The Taproot Podcast - The Weird History of Psychotherapy Part 1 Freud: A Different Version of Your Dad

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

The cocaine addict who convinced the world children want to sleep with their parents Vienna, 1866. Ten-year-old Sigmund Freud watches antisemitic thugs knock his father's hat into the mud. Jakob Freud picks it up, head down, and walks on. This moment of paternal humiliation would shape the entire field of psychology. But this episode reveals the shocking truth textbooks won't tell you: Freud was high on cocaine for 10-15 years while developing psychoanalysis. His "revolutionary" theories weren't insights into universal human nature - they were the projections of a traumatized man who never dealt with his own demons. You'll learn: How Freud's father complex infected all his relationships Why he systematically destroyed every colleague who challenged him The real story behind his break with Jung (spoiler: Freud fainted) How cocaine addiction fueled his grandiose theories Why none of his patients actually got better The disturbing case of Little Hans and Freud's sexual obsessions From his partnership with the bizarre Wilhelm Fliess to his golden ring cult of yes-men, this episode exposes how personal pathology became "scientific" theory - and why we're still paying the price. Trigger warning: Discusses substance abuse, childhood trauma, and controversial therapeutic practices.

You change your mind Like a girl, change your clothes Cause your heart and your cold Your yes and your no You're in and you're out You're up and you're down You're always right in back And it's what we fight, we break up

We kiss, we make love You don't really wanna say no You don't really wanna get off Your heart and your cold Your yes and your no You're in and you're out You know you shouldn't really want to go out in the snow Your heart's in your cold, your head's in your low Your ears in your mouth, your eyes in your Viennese Street, 1866 Young Sidney Freud watches as anti-Semitic thugs

knock his father's hat into the mud and hit him Jacob Freud picks it up, his head down, and he walks on. His eyes are dull and sad, his smile is dim-witted and dumb. He waves at them, but this wasn't the first time. Freud was ten years old. Perhaps he'd heard about these things before. Perhaps they'd even been couched in some unwritten lesson from a father to his son that this was the way things are, or the way that one handles things.

Maybe it was never spoken of. The man picking up his hat was Jacob Freud, Sigmund's father, a wool merchant who worked hard but never aimed high and never lifted his family far from poverty. He never fought back and his son would remember this moment forever, not as tragedy but as prophecy this moment forever, not as tragedy but as prophecy and as emotion and as metaphor that he would run from for his entire life. Freud's mother Amelie had other plans for her golden boy, her darling Ziggy or little Ziggy. She superstitiously and desperately believed that the universe had marked him for greatness. In her eyes it wasn't possible for him to be anything but a heroic revolutionary, a brilliant light-bringer who would turn the world on its head, and Freud was raised to believe that, not that he would, but that he had to. Years later, Freud would write about his childhood hero. I myself walked in Hannibal's footsteps, and like him, I was destined never to see Rome.

Hannibal and Rome symbolized in my youthful eyes the struggle between the tenacity of the Jews and the organization of the Catholic Church. But here's the thing that haunted Freud. After crossing the Alps, after the impossible march, after defeating the Roman armies, Hannibal stopped. He stood up the gates of Rome itself and hesitated. Victory within reach and he couldn't take it. Even in Freud's dreams he could never enter Rome. The passivity, the fear, the conflict at superior forces, it would define everything. Freud would attach these forces to anti-Semitism and Christianity and the larger cultural forces where he felt he was not allowed

and the reasons that he was not allowed to go into these spaces. However, missing the point of his own system of thought, he would not ever connect them intelligently or accurately to his own upbringing. In psychodynamic thinking, which Freud would invent and then strangle in its crib when he needed to, we learn what makes us lovable from the parent of the opposite sex. But we learn how to be in the world, or our coping style, from the parent of the same sex. From his mother, greatness equaled love. From his father, Freud learned to submit and conform and avoid any type of conflict. This extreme passivity, Freud absorbed, made him repress every competitive or aggressive impulse. Freud would never connect the ambivalence between

the need to hide from God and the need to be God, or the desire to disappear and not have to fight with the need to fight. The inability to handle anger, whether or not we handle it in an outward way or an internal way, is the same thing. And Freud would never realize that even though he handled his phobias, his neuroses, whatever you want to call them, I would call them an avoidance of an emotional arc. Differently from his father, that he was still ruled for his entire life by the same thing. That had ruled Jacob. So naturally, this repressed aggression became the cornerstone of his psychology, and we diagnose in others what we can't admit in ourselves. As Joseph Campbell would

later point out, Freud was fishing while he sat on a whale. Freud prided himself on being bold, revolutionary. Read his letters. It's all self-deception. When he disagreed with his friends or mentors, he didn't argue for compromise. And rarely did he ever confront them. Oftentimes, he developed a very deep internal self-loathing while appearing overly facile, supplicatory, and sort of like negotiating with them, or complimenting them, while he hated them. Most of the time, he simply cut them off. Jung, Adler, Rank. First they were worshipped, and then they were discarded. Adler, Rank. First they were worshipped and then they were discarded. Brewer, Fleece, Charcot. They were adopted fathers until they disappointed him. Take his golden boy period, you know, with Carl Jung. They were discussing a patient's dream. Jung offers a different interpretation of the dream than his own

dream, right? It's Jung's dream. And Freud turns white and he shakes and he faints and he falls to the floor. And he tells Jung that this interpretation cannot be true. Freud tells Jung that both the contra interpretation of his dream and the bog bodies that they're about to see the exhibit of in Vienna that Jung has mentioned mean that Freud, that Jung has a death wish against Freud. Simply because Jung had a willingness to think for himself that would kill the image of perfection that Freud needed to feel lovable. This is someone who throughout their entire career, if you want to sit with this idea that we become lovable from the parent of the opposite sex, meaning not necessarily what makes us lovable all the time, but a lot of times what informs our purpose.

To be an artist, to be an innovator, to be a discoverer, to see through the lives of society, to be a hard worker, to be somebody who conforms to the rules as a point of order, as a point of pride, whatever that is, often is at odds with the way we learn to be in the world from the parent of the same sex. We learn what makes our purpose from the parent of the opposite sex, but how to be in the world, or what our coping style is from the parent of the same sex and a lot of times especially if you're a wounded healer like most therapists these things are at odds sometimes we learn to be over antagonistic to from the parent of the same sex or we learn as our coping style

to performatively seek victimhood or the lost cause of the great person that will ultimately be undone or to simply shut down and then cry out and receive help from a from a parent but Freud needed to be the most brilliant person in the room, but he also couldn't really fight with anyone and So he had to continue to back up until he had an all-encompassing system of understanding where his brilliance preceded him and his authority was presupposed by everyone because he couldn't have conflict. Cut to Vienna 1844. Freud's first and last love wasn't a woman or an idea, it was cocaine. He starts researching it in 1884

and convinced that he found this miracle cure. His colleague Karl Kohler is searching for this topical anesthetic crucial for eye surgery in an era before general anesthesia. When you cut on people in an area in a time before antibiotics and a time before anesthesia to do surgery, they tend to do something that is sort of inconvenient for the surgeon, like be awake and squirm around and have involuntary reactions to pain. Freud suggests cocaine, and it works. It was one of the decade's biggest medical discoveries.

But what does Freud do? First he congratulates Kohler, even though he feels like it's stolen while he's visiting his fiancé. So he plants rumors that Kohler stole the discovery from his notes, even though it was freely given, and Freud probably didn't understand the implications of that discovery when it happens, or his own insight. And Kohler also freely gave Freud credit, even though he published the paper. The slander follows Kohler's ophthalmology career to America for the rest of his life, another discarded father figure that Jung would collect, just like another discarded son figure

discarded father figure that Jung would collect just like another discarded son figure that he would never ultimately be able to craft the perfect son, just like he could never craft himself into the perfect father. And this starts this pattern. Freud courts father figures and then he destroys them. And it also starts Freud's solution to every problem for a while, which is cocaine. solution to every problem for a while which is cocaine. Freud starts, he switches careers at this point. There will not be a bigger discovery in surgery. There can't be. Kohler's taken it and so Freud enters neurology and he begins treating depressed patients by injecting them with cocaine and asking them how they feel and typically they feel great. So he publishes triumphantly. Cocaine became the first wonderful you know revelation in surgery but I had to leave that field because I am the darling and precious Ziggy who is the most brilliant and now I

can never be known for that so I have to bring this to another field. But several patients get addicted to Kotang like one does and then in one of his close friends Ernst von Fleischel he dies horribly. And Freud never publishes objective research again because when he takes a risk with a real study about a real drug in an objective way it hurts him, he becomes disgraced and Freud never publishes in that way he transforms himself into something different that is inherently subjective, inherently

slippery beneath the rules of empiricism. Dr. Frederick Cruz's book on this, Freud Making of an Illusion, is a good one. I've said before on the blog he was a pen pal of mine before his death and we had the same enemy so I enjoyed corresponding with him quite a bit. Props to him, you should read the book. A lot of the newer work on Freud, it's probably the best new work on Freud because even the best biographies of Freud didn't have the information that we have now, simply because a lot of these things were still covered up by the descendants of Freud until relatively

recently. It's a good book, I won't opine too much, but I do want to give sort of credit to a source since these aren't entirely academic things. After this, Freud retreats into the secret workings of the inner mind, where empirical embarrassment can't really follow you because you just make things up and then when you make things up people can't tell you that you're wrong or if they do you get to tell them that you're wrong too and there's not like a dead guy who was addicted to cocaine that follows you around in a way that sort of indicates that like

you didn't know what you were doing. So for 10 to 15 years when Freud's tolerance is building to cocaine, he switches to wine for withdrawals and he writes about spending weekends with his friend Marsala while he's using wine to come down off of the cocaine benders. Don't drink Marsala wine, it's gross. Don't even cook with it. There's no Marsala section at the wine store for a reason and if you find it in the cooking store and you make chicken marsala I don't know just anyway. Freud while he's high on cocaine becomes convinced that his personal theories explain everything that everyone must accept them and that he alone possesses this key to understanding the human psyche which if you've ever been around somebody who's doing cocaine is

pretty typical about what it does. Usually your thought process is I have the best idea in the world, it's that I'm going to start a restaurant and it's gonna be the best restaurant in the world because the food there will be the best food ever and everyone will love it and this is wonderful and you should do it with me. And also I just noticed that I can smell evil and you and me man, like you and me can tell evil and also have the best ideas we're gonna make the most money ever. That tends to be what it does to people who work food service but when it comes to the founder of modern psychology it worked the same way. Because your heart's in your cold, your yes and your no, you're in and you're out, you're up and you're down Enter Jean Martin Charcot. So cut to Paris, 1885. Charcot is staging this show, a circus.

Traumatized women, hysterics, as they were called then. They perform their symptoms for the medical students and Charcot hypnotizes them with electricity, sometimes blinding lights, loud sounds, eyelid manipulation, he rubs the eyes. He can make symptoms appear and disappear at will. He's making these women perform to show his magical powers and Freud is watching. This isn't therapy. Charcot believes that hysteria comes from defective genes, that these women can't be cured only displayed, and they're kept against their will. They're committed and they're just continued to be traumatized by Charcot for theatrical effect. Freud's peers are kind of disgusted because this isn't normal or

typical for the time and this theatrical abuse is absurd even for the 1880s but Freud is mesmerized. Here is this technique that can't be disproven and here is this power over the human mind that can be used to impress. And he sees patients under hypnosis describing childhood sexual abuse, but where Charcot sees genetic defects that are causing these things, Freud sees this opportunity. What if trauma causes hysteria? What if he can cure it by uncovering repressed memories of the trauma in the same way with the

same showmanship with the same ability to see underneath society and preempt these forces that give him a power over the world in a way that normal people can't see. Back in Vienna Freud discovers hypnosis is hard when the patients aren't captive, like prisoners in cages brought out by staff in order to be conditioned to perform, so he invents something better, free association, which is completely subjective, 100% effective because it's only Freud is able to decode it, surprise surprise he's always right. He partners with Joseph Breuer studying the patient Anna Oh and Breuer notices that she experiences catharsis when she is

expressing emotions about traumatic memory. Her symptoms improve and Freud watches and then he agrees and then decides that Breuer is too afraid of sexuality later because Brewer's not willing to follow Freud into the the brute cause of every problem being sexual. And because Freud can't replicate Brewer's empathetic technique of relating to the patient and making them feel something like, I don't know, comfortable or heard or feel something like, I don't know, comfortable or heard or reciprocally participating in the own experience of their treatment or at least the interpretation of the memories in their life, he declares that Brewer's wrong. And where Brewer's patients took trauma, accounts at face value,

Freud decides that actually they're lying but only he knows what the lies mean and why they're there. Those abuse memories actually they're unconscious fantasies. So at first Freud does consider under Brewer that a whole lot of really rich, noble people in Vienna are sexually abusing their children, people who are well thought of and have these careers, but then later he decides, no, that's just wrong, children are inherently sexual.

So it's sort of up for debate. How much of this decision was practical because Freud was Jewish and thought well if I can start saying that a whole bunch of and also poor so like if I start saying a whole bunch of like really rich Austrians and Germans basically have sex with their children secretly and then lie about it and traumatize their kids maybe this was not something that practically could be done at that point. Other people feel, other historians feel like it was more just sort of a direction that Freud wanted to go because it was definitely the easy route, you know, for lots of reasons. So what Freud

decides is that children are inherently sexual, they want to be abused, they want to have sex with the parent, and because they want that they go ahead and invent it in their mind and then the abuse never really happened. And so what needs to happen is that we need to analyze these people who we're talking about experiences that probably happened to them. And when we talk to them somehow they'll figure out that the root of their sexual abuse was actually their own desire as an infant or something and then they get cured. I'm still not sure what the point of psychoanalysis actually is. Please don't email me. Brewer had the humility to point out,

you know, that he wanted to learn from patients. But for Freud, authority was the point to be the father the paterfamilias that the patient started to listen to to understand themselves in a way that Freud's own father had never manifested authority and never listened to him and so now he Freud could tell the patients what they really felt and what they really wanted even they're over their own objections to what their feelings were or memories or sexuality in a lot of cases really anything about them Freud understood better than they did Brewer wrote Freud is a man given to absolutes and exclusive formulations and this is a psychical need in my opinion which leads to

excessive generalization something we might call now reductionism. The translation the cocaine is making him think that one weird theory explains everything multiple times even when those weird theories contradict on different benders of cocaine and marsala wine. Brewer had been more than a colleague though, he'd lent Freud money, he referred patients, he welcomed him into his home. He, on his own, you know, by his own admission was sort of trying to be a good father to get his wayward disciple on a good path because even though Freud's mother expected him to be brilliant, Freud was brilliant. He was an incredibly good writer, he was an incredibly good salesman for his ideas, a

good metaphor smith, even though he failed to understand metaphors, he wrote them fairly well and he also was a genius in a way that many people during this time weren't, and that did give him the sort of passive power through speech, through talking, over patients, over providers, and over the readers of his work. So Freud repays Brewer's generosity with slander, claiming that Brewer abandoned Anna O due to fear of sexuality. And as Yale historian Peter Gay notes in his book, classic case of ingratitude the resentment of a proud debtor against his benefactor. So exit Brewer and enter William Fleece,

a much poorer substitute for a therapist, psychiatrist, neurologist, surgeon, whatever, batted all of them, and also a much poorer excuse for a father. Fleece is a magnificently weird character in an era where people are doing things like cutting off different parts of the body to see if insanity come from them. Like there's a guy that pulls out teeth for a while and he's like, maybe there's bacteria in the teeth and the bacteria go to the brain and that's the reason why people are crazy

and that crazy people, I'm using shorthand to them, I'm not calling them crazy, but like mental patients during this time, maybe the reason why they have these issues is if you pull their teeth out. When you pull your teeth out, they don't really bite as hard, so maybe they're better. Assumptions like that were relatively normal for a minute.

So this is in that world, but it still is strange even for the time. Fleece believes that if you cut the nose off, pull bones out of the interior of the nostrils, and then sew the nose back on, that that will stop masturbation because the urge to do masturbation comes from the nose, and that when you stop masturbating that cures all physical and emotional problems. By the connections between these things are magic. I've read Fleece. He believes these things to be self-evident in a way that he doesn't explain or cite sources because whatever. Anyway, this appeals to Freud because it's a very reductive description for behavior

and it also goes back to sexuality. Freud loves at this point telling patients that their problem comes from repressed sexuality and masturbation or some relationship between those two things. And so he overlooks these wildly incompatible theories about biology even for the time, surgery. And some biographers think that Freud was maybe in love with fleece a little bit more

so than just as a father figure that there was a bisexual element to his I don't know the letters between them are very very intense I'll say that. Freud is this meticulous record keeper and he mysteriously doesn't save any of fleece's replies we don't have them we only have Freud's letters to fleece and so here comes incident, the falling out that would continue to happen with all of Freud's fathers and all of Freud's sons, where Freud refers this patient to Fleece for nasal surgery because she admits to masturbating, so that must be the reason why she has every medical and psychological condition that she also is complaining of, and that patient nearly bleeds

to death. This letter is horrifying, I won't read it at length, but it is sycophantic and bizarre. Seven times she almost bleeds to death. And when the doctor investigates to find out why she has continued to bleed from her nose is almost dying, they have another surgeon who's local, Fleece has gone home, and he pokes at the wound and figures out that there is literally half a meter of gauze that you use to stop bleeding during surgery on noses that you don't need to be doing to stop patients from masturbating that Fleece has stuffed in the nose, forgot about, sewed the nose back on and left inside. So Freud's letter to Fleece says, at the moment of the foreign body it was came out and everything became clear to me and I felt sick and

she had been packed I fled the room and I drank a bottle of water and felt miserable. But then incredibly Freud defendsends fleece. He says these accidents happened to the most unfortunate and circumspect surgeons, that absolutely no one would consider you a negligent for having left half a meter of cotton balled up in this woman's face while you're cutting her nose open to try and stop her from masturbating and other doctors refuse to support fleeces and competence. This is wildly strange. You don't really have to be a surgeon to understand how bad you have to be at surgery to stuff something that is at least, at least medical gauze, that's like four to six inches here compressed into the

nasal cavity and then forget that you did. No one at the time supports Fleece, he loses all respect. Freud begs Fleece to continue to understand that no one's angry with him even when everyone is and the letters are really weird. Again we only have Freud's, we don't have Fleece's. It looks based on Freud's response like Fleece is responding, like wanting more support which I don't even know how it's possible. It looks like he's asking Freud to intercede and get the support of other doctors to say that he didn't do anything wrong which means that he probably knows that he did. Anyway, the

scandal eventually ruins Fleece because people talk about him that aren't Freud or maybe Freud do. He probably is kind of disingenuous that he definitely throws Fleece under the bus when it's cool. Who knows who did it initially? Probably the surgeon that operated. And so now Freud learned his final lesson you never be the son again from now on you are the father and so one by one he collects people like Carl Jung, Otto Rank, Alfred Adler and one by one you know Freud tells them that they are his successor and that they will carry the fire into the future of all of his ideas and that they are superior to all of their colleagues and same script and

then one by one they develop their own ideas and one by one he cuts them off for pistol loyalty because he's threatened by anything that diverges from total loyalty to everything that he says which a lot of times is not consistent with the thing that he says next but that doesn't matter and by the time he reaches New York, only the talentless and the obsequious remain. He names them his secret committee, he gives them golden rings with sexually symbolic cameos, he models it on the secret society that he likes, and he's chased off by that point anyone who has any sort of intellectual ability like Freud was attracted to charisma and He did collect people who tended to be very

Charismatic effective smart, you know he he was brilliant himself he was attracted but also threatened by other people's brilliance, especially men and attracted but also threatened by other people's brilliance, especially men. And by the time that he's in New York there is no one left that you could describe as anyone other than a complete Midwit intellectual lightweight in his inner circle. Except for maybe Anna Freud who is sort of compromised from being his daughter but you know she's not terribly creative. I don't think that's an intellectual inability. She did get Freud's brilliance, but I do think that her legacy to Freud as a myth is part of the reason why she basically is, up until her death, changing his correspondence,

lying to biographers about what's in archives, because she has a loyalty to keeping this person's legend around that diverges from the history of who he was and what he said. And these secret committees, as Freud calls them, they meet in the shadows, they plot against anyone who deviates from the doctrine, they literally destroy careers of patients and other providers who disagree with them. And one dissenting analyst is so destroyed by their rumors that he kills himself and he begs Freud's forgiveness, which Freud refuses to give him.

And psychoanalysis continues to get weirder and weirder for Freud's life, so does Freud. The concepts that we associate with Freud like id, ego, superego, they're kind of systematized by followers after his death even though he writes about them in ways that do survive him. He also tries to dethrone them and retcon them later after he published the things that put them in print. Freud himself never had a consistent theory. He would apply, and the point of this series is not to be a biography of him, but like he would apply one idea to every patient like Spackle and then he would abandon it for another

and he would rewrite old cases with completely dissenting opinions with himself but he wouldn't admit error. Take like little Hans in 1909 which is a five-year-old who had a fear of horses and you know he saw a horse like trample his master or rider, owner, I don't know you call people that have horses whatever, trample a guy in the street. It's sort of normal that like a five-year-old would be afraid of seeing an animal that can kill you like almost kill a guy. You may not need to dig terribly deep under the hood to figure out what's going on there. Freud's analysis is that this boy wants to kill his father and then have sex with his own mother and the horse represents his dad because it has like a hair that looks like his dad's mustache.

I don't know what a horse mustache looks like his dad's mustache. I don't know what a horse mustache looks like or what this guy looked like. Those records don't survive. And when Hans saw the horse fall he starts to fear his own castration because he thinks his spiritually, even though he's not under threat of that, his balls might be removed because horses lose their penises when they are castrated and the kid knows this at five and this symbolizes punishment anxiety because he wants his mom so much is the way that Freud wants to attempt to cure of a five-year-old. So horses are everywhere in 1909 Vienna. They're big, they're loud, they fall down, they're terrifying to small children, but for Freud it must be about wanting to be your mom.

I don't like horses myself much, not because my parents. That's not really how psychology works. I just don't get it. If you like horses that's fine. But this is stupid. It's unintuitive, it's unscientific, and unlike, you know, mysticism or something, nobody feels better after they do it, you know? Like if you go to a drum circle, even like you at least feel better, you typically don't when somebody tells you that like your anxiety is being caused by you wanting to have sex with your mom because the horse reminds you of

Your penis somehow via your dad, but also your actual penis and whatever read the case study The the post Freudians who build the actual like therapeutic approaches They like have this weird loyalty to Freud They largely still hang out in New York or or they're psychiatrists that scatter from New York that are still practicing psychoanalysis, or like 80 years old. But when you try and proy it out to them, that nothing that Freud did actually informed what the better post-Freudians did. Like people like Karen Horni, or Win Winnicott or like Bowlby like

psychodynamic therapists then they actually were at tension with him picking things that are built more on like relationships and that like any time that Freud was even aware of them during his lifetime he hated them then they tell you that that's wrong even though like that is wrong, like he did. We have those letters. And also they also will sometimes try and get around it by treating into like retreating into like Lacan and saying Lacanian psychoanalysis or something which becomes its own thing. None of this really solves the problem of like Freudianism in America not really having anything to do with Freud.

By the time that Freud is in New York, like, he's given up pretending. In one case he needs, like, funding for his institute, so he goes to his patient Horace Frank and he tells the patient to leave his wife because, like, this other female patient who's like really wealthy is like more suggestible and then she also has to leave her husband so these people can get married because the only problem with their partners from Freud's mind is that like they don't like him and they also like aren't in this secret society of Freudian patients slash providers so he tells two people to get divorced and then marry so that they can like donate to his Institute

but when Frank resists, Freud tells him that like he has to do it because if he doesn't he'll become like latently homosexual in Freud's words and that will make him go psychotic and the guy's, I'm not gay though. And Freud's like, yes, you aren't aware that you're gay, but it's because you're not just gay. You're like triple secret super gay. And you're so secretly gay that you don't even know you are. And that's about to make you go crazy. If you don't divorce your wife and marry this other woman, neither of which is a man, and then give me money and the manipulation works. The guilt drives Frank psychotic because his wife, it doesn't end well for her, and he dies in his like

bathtub believing that it's a grave and that his wife is a pig. Like he does become psychotic because a lot of the things that Freud kicks off. it's a grave and that his wife is a pig like he does become psychotic because a lot of the things that Freud kicks off there's a billion other stories here again the point is not to be a biography of Freud It's just sort of Explicate the things that psychotherapy is reacting to and the people that are reacting to the same culture that Psychotherapy and habits starting with this person in the first episode By the end, you know Freud tells Theodor Reich in a letter, we do analysis for two reasons, to understand the unconscious and to get

paid. And then later, Freud writes for Krenze, patients are a rappel, only good to provide us with a livelihood and material to learn from. So at the end of his life, Freud basically says, I'm not wrong, psychoanalysis is right, it just doesn't heal anybody, and patients are like pitiful sources of money that are beyond help. Our job is to get them to pay us so that we can hear their problems, but that's just so that we can know how right we are, not really so that we can help anybody, and that because psychoanalysis doesn't work isn't really a fault of psychoanalysis, it's somehow the fault of other people.

And Freud's real discovery is that the unconscious exists, and it's this realm of trauma and drives and archetypes and intuitive creativity, all these things that he would never really flesh out in a coherent way or make a useful metaphor from. But he could only see sex and aggression as the thing that lay dormant under society because Freudian psychology became very good at describing Freud's own psychology, where there was a repressed obsession with sex, which we haven't gotten into. Freud probably has an affair with his wife's sister due to some recent things that came out on a hotel ledger and a scholarship that weren't available to biographers like Peter Gay that wrote pretty comprehensive biographers earlier. There's newer things now. But all of these things laid repressed in him and

he was sort of telling everyone else that they were the source of their own misery while he was being miserable. Murray Stein says pretty coherently in maps of meaning or Jung, his book on Jung, he says Freud mistook mechanism for meaning. Freud couldn't really see or face his own trauma, so he projects it on everyone else, first as a son seeking to overthrow inadequate fathers, and then as a father defending against imaginary death wishes, and finally as a King Lear type figure with his golden rings who's playing God with human minds, and all of Vienna's intelligentsia was exploring the unconscious. Like what Freud says is not

particularly original of an idea for the time. It is more so that Freud brings it into neurology, which would later become psychology or psychiatry and he does it in a way that is compelling because he is a good salesman, he's a good writer. But Clem, S.H.I.E.L., K.K.A.S.H.K.A. like all of these people like the artists, the theosophists, we're doing this through mysticism but like all of these people were talking about the forces of emotion that are underneath humanity, that move the world, that we can't see, that create wars and sexuality, and like all of the things that move humans along. Like it wasn't, that was not terribly original.

Freud's ideas were interesting, but they were just wrong because he saw Darwin, he saw natural selection, he saw those things that came from sexuality and so he thought that the entire mind could be reduced back to a sexual selective mechanism. When what really happens in the mind is that there are vast layers that are much more modern and even though some of these behaviors or some of these psychic attributes maybe originally started as, or the precursors to them originally started as ways to have babies so that you can pass your genes on without dying There were much more complicated layers to humanity that had to do with relational memory that had to do with time which had to do with transcendence which had to do with

concepts that were inborn and not necessarily learned that Freud missed because everything had to be that society was ignoring sex and that sex is actually like the force that moves everything and aggression too, which is in Freud's mind inseparable from sex because aggression is what lets you kill the person who wants to have sex with the person you want to have sex with so they're always the same, which again is not right. But unable to distinguish his own trauma from universal truth, his own mind from a greater psychology, Freud

sort of tries to indict everyone else with the problem that he could have healed and faced himself if he wanted to be more whole. And so because he's too afraid to face what is uniquely his versus what is... he can't see what is uniquely human or fundamentally human. And that's scary because it's easier to pretend that everyone's running from your demons than that you are. And every biography at the end is a tragedy. Freud dies, he failed to heal the very wound that drove him to create psychoanalysis, the profession would take over 200 years to recover if it ever did, and then we

deal with our own trauma or we project it into family politics or our own patients. And right now as a society we are deciding, will we deal with it? I often wonder though if Freud felt at the end of his life in his quietest moments, if he was running from the same thing that his father had. Instead of being laying on the street, being beaten, he was pretending that he was the one doing the beating. There's an undercurrent of shame, of rage, of grief, of vulnerability, and of victimhood that Freud's writing never moves past, because Freud himself never moved past it. And to be fair, I don't know that the West moved past it even today. One of the essential ingredients in being an abusive person who justifies that abuse

is a belief in your own victimhood and in a certain way as Adler would diagnose after he left Freud there is a tension of these opposites. There is a big internal part for every large internal part. All of Freud's abuses of power and manipulations were justified by his own belief in victimhood. His own belief in his own ultimate victimhood that no one else could his own ultimate victimhood, that no one else could know as much as he knew because no one else could hurt as much as he was hurting. This is something that is still very much alive in the West, this ambivalence between even though I'm hurting you, you hurt me more, even though I'm the group that has all of the power, you somehow have a shadowy network beneath the scenes. The way that we deflect as the collective

is also the way that we deflect as the individual. Blame shifting. Oh, you're the one that caused me to do that. Gaslighting. Oh, you don't understand how all of these things fit together in the way that I do. Changing the subject. Oh, well, yeah, that is completely irrelevant

when we consider something that is totally different. Minimizing their behavior. Oh, well, how could you say that to me unless you are perfect? How can I apologize for this thing that I did wrong unless you apologize for everything that you've also done wrong because for some reason, your complete insight is a condition of my accountability? Victim's stance.

Well, there's no one on earth that understands where I'm coming from because I'm the only person who's coming from this place of complete power and also complete powerlessness at the same time. Aren't I so smart and helpless? Over-intellectualization and rationalization. I'm not even gonna explain that one. Silent treatment, stonewalling, ghosting, sarcasm or humor, idealization or devaluation, splitting. Well, this one group is completely bad because there's something that they did wrong and

therefore that makes me completely good and always blameless. Projection. Not even gonna explain that one either. Maybe a lot of the systems that run the modern world make all of us feel a little bit like Freud's dad. Politics would continue to speak the language of Freud even though Freud was largely going to be forgotten. And I wonder if when Freud is sitting down and looking at the future and writing Moses and Monotheism, if he didn't feel a relationship to his father and realized that he was running from the same wound, even though he handled it a different way. Neither one of them ever dealt with the pain.

And even in his later works that are supposed to be reflections on his fantasies and dreams from childhood, I wonder if he wondered why he never was successful, even in them. He'd made a career telling people that they had corrupted fathers in religion, corrupted fathers in politics, corrupted fathers in bad therapy, in medical doctors, in their own families of origin. But that he was the perfect father, the one that could take them to Rome.

Freud would never connect the ambivalence between the need to hide from God and the need to be God. Or the desire to disappear and not have to fight with the need to fight. The inability to handle anger, whether or not we handle it in an outward way or an internal way, is the same thing. And Freud would never realize that even though he handled his phobias, his neuroses, whatever you want to call them, I would call them, an avoidance of an emotional arc, differently from his father, that he was still ruled for his entire life by the same thing. The Moses that could finally enter the promised

land. I wonder if he wondered why even in his dreams he couldn't enter Rome. And go on smiling while your landlord is pounding on the door Up on the podium, you're famous and your straw When the alarm goes off in your Ascent feeling a song