Introduction: The legacy of Freud

RICHARD WEBSTER

…………………………………………………………
From Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and
Psychoanalysis (1995)
…………………………………………………………
‘MURDER IS A CRIME. Describing murder is not. Sex is not a crime. Describing it
is.’ These words of Gershon Legman express well something of the confusion, fear
[1]

and anxiety which have surrounded the subjects of sex and violence for very many
centuries

This confusion clearly affects individuals at the most intimate and private level. But it
is also significant in intellectual terms. For to think at all about subjects which are
hedged round by such powerful taboos requires not simply lucidity of intellect, but
emotional fluency of the kind we do not normally associate with the scientific mind.
To think clearly requires even more unusual capacities. It also calls for a degree of
intellectual rebelliousness which is rare among those trained in the natural sciences.

Sigmund Freud is frequently held to have possessed all of these qualities. The
American writer Lucy Freeman begins her popular study of Freud and the
psychoanalytic movement by observing that nearly twenty-one centuries have passed
since Plato wrote, ‘the life that is unexamined is not worth living’, and advised man to
‘Know thyself’. She goes on to describe the birth of psychoanalysis in the following
terms:

For close to two millenniums Plato’s celebrated dictum seemed to pose an

impossible challenge to mankind. Then, at the dawn of the twentieth century,
a lone doctor in Vienna, Sigmund Freud, conducted what Alexander Pope, in
1733, called ‘the proper study of mankind’. Freud made startling discoveries
that were to revolutionise the thinking of the world about the mind of man.
Five centuries before Christ, Heraclitus had said, ‘The soul of man is a far
country, which cannot be approached or explored.’ But one man, Sigmund
Freud, not only crossed the frontier of that far country, but penetrated its
heartland, and through his writings and personal influence made the inner
landscape available to all who dared follow.
2

Lucy Freeman’s journalistic fluency, and the seemingly naive assurance with which
she disposes of more than two millennia of intellectual history, make it very tempting
to dismiss her words as yet another example of the myth-making which has always
surrounded the figure of Freud. Yet the most striking feature of Freeman’s brief
conspectus of Western thought is just how much truth it contains. For one of the
simplest but most startling facts of intellectual history is that, until the beginning of
the twentieth century, European thinkers made virtually no significant contribution to
the scientific study of human nature and human behaviour. For at least half a century
after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species we possessed no systematic
theory which even attempted to explain the exceptionally violent nature of our own
species, the extraordinary range and complexity of our non-reproductive sexual
behaviour or the depth and power of some of the most ordinary human emotions. The
fierce taboos and the atmosphere of religious unreason which surrounded nearly every
form of intimate human relationship for centuries, had, it would seem, triumphed over
science itself. Here, at least, the advance of human knowledge, which in almost all
other areas had proved irresistible, had been held back.

That Freud eventually challenged many of these ancient taboos cannot be disputed.
As the intrepid intellectual adventurer he was, he led an assault on the highest peak of
human knowledge in a manner which has seemed to many observers not simply
impressive, but in some respects magnificent. Yet the view that his expedition was
triumphant – that Freud actually succeeded in solving the enigma of human nature – is
one which, in the last twenty years or so, has been questioned or rejected by a series
of increasingly hostile critics.

Indeed the sheer volume of such attacks has sometimes led to the mistaken impression
that psychoanalysis is already a defeated force. Freud, however, has proved more
difficult to vanquish than many of his opponents have calculated. As Walter Kendrick
has written, ‘How can you simply kill the Father who taught you that his death must
be your desire?’ Although some psychoanalysts themselves now profess a degree of
[3]

defensive agnosticism about Freud’s theories, the movement which he founded

continues to show many signs of vigorous life. If the figure of Freud no longer
bestrides the intellectual landscape in triumph, it seems at times that he still lies across
it like Gulliver, diminishing his critics by the sheer scale and grandeur of his
enterprise, and shrugging off as pin-pricks the lances which they hurl against him.
‘Why,’ asks Phyllis Grosskurth in a recent study of Freud’s inner circle, ‘has Sigmund
Freud’s life and work commanded such undiminished interest? Today – as we
approach the end of the century – he appears to have been its leading intellectual
force, a far more tenacious influence than Karl Marx.’ More recently still, in a book
[4]

which sets out to answer some of Freud’s critics, the American historian Paul
Robinson expressed optimism about the future of psychoanalysis:

Unless I am seriously mistaken ... Freud’s recent critics will do him no

lasting damage. At most they have delayed the inevitable process by which
he will settle into his rightful place in intellectual history as a thinker of the
first magnitude. Indeed the very latest scholarly studies of Freud suggest that
the anti-Freudian moment may already have begun to pass. [5]

Robinson goes on to quote the view of Harold Bloom that ‘No twentieth-century
writer – not even Proust or Joyce or Kafka – rivals Freud’s position as the central
imagination of our age.’ The fact that such views as these can still be seriously
[6]

advanced is a mark of the status psychoanalysis continues to enjoy in at least some

quarters of intellectual culture.

One of the reasons that psychoanalysis has proved so resilient in the face of recent
attacks is that Freud’s theories were themselves formulated in an environment of
hostility. Those who follow Freud are thus able to account for the continuing
scepticism about his ideas by invoking the same arguments which he deployed against
his original detractors. One of the arguments resorted to most frequently is that which
explains all criticism of psychoanalysis as a product of ‘resistance’. Like many of
Freud’s ideas this notion contains an element of truth. For there can be no doubt that
some people do reject his theories because of a conscious or unconscious aversion to
their sexual content. But what defenders of psychoanalysis rarely if ever acknowledge
is that theories about sexual behaviour which are wrong are just as likely to be met
with resistance as theories which are right. The argument about unconscious
resistance is therefore a diversion from the main issue. What is far more important
about some recent criticism of Freud is that a number of scholars who do not regard
the subject-matter of psychoanalysis as offensive or indelicate remain genuinely
doubtful about the validity of psychoanalytic theory. They are dissatisfied with it
because it fails to do the only thing we ultimately have a right to demand of
explanatory theories – it fails to explain.

I share this dissatisfaction. Psychoanalysis is, I believe, one of the most subtle of our
many attempts to use reason in a ‘magical’ rather than in a scientific manner – to use
reason, that is to say, not in order to provide a genuine solution to an intellectual
problem, but in order to provide a defence against the forces which we fear, and
against aspects of our own nature which arouse anxiety. Freud saw himself as the
rational foe of religion. Significantly, however, far from setting out radically to
subvert the values of Judaeo-Christian asceticism which were deeply internalised in
his own culture, Freud made the Lamarckian assumption that such asceticism had
become part of our biological inheritance, so that it now belonged to our very nature.
It is for this reason that his notion of therapy contains an implicit endorsement of the
oldest of all ascetic ideals – the glorification of the spirit at the expense of the body:

We liberate sexuality through our treatment, but not in order that man may
from now on be dominated by sexuality, but in order to make a suppression
possible – a rejection of the instincts under the guidance of a higher
agency ... We try to replace the pathological process with rejection. [7]

Driven by what some have construed as fierce intellectual honesty, Freud declined to
excise sexuality from human nature completely. To some extent at least we have
benefited from his attitude. But throughout the twentieth century, from the time of D.
H. Lawrence to the time of Gershon Legman, Nancy Friday and their successors,
there have been many who have rebelled against Victorian primness with far more
gusto and far more enthusiasm for the realm of the obscene than can ever be glimpsed
in the writings of any psychoanalyst. In the climate of explicitness which these latter-
day rebels have helped to create it is now possible to see that psychoanalysis is far
less adventurous and far less open than we once thought. Significantly, the science of
sexuality which Freud brought into being is couched in a language purged of
obscenity. Not only this, but Freud’s own attitude towards some of the commonest
forms of sexual behaviour, including masturbation, homosexuality and many aspects
of women’s sexuality, was one of distaste bordering on disgust. This attitude is
reflected in psychoanalytic theories which are, in many respects, a flight away from
the very forms of sexual behaviour which Freud claimed fearlessly to confront.

Given this cryptic conservatism it is perhaps not surprising that some writers have
regarded Freud’s doctrines as being compatible with traditional religious beliefs. One
of Freud’s earliest and most enthusiastic followers, the Protestant pastor Oskar Pfister,
saw psychoanalysis as a gospel of love comparable with that preached by Jesus. More
recently both Erik Erikson in his portrait of Luther, and Norman O. Brown in his Life
Against Death have pointed to the numerous similarities between Luther’s view of the
human condition and that found in psychoanalysis. The resemblances which Brown
[8]

and Erikson found between Lutheran Protestantism and classical psychoanalysis can
scarcely be disputed. Some of those who are members of a Protestant church, or who
hold any form of religious belief, may take comfort in discovering that the revealed
truths perceived by Luther are in harmony with the analytic hypotheses produced by
Freud. Those who possess greater intellectual caution, however, or those who hold no
religious beliefs, may well feel some scepticism in the face of such an easy
congruence of ancient faith and modern reason. They will be prompted to ask to what
extent we should regard psychoanalysis not as a scientific approach to human nature
but as a disguised continuation of the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

For if psychoanalysis seems in some quarters to have attained the weight and
seriousness of orthodoxy it is perhaps for no other reason than that it is a form of
orthodoxy itself – a subtle reconstruction in a challenging and modern form of some
of the most ancient religious doctrines and sexual ideologies.

This view of psychoanalysis has sometimes been taken by other writers. But it has not
been taken very far. One of the reasons for this is that today, in our sceptical
materialism, we tend to be profoundly unfamiliar with the doctrines and eschatology
which once lay at the heart of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. So powerful has the
ethos of secular rationalism become that we rarely recognise the fundamental role
which has been played in history by irrational fantasies – by religious dreams of
redemption and world-purification, by miracles, rituals and magic, by the belief in
angels, demons and witches, by visions of cosmic struggles between the forces of
light and the forces of darkness, by the fear of Satan and the belief in the eternal
punishment of the wicked.

Such fantasies were once the very essence of religious orthodoxy, and it was in the
white-hot religious zeal which was associated with them up to and beyond the time of
the Reformation that our modern rational conscience was originally forged. But one
of the effects of our internalisation of the rational Protestant conscience has been
actually to obscure the conditions in which that conscience was created. Out of its
very severity the Protestant mind has tended progressively to repudiate the very
supernaturalism which originally licensed its strictness, together with all those aspects
of Christianity which no longer seem compatible with its modern rational form. As a
result, although the doctrines of Heaven and Hell, of Original Sin and of the Last
Judgement may have some nominal significance for us, they are no longer part either
of our imaginative or of our intellectual reality. The fantasies which were once
expressed in Christian demonology and in Christian visions of hell have been
progressively relegated to the thriving sub-cultures of Satanism and science fiction, of
horror comics and pornography. In the dissociated post-religious culture which has in
this way been brought into being, Christians and rational humanists alike are often
unable to bring themselves to believe that the very forms of fantasy they have been
conditioned to revile once lay at the orthodox heart of the religious tradition which
our culture tends still to revere. Our modern cultural predicament has been most
succinctly and poignantly expressed by the novelist John Updike: ‘Alas we have
become, in our Protestantism, more virtuous than the myths which taught us virtue;
we judge them barbaric.’ [9]

Our culturally orthodox lack of familiarity with our own culture has not only brought
about the virtual destruction of our historical consciousness, but it has also profoundly
affected every area of contemporary intellectual life. Above all it has determined our
reaction to modern theories of human nature. In considering such theories what must
always be borne in mind is that it is only in the last century or so that secular theories
of human nature have become at all common. Before that time intellectuals generally
felt little need of such theories. They felt no need of them for the simple reason that
they subscribed, almost without exception, to the creationist theory of human nature
which is contained in Judaism, in Christianity and in Islam. It was only in the early
part of the nineteenth century, as the ‘truths’ of revealed religion were increasingly
discredited, that an acute need for secular theories of human nature began to emerge.

The confident assumption which is generally made by modern rationalist thinkers is

that the propositions about human nature which are contained in such theories as
Marxism, psychoanalysis, existentialism, functionalism, and structural anthropology,
are of a quite different order to the propositions about human nature which are
contained within the Judaeo-Christian theory which they effectively replace.
Whatever judgement may be passed on particular theories, it is at least generally
assumed that modern thinkers have succeeded in freeing themselves from the
superstitious and theological modes of thought which dominated those intellectuals
who belonged to an era of faith. It is, however, just this assumption which needs to be
questioned. For although such secular theories as psychoanalysis and structural
anthropology have evidently shed the theism of Christianity, it is not at all clear that
they have repudiated the view of human nature which was once associated with
creationist theology, and with Judaeo-Christian doctrines of sin and redemption.
Modern theorists of human nature, indeed, trapped as they are within a culture which
has systematically mystified its own strongest traditions, are rather in the position of
the mariner who sets out to sea without a chart. When he lands at a different point on
the same continent from which he originally set sail, there is always the danger that he
may fail to recognise this, and announce instead that he has discovered a new world.

In the last hundred years such thinkers as Marx, Freud, Sartre and Lévi-Strauss have, I
believe, repeatedly made just such a voyage. Setting out from a culture alienated from
its traditional beliefs, disconsolately counting the small change of its new spiritual
poverty, they have returned richly laden with belief and certainty in order to announce
the discovery of the Brave New Worlds of dialectical materialism, of psychoanalysis,
of existentialism and of structuralism. Many thinkers have greeted these discoveries
with relief and enthusiasm. But because of their profound lack of familiarity with the
orthodoxies of their own culture, they have often failed to recognise that the New
Worlds in question are in reality but part of the old religious continent which was
once their own, and that what they have embraced are not fresh theories of human
nature but Judaeo-Christian orthodoxies which have been reconstructed in a secular
form, safe from the attacks of science precisely because they are presented as science.

Any culture which is founded upon the internalisation of a body of sacred doctrine,
but which allows that body of doctrine to fall into obscurity, is always in danger of
recreating old errors in new secular forms, and of allowing unexamined forms of
irrationalism to determine its very definition of rationality. It is to this danger that our
own culture has succumbed over and over again during the past century.

What I have set out to do in this book is to show in detail how the creation of
psychoanalysis in the closing years of the nineteenth century and its development and
reception during the twentieth century has followed just this pattern. At the same time
I have tried to use what amounts to an essay in cultural analysis in order to untie some
of the complex intellectual knots which have been tied in our understanding of
sexuality and of human nature by Freud and his followers.

I have devoted a whole book to a theory I believe to be mistaken partly because I

think it is mistaken in a particularly interesting way, and partly in order to establish
the need for an alternative theory of human sexuality and human nature. It is because
my ultimate aim is constructive, rather than destructive, that I have not yielded to the
temptation to dismiss the psychoanalytic movement out of hand as being without
intellectual value or significance. In the past twenty or thirty years there have been a
number of attacks on psychoanalysis which have taken such a view. But I believe that
one of the great dangers in any critique of Freud is that of underestimating the real
achievements of those who have written within the psychoanalytic tradition. For this
tradition has every claim to be regarded as richer and more original than any other
single intellectual tradition in the twentieth century. Many of Freud’s earliest
followers were themselves highly creative and the writings of Otto Rank, Ernest
Jones, Victor Tausk and Hans Sachs still reward careful reading. In its subsequent
development the psychoanalytic tradition has included the original and sometimes
heterodox contributions of Wilhelm Reich, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Donald
Winnicott, John Bowlby, Bruno Bettelheim, Anthony Storr and Nancy Chodorow.
Valuable contributions have also been made by many other psychoanalytic writers – I
think in particular of the American analysts Lawrence Kubie and Joel Kovel. [10]

The writings of all these analysts make up what is, relatively speaking, an extremely
interesting intellectual tradition. But this acknowledgement of the breadth and vitality
of the work which Freud has helped to inspire must immediately be qualified. In the
first place it is important to bear in mind the larger cultural context in which
psychoanalysis grew up. For it might well be claimed that the reasons for the
‘success’ of the psychoanalytic tradition have been almost entirely negative. If
psychoanalysis has attracted some of the most lively intellectuals of the twentieth
century it is not, I believe, because of the truth which psychoanalytic theories contain,
or their explanatory value. It is perhaps because psychoanalysis is, with the
increasingly fragile exception of literary criticism, the only branch of the human
sciences which even begins to recognise the existence of the human imagination in all
its emotional complexity. In this respect it might well be said that the incorrect theory
elaborated by Freud has been infinitely preferable to no theory at all, and in the vast
desert of twentieth-century rationalism it is scarcely surprising that many have seen,
in the drop of imaginative water which is contained in Freud’s theories, a veritable
oasis of truth.

But there is another reason why the vitality of the psychoanalytic tradition should not
be taken as confirmation of the validity of Freud’s theories. This is because a great
deal of it is owed not to any intellectual factor but to Freud’s own remarkable and
charismatic personality and to the heroic myth which he spun around himself during
his own lifetime. Freud himself consciously identified with Moses, and the prophetic
and messianic dimensions of his character have been noted again and again even by
those who have written sympathetically about psychoanalysis. It would be difficult to
overestimate the extent to which Freud’s messianic personality has profoundly
distorted the perception of his theories.

One of the most important roles of the messianic personality has always been that of
acting as the fearless transgressor. The messiah is that person whoappears to have the
inner strength openly to attack established authorities or flout laws and taboos in order
to further his chosen cause. It is by systematically transgressing taboos that he relieves
his followers of the burden of guilt and anxiety they would otherwise feel as a result
of pitting themselves against their elders, or against established orthodoxies.

It was in just such a role that Freud cast himself when he created the psychoanalytic
movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. The need which he filled by
doing this should be clear enough. For in any intellectual culture which is oppressed
by rigorous taboos the most powerful though least conscious desire of its members
will be to transgress these taboos and in this way seek relief from what Chesterton, in
an essay on Freud, called ‘our monstrous burden of secrecy’. To suppose that such a
[11]

transgression may be easily made is to fail to appreciate both the power of taboo and
the extent to which intellectuals, simply because they have been selected according to
the criterion of academic success, tend to be conformist by nature. Ultimately it is
only to authority, whether or not this authority derives from genuine explanatory
power, that the majority of intellectuals will defer. If what is at stake is the
transgression of some of the most sacred principles of rationalism, then no ordinary
authority will suffice. What is needed is nothing less than the authority of a messiah.

Perhaps the most significant of Freud’s achievements lay in the way he intuitively
perceived this need and went on to use the aura and authority of scientific rationalism
in order to create around himself a ‘church’ whose doctrines sought to subvert the
very rationalism they invoked.

The kind of need which was answered in this way is conveyed well by some words of
André Gide, who speaks of having found in Freud ‘rather an authorisation than an
awakening. Above all he taught me to cease doubting myself, to cease fearing my
thoughts, and to let those thoughts lead me to those lands which were not after all
uninhabitable since I found him already there.’ Gide’s experience is one that reflects
[12]

that of countless other twentieth-century artists and intellectuals. In Germany Thomas

Mann spoke admiringly of Freud’s heroic achievement and of his insight into human
nature. In England W. H. Auden greeted psychoanalysis enthusiastically, writing of
Freud:

To us he is no more a person
Now but a whole climate of opinion.

In France the novelist Romain Rolland emerged as one of Freud’s most enthusiastic
admirers. Meanwhile, in America, Freud gained an even wider following both among
writers and scholars. After reading some of Freud’s work the novelist Theodore
Dreiser wrote in the following terms of his achievement:
 Every paragraph came as a revelation to me – a strong revealing light thrown
on some of the darkest problems that haunted and troubled me and my work.
And reading him has helped me in my studies of life and men ... [H]e
reminded me of a conqueror who has taken a city, entered its age-old, hoary
prisons and there generously proceeded to release from their gloomy and
rusted cells the prisoners of formulae, faiths and illusions which have racked
and worn man for hundreds and thousands of years ... The light that he has
thrown on the human mind! Its vagaries and destructive delusions and their
cure! It is to me at once colossal and beautiful!
[13]

Again and again Freud has been hailed, as he is here by Dreiser, as the bringer of
cultural and intellectual liberation. Yet if Freud has indeed established himself as one
of the most significant messianic figures in modern intellectual culture this is perhaps
itself a reason for preserving our scepticism about his mission. For from the time of
Moses to the time of Marx it has been one of the characteristics of messianic prophets
that their apparent willingness to attack established authorities has concealed a deeper
adherence to orthodoxy than their followers have ever suspected. Frequently, indeed,
the movements of liberation which they have led have actually ended by redoubling
the very forms of repression they have ostensibly opposed.

If Freud has not often been seen in this light it is perhaps because the very success
which he has enjoyed by casting himself in the role of intellectual liberator has
brought with it the kind of idealisations and projections to which all messiahs are
subject. One of the most fundamental psychological transactions in all religious
movements stems directly from followers’ feelings of unworthiness in relation to their
messiahs. As a result of these feelings they frequently find themselves inwardly
compelled to disown not only their own rebelliousness but also their own generosity,
their own intuitive sensitivity, their richly humanistic social hope and even their own
intellectual originality. Unconsciously all these qualities are denied or minimised and
reattributed to the messiah. The image of the messiah is in this way enriched by gifts
and talents which followers are either too anxious or too submissive to proclaim as
their own.

This kind of transaction may frequently be observed within the psychoanalytic

movement itself where psychoanalytic theorists with genuine insights into human
behaviour have failed to develop them through an inability to challenge Freud’s
authority. Instead they have sometimes represented ideas which are in fundamental
conflict with classical psychoanalytic theory as having been in some way ‘derived’
from Freud. In consequence their own sensitivity to human motivation – which is
sometimes incomparably greater than that shown by Freud himself – comes to be
associated with psychoanalysis and thus to increase still further Freud’s own authority
and cultural status. This has even been the case with some of the best-known
psychoanalytic writers, including Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Erik Erikson and
Heinz Kohut, who are regarded within the psychoanalytic movement as highly
original or even ‘dissident’ thinkers. For because their theoretical rebellions against
Freud have been conducted within a larger pattern of submission to Freud’s authority,
these thinkers have never been able to bring about the intellectual revolution which
alone might have rescued psychoanalysis from itself. [14]
As a result Freud’s own reputation has been preserved and the status of his theories
protected. There can be no doubt at all that his work is shot through, in a somewhat
random manner, with real insights into human nature. But Freud repeatedly shows
that he is unable to organise these insights systematically. Frequently, indeed, his own
complex, and sometimes bizarre theories have the effect of strangling the insights
which are scattered throughout his writings. Partly because of these sporadic insights
the pseudo-science which Freud eventually succeeded in constructing is highly
plausible. But it remains a pseudo-science for all that – perhaps the most complex and
successful which history has seen.

If the psychoanalytic movement were not important or if it had made little intellectual
impact, Freud’s pseudo-science could be ignored or briefly rebutted. But Freud’s
influence on contemporary intellectual life has been so large and his psychological
assumptions have proved so enduring that it is difficult to re-examine human sexual
behaviour – or any other form of human behaviour – without finding that our very
perception of this behaviour is distorted by psychoanalysis.

It is for this reason, I believe, that the task of untangling sexual behaviour from the
psychoanalytic theories in which it has become enmeshed is such an important one.

From the introduction to Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis.

NOTES
[1]
Gershon Legman, quoted in Gay Talese, Thy Neighbour’s Wife, Pan, 1980, p. 389
[2]
Lucy Freeman, Freud Rediscovered, 1980, New York: Arbor House, pp. 1–2.
[3]
Walter Kendrick, review of Jeffrey Masson’s Freud: The Assault on Truth, Voice
Literary Supplement, June 1984.
[4]
Phyllis Grosskurth, The Secret Ring: Freud’s Inner Circle and the Politics of
Psychoanalysis, Jonathan Cape, 1991, p. 14.
[5]
Paul Robinson, Freud and His Critics, University of California Press, 1993, p. 269
[6]
Harold Bloom, ‘Freud, the Greatest Modern Writer’, New York Times Book Review,
23 March 1986, quoted in Robinson, p. 270.
[7]
Freud, Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, ed. Herman Nunberg and
Ernst Federn, vol. II, New York: International Universities Press, 1967.
[8]
Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther, New York: W. W. Norton, 1958; Norman O.
Brown, Life Against Death, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959.
[9]
John Updike, in his introduction to F. J. Sheed(ed.), Soundings in Satanism,
Mowbrays, 1972, p. vii. The best-known modern example of this attitude will be
found in Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God (SCM Press Ltd, 1963), in which the
traditional doctrines and beliefs of Christianity are systematically repudiated. John
Robinson’s position is very close to that outlined by the Anglican lay-theologian John
Wren-Lewis, whose words he quotes:

I cannot emphasise too strongly that acceptance of the Christian faith became
possible for me only because I did not have to go back on my wholesale
rejection of the superstitious beliefs which surrounded me ... There is a
 misplaced sense of loyalty which makes many Christians feel reluctant to
come out in open opposition to anything that calls itself by the same name,
or uses words like ‘God’ and ‘Christ’; even Christians who in practice dislike
superstition as much as I do still often treat it as a minor aberration to be
hushed up rather than a radical perversion to be denounced ... In fact a very
large part of what passes for religion in our society is exactly the sort of
neurotic illness which Freud describes, and the first essential step in
convincing people that Christianity can be true in spite of Freud is to assert
outright that belief based on the projection mechanisms he describes is false,
however much it may say ‘Lord, Lord.’ It is not enough to describe such
beliefs as childish or primitive, for this implies that the truth
is something like them, even though more ‘refined’ and ‘enlightened’,
whereas in reality nothing like the ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ I was brought up to
believe in can be true. It is not merely that the Old Man in the Sky is only a
mythological symbol for the Infinite Mind behind the scenes, nor yet that
this Being is benevolent rather than fearful; the truth is that this whole way
of thinking is wrong, and if such a Being did exist he would be the very devil
(quoted in Honest to God, p. 43).

The theology of John Robinson and John Wren-Lewis is by no means as novel as

might be supposed. Historically speaking this kind of theology has its origins in
extreme Puritanism. In 1650 the Leveller Gerrard Winstanley wrote that the
traditional Christian, who ‘thinks God is in the heavens above the skies, and so prays
to that God which he imagines to be there and everywhere ... worships his own
imagination which is the devil’ (quoted in Christopher Hill, The World Turned
Upside Down, Penguin, 1975, p. 140). It is both interesting and significant that while
Wren-Lewis and Winstanley both decry ‘superstitions’ neither of them can dispense
with the concept of ‘devil’ and both end by eschewing reasoned criticism of the
beliefs they oppose in favour of a kind of exasperated demonology.
[10]
Although I have included in this list psychoanalytic writers who have, in my view,
made interesting contributions to psychology, the inclusion of any particular writer
should not be construed as an unqualified endorsement of their work. In the case of
John Bowlby, for example, it remains my impression that, for all the immense value
of his work in changing hospital practice, his theoretical contribution tends to be
accepted uncritically by too many writers (particularly those who are out of sympathy
with Freud), simply because it appears to have empirical foundations and a sounder
relation to Darwinian theory than can be claimed by classical psychoanalysis. For an
interesting view of Bowlby, see Jeremy Holmes, John Bowlby and Attachment
Theory, Routledge, 1993. See also Michael Rutter’s Maternal Deprivation
Reassessed, 2nd edition, Penguin, 1981. Rutter’s criticisms of Bowlby, though mildly
put, add up to a significant repudiation of the lofty estimate which Bowlby formed of
his own theories.
I yoke together Lawrence Kubie and Joel Kovel because of Kovel’sWhite
Racism: A Psychohistory, Allen Lane, 1972, in which Kovel acknowledges his debt to
Kubie’s ‘The Fantasy of Dirt’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, vol. VI, 1937. Kovel is one
of the few psychoanalysts to have appreciated something of the value and profundity
of Kubie’s paper
[11]
Chesterton, quoted in Frank Cioffi (ed.), Freud: Modern Judgments, Macmillan,
1973, p. 24
[12]
Gide, quoted by Cioffi, p. 23.
[13]
Dreiser, quoted in Ronald W. Clark, Freud: The Man and the Cause, Paladin,
1982, p. 421.
[14]
Although he makes no such sweeping claim as I have made here, it is interesting
that Paul Roazen has written that ‘whereas others have taken pains to differentiate
their work from Freud’s, Erikson actually ascribed his own ideas to Freud. Erikson
does not always seem to want to acknowledge his own originality’ (Freud and His
Followers, Penguin, 1979, p. 500).