FOOTNOTE:
[15] The popular novelists try to disclose “the secrets of the heart” by means of Freudian sex phantasies, psychoanalytic mother complexes, and Jungian mystic sex libido. It is only in an era of philistinism and vulgarity with a literature of decadence and commonplace mediocrity that psychoanalysis can take root and flourish.
“Die Theorie behauptet mit ausschliessender Sicherheit (?), das es nur sexuelle Wünschregungen aus dem Infantilen sein können, welche in den Entwicklungsperioden der Kindheit die Verdrängung (Affectverwandlung) erfahren haben, in späteren Entwicklungsperioden dann einer Erneuerung fähig sind, sei es in folge der sexuelle Konstitution, die sich ja aus der ursprünglichen Bisexualität herausbildet, sei es in folge ungünstiger Einflüsse des sexuellen Lebens, und die somit die Triebkräfte für alle psychoneurotische Symptombildung ab geben.” (S. Freud, “Die Traumdeutung,” p. 376, zweite Auflage 1909.) In other words, slippery and mutable as Freud’s statements are, he clearly declares in his magnum opus the far-reaching generalization that neurosis is based on infantile sexual wishes, either due to bisexuality or to unfavorable influences of sexual life. Suppression of sexual experiences can be easily observed (by competent observers, of course), in infants a few months old. If you miss the process of suppression in the baby, you can easily trace it by means of psychoanalysis to the early recollections of tender infancy. It is certainly lack of comprehension that induces Ziehen to dub Freud’s speculations as Unsinn (nonsense). Freud’s admirers with a metaphysical proclivity delight over the theory of suppressed wishes. The wish is fundamental and prior to all mental states. This piece of metaphysical psychologism is supposed to be based on clinical experience. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. The Freudist manages to ride such horses.
The following speculation of Jung’s well represents the metaphysico-religious character of psychoanalysis: “By entering again into the mother’s womb he (Christ) redeems in death the sin of life of the primitive man, Adam, in order symbolically through his deed to procure for the innermost and most hidden meaning of the religious libido its highest satisfaction and most pronounced expression.... In the Christian mysteries the resurrected one becomes a supermundane spirit, and the invisible kingdom of God, with its mysterious gifts are obtained by his believers through the sacrifice of himself on his mother. In psychoanalysis the infantile personality is deprived of its libido fixations in a rational manner. The libido which is thus set free serves for the building up of a personality matured and adapted to reality, a personality that does willingly and without complaint everything required by necessity. (It is, so to speak, the chief endeavor of the infantile personality to struggle against all necessities, and to create coercions for itself where none exist in reality.)” Such metaphysico-religious lucubrations parade under the term psychoanalysis.
“Man,” says James, “believes as much as he can,” but the credulity of the psychoanalyst is limitless. The psychoanalyst with his allegories, symbolism, sublimation, incest phantasies, bi-sexuality, sexual suppression, mother complexes, Oedipus and Electra phantasms, and all the other complex psychoanalytic instrumentalities is an excellent example of sex obsessed, delusional dementia praecox. Psychoanalysis is a sort of sexual mysticism. All mental life is reduced by psychoanalysis to “creation” or “procreation.”
[CHAPTER XXXIII]
LIFE ENERGY AND THE NEUROTIC
The subject of fear may be considered from a somewhat different point of view, namely from a purely physiological and biological aspect. The cell in general, the nerve cell, or neuron, is a reservoir of energy. In fact the great biologist Sachs proposed to term the cell, energid.
For we must look at the organism as a store of energy which is used up in the course of the adjustments of the individual to his environment. The organism stores up energy and uses the energy during the course of its life activity.