Freud's theories

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  1. I am listening to European history lecture on Freud’s theories about the superego, the id, ect. Is this acceptable in Christianity, if not, why is he wrong?
 
sowinskija said:
  1. I am listening to European history lecture on Freud’s theories about the superego, the id, ect. Is this acceptable in Christianity, if not, why is he wrong?
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the big problem with freud is that he believes that everything has to do with sex. He thinks its wrong to repress sexual urges and people who repress these sexual urges are probably going to have a bad life. So pretty much all christians who practice chastity (which all should) are bad in freud’s eyes. He has done lots for psychology but his philosophical views are just horrible in comparison to what the Catholic Church teaches.
 
It is good to learn about Freud, IMNAAHO, because his teachings have altered the modern world, not only in psychology but in pop culture down to the Alan Parsons Project :). To understand the way modern Western persons see life, you need to know some Freud.

As a pattern for understanding the human mind, however, not so good, unless you are prepared to accept that we are all just a jumble of sexual conflict above the shoulders!

ICXC NIKA
 
sowinskija said:
  1. I am listening to European history lecture on Freud’s theories about the superego, the id, ect. Is this acceptable in Christianity, if not, why is he wrong?
Click to expand...
I think there is no real problem with Freud’s theories. What is important is to actually interpret such things because they are theories. Sexuality is something very present in the ideas of Freud, but what can it bump into our notion of what is sexually acceptable or not? In fact much of our life and our attitudes are driven by sexual urges, this is something biological, it is a biological necessity. However, what differentiates us from ethology, the study of the animal behavior, is that we have a moral, product of our conscience and, further, gift of the divine.

What is wrong is to think that the human being is governed solely by sexual impulses; far from it! We are governed by a biological and psychological conditioning and by God’s grace! Every theory must be understood, not only accepted. Nietzsche was a philosopher who criticized clericalism and religious institution, but it is still possible to extract true thoughts from Nietzsche.

St. Thomas Aquinas was not well received in his time because he was studying Aristotle. “How can a man turn to this pagan philosophy to justify the things of God?”. But Aquinas knew very well discerning what was good and what was bad in Aristotle. The Church then saw that it was really good and today he is one of our pillars. So too was done by Augustine, who soon turned to philosophy to justify the truth. Faith and reason are like two wings that lead us to contemplate the truth, words of Blessed Pope John Paul II.

As for Freud, you just need to meditate things said there. We are not just animals sexually inclined, we have a dual reality, we are body and soul, and the interaction of these two parts form a whole that is the human being.

Pax et Bonum!
 
Freud’s Martin Luther moment came in seeing the paintings in which the infant Christ is sitting on the Blessed Virgin’s lap – I can’t remember the exactly one Freud referenced – but what Freud saw was not purity, but rather, the sexual desire of the male child for the mother. So he did lay the entire foundation on a complete sexualization & corruption of the very relation which the faith places at the center of the history of salvation.

Freud also described himself unapologetically as a “godless Jew” and all his works on religion were directly intended to delete all supernatural elements from the psychological life of humanity and to re-interpret all of it in terms of inexpungable feelings of guilt & reproach affiliated with various notions of transgression.
 
He was brilliant for his unabashedness only. His views were distorted and he overpathologized. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” – but only sometimes. He wreaked havoc on the world; and many blame the holocaust on the psychic energy his influence “released”. His thought represented a quantum leap that more naturally modulated promulgated would have been a transitional boon for man.:eek:
 
Freud was mistranslated. The American tradition was scientific and quantified a beautiful and profound theory. People hate Freud because they do not understand him. They understand an Americanization of his ideas.
I am using a tablet so I cannot post sites. However, if you google," sonoma bettelheim"* you will get an amazing article. Freud reminds me of Buber’s “I and thou”!!!
  • The article is by Victor Daniels.
 
sowinskija said:
  1. I am listening to European history lecture on Freud’s theories about the superego, the id, ect. Is this acceptable in Christianity, if not, why is he wrong?
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Don’t worry about it. Freud’s ideas are outdated. He is considered to have paved the way for modern psychology, but most of his concepts were wrong, partially due to his miniscule study size. His observations are based on upper-class white women living near him and his own children only.
 
Freud is not really taken seriously by anyone anymore. His studies were unscientific and his conclusions are now widely held to be incorrect in psychological circles.

So Freud is not the concern. That said, I think that contemporary psychology in general is something that Catholics have to be careful when interfacing with. Particularly, psychology is such a big part of our culture that I think you can pick up its assumptions by osmosis. There are a lot of trends in psychology that dispute man’s ability to know reality, discredit the validity of the senses, mechanize the mind, subject apparent “free will” as a response to one’s surroundings, characterize religion as an anthropological impulse, etc. These trends are much more threatening to the Catholic view of human nature than the flawed theories of Freud.
 
sowinskija said:
  1. I am listening to European history lecture on Freud’s theories about the superego, the id, ect. Is this acceptable in Christianity, if not, why is he wrong?
Click to expand...
For Freud, the superego corresponds with the conscience; the id corresponds with your biological drives (e.g., concupiscence); and the ego corresponds with your conscious, rational mind.

Nothing subversive about this, per se, especially if it is viewed as a metaphor, of sorts – a sort of artificial mapping of the elements of the human mind. Plato, and perhaps Augustine, did something similar (Plato, much more congenial to Catholicism, had a tri-partite model of the soul).

That being said, others on this thread are correct when they caution you about Freud, at least from a Catholic perspective. His approach to religion is reductionistic (in simple terms, he reduces it to a “father complex”); and his approach in general is materialistic, naturalistic. Nor was a moralist, per se, but he did reflect deeply on the phenomenon of morality.

He had a few insights that I would consider rather incredibly perceptive. He felt that dreams – that come from us – have something to tell us about our own thoughts and emotions. He identified the phenomenon of “repression,” whereby we “block from our minds” that which was either traumatic, or guilt-inducing.

Most controversially, he recognized that children have a sexuality, as well (to even think such a thing was considered immoral, certainly in the Victorian society in which he published his theories). He spoke of the oral, anal, and genital phase of sexual development – the oral phase, simply put, was connected with the observation that “suckling” is a form of pleasure, whether physical physical or psychological. The anal phase was connected with the observation that children often derive pleasure from alternately holding and releasing their bowls, which makes of “potty training” a form of self-exploration.

He observed that children, who don’t know where babies from, often think it comes from something that mother has eaten (as a four year old child, I had the fanciful notion that swallowing one’s gum could make one pregnant).

Freud deluded himself because he believed that people were against his theories because they themselves were sexually repressed – and, certainly, there is some of that, in the resistance to his theories. Lord knows we idealize childhood as a time of “innocence”, and associate any awareness of sexuality with guilt. But it’s true that his methods were not truly scientific, and that he was ultimately wrong about more than he was right (but is that not true of most philosophers, in general?) 😉
 
I would take what can be applied from Freud’s theory to explain religious phenomena and throw the rest out. Freud’s theory of the ego, superego, and id are very useful in explaining Catholic phenomena.
 
Robert_Sock said:
I would take what can be applied from Freud’s theory to explain religious phenomena and throw the rest out. Freud’s theory of the ego, superego, and id are very useful in explaining Catholic phenomena.
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Regarding id, ego, and superego, this short lecture from Bishop Fulton Sheen may serve as a good compliment.

He draws a diagram up his own diagram of the mind, which is not dissimilar in some respects to the models drawn up by Freud or by Plato.

youtube.com/watch?v=AKcxm-VhxUw
 
Freud was an atheist. He believed religion is a childish neurosis and that it is doomed. Read his book The Future of an Illusion. It never occurs to Freud that maybe he is the one suffering from a case of wish fulfillment. As I have detected in all the atheists I have known: they don’t want God to exist. The reasons are firmly planted in their Ids and most of them will never come out of hiding. A clue to Freud’s secret reason may be found by reading Dr. Paul Vitz’s Faith of the Fatherless.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Freud was an atheist. He believed religion is a childish neurosis and that it is doomed. Read his book The Future of an Illusion. It never occurs to Freud that maybe he is the one suffering from a case of wish fulfillment. As I have detected in all the atheists I have known: they don’t want God to exist. The reasons are firmly planted in their Ids and most of them will never come out of hiding. A clue to Freud’s secret reason may be found by reading Dr. Paul Vitz’s Faith of the Fatherless.
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Even an atheist can come up with good observations. Most of psychologists are atheist and many make great observations, even though their theories leave a lot to be desired.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Freud was an atheist. He believed religion is a childish neurosis and that it is doomed. Read his book The Future of an Illusion. It never occurs to Freud that maybe he is the one suffering from a case of wish fulfillment. As I have detected in all the atheists I have known: they don’t want God to exist. The reasons are firmly planted in their Ids and most of them will never come out of hiding. A clue to Freud’s secret reason may be found by reading Dr. Paul Vitz’s Faith of the Fatherless.
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Everything that is in your “id” will come to light in Purgatory.

As our LORD said, there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.

There is far more to our subconsciousnesses than primal drives and alleged childhood sexuality; everything in us we don’t want to face up to is there; but if we do not do penance, we may end up doing Purgatory for all of it. Mercy me!

ICXC NIKA
 
sowinskija said:
  1. I am listening to European history lecture on Freud’s theories about the superego, the id, ect. Is this acceptable in Christianity, if not, why is he wrong?
Click to expand...
I think that Freud views on human nature is much compatible with Christian view, apart from the fact Freud denied “divine element” in humans. He saw in humans “death drive”, which is a part of our nature and we cannot change it. This is similar to the “original sin” - human being isn’t bad, but has a potential to be bad.

As I know, there are no catholic official documents, which condemn Freud theories.

Even famous sedevacantist x. Rama Coomaraswamy, wrote that psychoanalysis has some common points with the traditional religion:
sacredweb.com/online_articles/sw3_coomaraswamy.html
 
catholictiger said:
the big problem with freud is that he believes that everything has to do with sex. He thinks its wrong to repress sexual urges and people who repress these sexual urges are probably going to have a bad life. So pretty much all christians who practice chastity (which all should) are bad in freud’s eyes. He has done lots for psychology but his philosophical views are just horrible in comparison to what the Catholic Church teaches.
Click to expand...
This is misinterpretation of Freud.
Please, read Rama Coomaraswamy article about Freud.😉

Freud is often accused of “sexual revolution”, but this is in fact a mistake.
His pupils - anarchist Otto Gross and communist Wilhelm Reich postulated complete sexual freedom, not Freud!
 
wopako said:
This is misinterpretation of Freud.
Please, read Rama Coomaraswamy article about Freud.😉

Freud is often accused of “sexual revolution”, but this is in fact a mistake.
His pupils - anarchist Otto Gross and communist Wilhelm Reich postulated complete sexual freedom, not Freud!
Click to expand...
culturewars.com/2013/Darkmoon.htm
THE CASE AGAINST REICH
A compulsive masturbator himself, Reich believed that masturbation was a useful tool in producing “well-balanced” individuals without religious hang-ups or anti-Semitic attitudes. His major finding was that masturbation and the religious life were incompatible, which is why he advocated masturbation as the most effective means of eradicating the religious instinct, which he regarded as the ultimate evil. “What Reich discovered was a fundamental truth of sexual politics, one discovered by the Catholic Church long ago,” Dr E. Michael Jones comments. “Either masturbation destroys your prayer life, or prayer destroys your ability to enjoy masturbation. The two forms of activity are psychically mutually exclusive” (Libido, p. 259). Like many other psychoanalysts, Reich is known to have masturbated his female patients in therapeutic sessions. “The pleasure of living and the pleasure of orgasm are identical,” he pontificated, thereby equating infinite happiness with the provision of an infinite number of orgasms.
Reich was himself, by his own account, not only a compulsive masturbator from early childhood but a self-confessed pervert with wide-ranging sexual interests. Beginning sexual activity at the early age of four, he went on to seduce the family cook at eleven-and-a-half. While still a small boy, he had begun to take an unhealthy interest in farm animals At 15 he began visiting brothels where his insatiable appetites made him the talk of the town. In his Autobiography, he described his uncontrollable libido by claiming, “I was pure sensual lust.”
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