even more disordered pile of fabulation, fantasies and weird ass ideas.