Dismantling Freud

This is an erudite and far-reaching study of the dubious cultural influence of Freud written by a practising psychotherapist and from the viewpoint of the perennial philosophy tradition. The premise of the approach is that 'psychoanalysis has waged an assault on traditional conceptions of human nature by eclipsing everything of a transcendent order – even branding religion itself kind of psychopathology.' This has led to the familiar and prevalent spiritual and existential vacuum that denies the essence of our humanity as spiritual beings. Freud's influence has been further developed by his nephew Edward Bernays through his seminal book on propaganda in 1928, from which the following quote is chillingly relevant to our times: 'the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.' Our whole scientific worldview or 'cultural superstructure' has become imprinted with the secular pseudo-religion of scientism that treats spiritual experiences as illusions and insists on the adequacy of mechanistic and instrumental thinking.

Sotillos draws on a vast range of literature – there are nearly 180 pages of references and notes – and the chapter headings indicate the detail of the argument in relating the history of the psychoanalytic movement, its relationship to loss of faith, the making of psychological man – from imago dei to homo naturalis – psychologism as the reduction of reality to psychological criteria, Freudianism as a counter-religion transitioning from metaphysics to metapsychology and colonising the human psyche with new terminology. Mysticism is interpreted in terms of the regressive oceanic feeling, and religion is replaced by psychopathology, leading to an ethical void resulting from a corrosive ideology. All this extends the cultural impact of Darwinism in terms of disenchantment and desacralisation. In traditional circles, it is common to find Jung also criticised for reducing metaphysics to psychology – 'statements of the psyche' – and while this is true at one level, Jung entered deeply and existentially into gnosis and alchemy while at the same time trying to insist that his approach was purely scientific – a prophetic tension analysed by Peter Kingsley in his magisterial Catafalque.

I am very sympathetic to the author's diagnosis of the implications of the loss of the sacred, also argued by the Prince of Wales. Interestingly, in his classic 1890 book The Law of Psychic Phenomena, Thomas Jay Hudson refers to the rival hypnosis schools in Nancy and Paris, where the former was open to New Thought spiritual ideas of the universal mind, while the Paris School of Charcot, which influenced Freud, spoke in terms of abnormal nervous conditions 'explicable on the basis of cerebral anatomy or physiology.' The history of psychology would have been very different had the first school and New Thought become predominant, as they were with William James. At any rate, this remarkable and a timely book puts Freud in his proper place as a regrettable overall profane influence on western culture while making a strong case for freedom and embodiment of the Spirit as the true compass for future cultural evolution.