… If you envisage men as being only men, you are bound to see human society, not in Christian terms as a family, but as a factory-farm in which the only consideration that matters is the well-being of the livestock and the prosperity or productivity of the enterprise. That’s where you land yourself. And it is in that situation that western man is increasingly finding himself.
— Malcom Muggeridge
The impact of Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, on Western civilisation and, via globalisation, increasingly upon every region of the world, has been one of the primary influences of the modern epoch. It is not that Freud himself is necessarily recognised as the primary influence, but his teachings have permeated social theory and politics, even if his name is not evident. Freudianism, combined with Marxism and heavily revised, has been a lethal formula for deconstructing the primary customs, ethos, traditions and faith of the West. This was enabled due to the cultural crisis of the modern epoch of Western civilisation that starts with the Reformation and the Renaissance, proceeds through the Age of Enlightenment, the American and French Revolutions against the vestiges of the traditional Western social order, and through the Industrial Revolution, Bolshevism, and the world-expansive liberal-democratic-capitalism that is today called globalisation.
Marx and Freud were both products of the same Zeitgeist or spirit of the age, where the old certainties of faith had been destroyed by rationalism and scientism and, as Marx said, the bourgeoisie had replaced the aristocracy, the financier became lord, and God was replaced by ‘reason’. Richard LaPiere,1 a dissenter among social scientists, stated of this, ‘Sigmund Freud was a product of the nineteenth century, who had the unusual distinction of providing the twentieth century with a new and very radical idea of man, and of living to see that idea rise to a position of dominance in the thought of Western peoples’.2
The Freudo-Marxian world revolution has been more enduring and encompassing than Bolshevism, while ‘conservatives’ were worrying about a ‘Moscow plot’.
LaPiere wrote, about a decade prior to Freudo-Marxism becoming the basis of the ‘New Left’ student revolt, that
Freudianism has become … more than a theory of the causes of mental disorders and a therapy claimed to resolve them. It has become, as Freud so obviously hoped that it would, a doctrine on the nature of man that its adherents believe applicable to all mankind. And it has of late years become remarkably popular with both laymen and scientists, particularly here in the United States.
Those less beguiled by Freudianism have been inclined to find the explanation for its popularity in its exotic content; and a few observers have related its popularity, vaguely but perhaps with some validity, to the current American ethos with its liberality toward self-indulgence and irresponsibility. …3
It is notable that LaPiere refers to the reception Freudianism received in the USA because of the liberal hedonism that marks America’s modernist ideology. The Freudo-Marxian synthesis, known as Critical Theory, was brought to the USA by the faculty of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, fleeing Hitlerism. It is notable that this synthesis was resolutely rejected by the orthodox Communists in Germany and the regime in Moscow, while gaining enduring influence in the USA. It is also of note that this ‘Frankfurt School’ arose during the era of the Weimar regime in Germany in the aftermath of World War I, where moral and social experimentation were the product of social decay.
LaPiere referred to the fracture of the traditional order by Freudianism:
The growing popularity of Freudianism as an explanation of and justification for human conduct is only one of many social changes, but it is a change of paramount significance; for Freudianism provides a unique idea of the nature of man, of his potentialities, and of his relations to society. Those who adopt this new idea and act upon it ipso facto regard themselves and the world about them in a way that differs radically from the traditional view. They are perforce constrained to renounce many established values and sentiments and to accept, as logical correlates of the Freudian idea of man, a new set—values and sentiments that are, for convenience and with an eye to precedent, here designated as the ‘Freudian ethic’.4
LaPiere refers to a period of subversion of the social sciences, which we are able to readily trace to the Critical Theorists:
The Freudian invasion of contemporary social psychology and sociology has been less spectacular and considerably less forthright [than pre-Freudian psychology]. Freudian concepts have seeped into these disciplines in fragments and, often, have been camouflaged by the use of non-Freudian terms. The result is a partial retreat from the behavioristic orientation that dominated these fields from about 1925 to 1945 to a modified version of the kind of instinctivism that was popular in the years just preceding 1925. In this version, the antisocial character of man’s presumed instincts is not stressed, but it is frequently assumed and stated that man comes into this world with a variety of psychological needs that can be fulfilled only under special social circumstances. Thus the small-group approach in social psychology stresses the desirability of a ‘democratic atmosphere’ in the individual’s work, study, and other life circumstances on the grounds that ‘autocratic’ authority violates the innate need for self-fulfillment, self-expression, and self-determination. Those social psychologists who are much concerned with the ‘tension-producing’ conditions of modern life—and who purport to be able to explain everything from divorce to war in accordance with their tensional system of interpretation—likewise assume that there is a common if not universal conflict between the individual’s innate psychological needs and the social demands made upon him.5
While LaPiere does not name Critical Theory, the doctrines he is describing are those of the Frankfurt School, where the therapeutic state is propounded as necessary to ensure the mental health of mass society, in need of freedom to express instincts that are repressed by the authoritarian patriarchal family.
The focus of this neo-Freudianism is on the individual detached from society. It is therefore a means of deconstructing and fracturing the social organism, which is why the Marxian theorists who created the Frankfurt Institute in 1923 found Freudianism to be such a useful ingredient in creating a new revolutionary synthesis. The organic bonds of family, state, faith and ethos, disparaged as ‘primary ties’ in need of cutting, were portrayed as injurious to the individual well-being and as repressing the individual’s path to self-actualisation. LaPiere called Freudianism ‘a doctrine of social irresponsibility and personal despair’.6 In the pursuit of individual meaning through liberation from traditional social bonds, the result is not the universal bliss of oneness with humanity, as the Critical Theorists promise, but the despair of nihilism, of the detached individual who goes toward the light with the promise of eternal fulfilment, only to find that it is one of obliteration within a void.
Freud’s concern, both as a therapist and as a theorist, was with the individual. His data, if so they may be described, were dredged up from the hypothesized unconscious of his neurotic patients; moreover, he delved into this unconscious with a preconceived notion of what he would find there. Both what he looked for and what he found were inevitably biased in favor of the individual and against society. The patients saw themselves as victims of society; they were poor, misunderstood, mistreated creatures in search of someone who could comprehend their troubles and sympathize with them. Such are the common characteristics of neurotics. They are people who have failed, to a significant degree, to make their peace with society; and they believe that society has failed them. Never, in the mind of the neurotic, has he failed society.7
We might discern here, decades before the rise of ‘identity politics’, what has become the manifestation of a mass of neurotic individuals, socially fractured and re-clustering into aggrieved ‘minorities’, who are open to manipulation. The Critical Theorists sought to create these aggrieved minorities as revolutionary vanguards. LaPiere continues:
What Freud secured from his patients might justly have been used to demonstrate how the neurotic individual regards himself and his relation to society. Freud used it, however, as evidence in favor of his humanistic but completely unrealistic idea that the individual is inevitably and inescapably repressed by the inhuman dictates of organized social life. Freud, like his patients, believed that they were victims of social circumstances; and, like them, he was in all respects antagonistic toward society. So strong, apparently, was that antagonism that Freud never pondered the question: If man is by nature contrasocial, how can it be that men have evolved the social systems by which man lives?8
The critique of ‘organised social life’ as repressing the individual became the basis of Critical Theory. Erich Fromm called ‘organised social life’ the ‘primary ties’ from which the individual must be freed. His colleague Herbert Marcuse, father of the New Left and of ‘identity politics’, explained the Freudian method of Critical Theory:
The concept of man that emerges from Freudian theory is the most irrefutable indictment of Western civilization and at the same time the most unshakable defense of this civilization. According to Freud, the history of man is the history of his repression. Culture constrains not only his societal but also his biological existence, not only parts of the human being but his instinctual structure itself. However, such constraint is the very precondition of progress. Left free to pursue their natural objectives, the basic instincts of man would be incompatible with all lasting association and preservation: they would destroy even where they unite. The uncontrolled Eros is just as fatal as his deadly counterpart, the death instinct. Their destructive force derives from the fact that they strive for a gratification which culture cannot grant: gratification as such and as an end in itself, at any moment. The instincts must therefore be deflected from their goal, inhibited in their aim. Civilization begins when the primary objective — namely, integral satisfaction of needs — is effectively renounced.9
Here Marcuse distilled the premises of Critical Theory. Freud and his dissident protégé Carl Jung said that culture depends on the extent to which the atavistic urges are redirected, or canalised as Jung termed it; which the philosopher Nietzsche called sublimation, but which Marcuse and other Critical Theorists condemned as ‘deflection from the goal of satisfaction of instinctual needs’. The post-Freudians depart company from their father-figure (an Oedipal conflict?) and contend that in the name of self-actualisation the individual must liberate himself from the constraints of custom, law, family, religion, and morality and give free reign to his instinctual drives. Marcuse listed a dichotomy between atavistic impulse and sublimation:
from: |
to: |
immediate satisfaction |
delayed satisfaction |
pleasure |
restraint of pleasure |
joy (play) |
toil (work) |
receptiveness |
productiveness |
absence of repression |
security |
The Critical Theorists aim to regress culture to that of the instinctual drives in the name of ‘freedom’. That which prevents this is called ‘authoritarian’ and even ‘Fascist’. What concerned Fromm was that individuals when given a choice prefer ‘security’ rather than the ‘absence of repression’. This repressive tendency, which one would expect to be an instinctual survival drive, was claimed by Marcuse and other post-Freudians, such as Wilhelm Reich, to be the result of sexual repression. These doctrines became the premises of the New Left, but have been mainstreamed to become the new normal.
Marcuse et al claimed to be rejecting conventional society and rebelling against capitalism. However, the self-indulgent, unrestrained individualism that demands immediate ego gratification and objects to any form of ‘delayed satisfaction’ as the result of repression, oppression, suppression, racism, misogyny, or homophobia, ad infinitum, became the ideology of capitalism. The expectation of ‘immediate satisfaction’ is the basis for ever-expanding markets. It is the old game established by Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, father of public relations, when, employed by the tobacco industry, he promoted cigarettes as ‘torches of freedom’ for ‘the modern women’. Hence the ‘liberated women’ became a vast new consumer market for the tobacco industry.
Richard LaPiere described the manner by which Freudianism became the method for expanding consumer markets:
The advocates of the Freudian view of man and of the ethic that stems from that view have recently been augmented by a host of bright young men whose ostensible task is to aid in the shaping of advertising and other promotional endeavors. A generation ago it was the assumption along Madison Avenue that people buy goods for their use or prestige values. Market researchers, as they were then called, endeavored by interview and survey studies to ascertain what people wanted to buy or why they bought what they did buy rather than something else. From such studies the ‘wants’ of men were determined, and the advertising copy writer then slanted his appeals toward the satisfaction of these wants. If it appeared that people wanted economy in their automobiles, he claimed that his car was the most economical; if they seemed to want speed, he claimed the highest speed; etc.
Of recent years, however, market researching has given way to a more complex, impressive, and costly operation called ‘motivational research.’ The motivational researchers proceed on the assumption that people do not know why they buy what they buy; therefore it is futile to ask them what they want to buy or why they bought what they did. One must, they believe, probe behind the obvious to the real — dig down through the public’s conscious self to its unconscious motivations. To this end a sample of the population must be subjected to depth interviews, and the interview materials must then be analyzed to determine the hidden, unconscious motives that have been inadvertently revealed. When the psychoanalysts of the public have made their diagnoses, the advertising copy writer, or the political propagandist, can then pitch his appeals to the real rather than the ostensible motives of men. The motivational researchers have become, it would appear, a considerable power in advertising and related circles. An increasing proportion of advertising is slanted toward such ‘unconscious’ motivations as the need for emotional security, ego gratification, guilt release, and—inevitably—thwarted sexual desires. Whether the new appeals actually fool the buying public is debatable, but the fact that the advertising fraternity believe they do suggests that advertisers have taken over the Freudian idea of man and have made the public in its image.10
The social sciences provided a doctrine for the rationalisation of instant ‘ego gratification’ that is the premise for expanding consumerism, and the fad of the new. Traditional — medieval — Western societies, with their religious foundation and repudiation of avarice as sinful, prohibited mercantile competition, advertising and marketing, without which modern capitalism could not function. This was the basis of the pre-capitalist organic social community. The Left, with its cult of the new, have played a role in expanding consumerism, all the while, like Edward Bernays, assuring consumers that they are exercising a healthy ‘freedom’. This is why ostensibly ‘radical’ leftist institutions such as the New School for Social Research, and the London School of Economics have a close relationship with capitalism.
The first institution that requires destruction in the name of ‘freedom’ is the ‘patriarchal family’ as the seedbed of repression and ‘authoritarianism’. Marcuse states of this: ‘The primal father, as the archetype of domination, initiates the chain reaction of enslavement, rebellion, and reinforced domination which marks the history of civilization’.11 Karl Marx’s class struggle as the impelling force of history, is replaced by a post-Freudian Oedipal struggle against the perennial father-Führer-god figure.
After World War II Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and others of the Frankfurt School, undertook studies, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, to determine the degree to which individuals are constrained by the primary ties, and particularly by the family, which supposedly measured their ‘authoritarian personality’ on an ‘F’ (for Fascism) scale. The stronger one’s bond to parents, church and homeland, the more authoritarian and neurotic one was deemed. LaPiere stated:
Unlike Marx, who also hated society—but the society of his times rather than society in general—Freud did not counsel general revolt from social restraints. Nevertheless, he implied the wisdom and justice of individual evasion of those restraints by designating (as have all psychoanalysts since) social repression as the cause of the difficulties experienced by his patients. And if he did not directly advise the patient to evade the authority of the feared and hated parent or desert the intolerable wife, his doctrine certainly does nothing to foster submission to the requirements of society and everything to cast society into disrepute.12
It is here that the Critical Theorists have made their seminal contribution to the modern epoch. With the use of Marx’s dialectical method of historical struggle they politicised Freudianism as the modern form of struggle that replaced class war. Rather than two contending classes vying for domination over the forces of social production, there would be a multiplicity of fractured interests each with its own demands on the social organism. Why then, do oligarchs sponsor what appears to be a revolt against their rule? LaPiere gives part of the answer in that Freudianism is the basis of ‘motivational research’ which examines the consumption habits of mass society and how these might be manipulated. Analogous to this, Critical Theory provides the analytical methodology for determining how aggrieved minorities can be manipulated. The studies of the Critical Theorists in what was published as The Authoritarian Personality provided data for social engineering and control, an example being the way this was used to ‘re-educate’ Germany after World War II.
We can find the origins of these doctrines in the Age of Enlightenment, where ‘reason’ and ‘science’ questioned faith and tradition. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote of the need to overthrow King and Church and return man to what he supposed to be a ‘state of nature’, where he imagined perfect freedom prevailed. Donatien Alphonse Francois Marquis de Sade expounded on libertine sexuality, abortion, and the end of marriage for the sake of perfect freedom. The English liberal philosopher John Locke had written in 1690 a treatise on government where he imagined mankind had lived in a perfect state of equality before civilisation intervened:
To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.
A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.13
These were the precursors of today’s ‘progressive’ intelligentsia, social scientists, and oligarchic ‘philanthropists’, who all aim — like the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks — to reshape Man according to ideological assumptions. These doctrines culminated in the 1789 Jacobin Revolution in France, which ushered in the current epoch of liberalism, with capitalist and socialist derivatives.
Professor Edelstein, in his aptly named study Terror of Natural Right, states that with the destruction of the Church the ideal of returning man to a supposed state of Nature legitimised the revolutionary terror.14 Inspired by Enlightenment philosophers, such as those named above, Saint-Just and Robespierre regarded transgressors of Jacobin law as contravening ‘Nature’ herself, who forfeited their right to live in the revolutionary idyll of Liberté, égalité, fraternité.15 Rousseau had given ideological justification for mass terror in his concept of the ‘general will’ and the ‘social contract’.16 The concept is now called ‘international law’, and dissidents still find themselves liable to imprisonment, under an ideology that is neo-Jacobin, while ‘rogue nations’ are targeted for destruction by advanced technical warfare, again in the name of a nebulous ‘international community’.
With the triumph of Jacobinism and the overthrow of the remnants of traditional society, de Sade was released from an asylum in 1790 and assumed a role in Revolutionary France. His synthesis of sexual sadism as the impelling force of humanity makes de Sade the real father of Critical Theory, and allied movements such as ‘population control’, feminism, and liberalism. Despite his infamy as a brutaliser of women, especially among the poor, de Sade was elected to the National Assembly, where he aligned with the most extreme wing of the Revolution, led by Marat.17 His doctrine of sex and death pre-empted Freud’s premise of Eros and Thanatos as the primary motivators of human behaviour. Antedating Freud, de Sade wrote in The 120 Days of Sodom that ‘[s]exual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite’.18
In Philosophy in the Bedroom,19 de Sade condemned ‘insipid moralists’ in the name of ‘Nature’. He called maidenly virtue ‘absurd’ and a product of ‘dangerous bonds’, imposed by ‘a disgusting religion’, and ‘imbecilic parents’. He pre-empted the disparagement by the Bolsheviks and Critical Theorists of familial bonds as ‘repressive’:
Then listen to me, Eugénie. It is absurd to say that immediately a girl is weaned she must continue the victim of her parents’ will in order to remain thus to her dying day. It is not in this age of preoccupation with the rights of man and general concern for liberties that girls ought to continue to believe themselves their families’ slaves, when it is clearly established that these families’ power over them is totally illusory.20
De Sade anticipates the condemnation of the ‘patriarchal family’ by Critical Theory and feminism:
Let us consult Nature upon so interesting a question as this, and may the laws that govern animals, in much stricter conformance with Nature, provide us for a moment with examples. Amongst beasts, do paternal duties extend beyond primary physical needs? Do not the offspring of animals possess all their parents’ liberty, all their rights? As soon as they are able to walk alone and feed themselves, beginning at this instant, are they any longer recognized by the authors of their days? And do the young fancy themselves in any sense beholden to those whence they have received breath? Surely not. By what right, hence, are other duties incumbent upon the children of men? And what is the basis of these duties if not the fathers’ greed or ambition?21
While de Sade touchingly anticipates feminism with his call for the ‘liberation’ of girls from their parents, his motives, true to form, soon follow: to ‘liberate’ girls so that they might be abused by male psychopaths such as himself:
… Begin, therefore, with the legitimacy of these principles, Eugenie, and break your shackles at no matter what the cost; be contemptuous of the futile remonstrances of an imbecile mother to whom you legitimately owe only hatred and a curse. If your father, who is a libertine, desires you, why then, go merrily to him: let him enjoy you, but enjoy without enchaining you; cast off the yoke if he wishes to enslave you; more than one daughter has treated thus with her father. …22
In proto-feminist mode de Sade counsels, through the character of a fictitious woman, to discard all familial kinship and abjure marriage as a burden, in order that women might be liberated to copulate without moral, religious or legal restraints, leaving women to be subjected to the ‘freedoms’ according to the utopian Republic of Nature:
… I require her to trample upon all the prejudices of her childhood, if I prescribe to her the most formal disobedience to her family’s orders, the most arrant contempt for all her relatives’ advice, you will agree with me, Eugénie, that among all the bonds to be burst, I ought very surely to recommend that the very first be those of wedlock.23
While de Sade, who regarded France as in need of depopulation, an attitude to which the Jacobins agreed with bloody results, refers to methods of birth control, he soon resorts to recommending sodomy as the best method; again anticipating the ‘new normal’ of the modern world. De Sade also predates Dr. Alfred Kinsey and Magnus Hirschfeld as the ‘father of sexology’ when writing of ‘buggery’, ‘Absurd to say the mania offends Nature; can it be so, when ‘tis she who puts it into our head? Can she dictate what degrades her? No, Eugénie, not at all; this is as good a place to serve her as any other, and perhaps it is there she is most devoutly worshipped’.24
De Sade also establishes himself as the father of ‘population control’, preceding Margaret Sanger by 120 years:
MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE — Do you know, Dolmancé, that by means of this system [mass buggery] you are going to be led to prove that totally to extinguish the human race would be nothing but to render Nature a service?
DOLMANCE — Who doubts of it, Madame?25
Child-birth and child-rearing are to be abhorred as infringing on women’s freedom, and abortion and infanticide are ‘no crimes of Nature’. Again we hear the distant echo that has become the thunderous rage of gender politics, and the sickness that has been normalised:
MADAME DE SAINT-ANGE —… propagation is in no wise the objective of Nature; she merely tolerates it; from her viewpoint, the less we propagate, the better; and when we avoid it altogether, that’s best of all. Eugénie, be the implacable enemy of this wearisome child-getting, and even in marriage incessantly deflect that perfidious liquor whose vegetation serves only to spoil our figures, which deadens our voluptuous sensations, withers us, ages and makes us fade and disturbs our health; get your husband to accustom himself to these losses; entice him into this or that passage, let him busy himself there and thus keep him from making his offerings at the temple; tell him you detest children, point out the advantages of having none. Keep a close watch over yourself in this article, my dear, for, I declare to you, I hold generation in such horror I should cease to be your friend the instant you were to become pregnant. If, however, the misfortune does occur, without yourself having been at fault, notify me within the first seven or eight weeks, and I’ll have it very neatly remedied. Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb...26
De Sade invents the clichés and slogans of feminism in his defence of abortion. ‘We are always mistress of what we carry in our womb’, says this liberal champion of ‘women’s health issues’. He compares the child to excrement that might be purged with no more meaning than a daily toilet routine.
… as we are of the nails we pare from our fingers, or the excrements we eliminate through our bowels, because the one and the other are our own, and because we are absolute proprietors of what emanates from us.
Here is the liberal creed of freedom laid bare and unequivocal. With exactitude we find the doctrine of Critical Theory and other forms of Freudo-Marxism that condemn the family as the incubator of ‘Fascism’, and the ‘primary ties’ as the obstacles to ‘self-realisation’. In the name of ‘Nature’, de Sade wrote, ‘destruction’ was one of her ‘chief laws’, under which ‘nothing that destroys can be criminal’. ‘Murder’ was ‘altering forms’. Man was matter, without spirit, and Nature was ‘conflict’.27 Under the Republican utopia of Nature, there would be few actions that are ‘criminal’,28 when the foundations of society are ‘liberty and equality’.
With de Sade we have the range of today’s leftist doctrine, which has been mainstreamed in the name of ‘progress’, as the new ‘normal’. Simone de Beauvoir, seminal feminist and social critic, for example, acknowledged this, writing, ‘Intuitions such as these allow us to hail Sade as a precursor of psychoanalysis’.29 De Sade struck the right chord for the ‘modern age’; his time had dawned. He anticipated the
• Dialectical materialism of Karl Marx
• Psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud
• Sexology of Alfred Kinsey
• Feminist birth control and abortion of Margaret Sanger
• Critical Theory of Marcuse, Fromm, Adorno et al.