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13 part 1
Phallocentric Circles
Freud seriously questioned humanity’s dependence upon religion,
even though he was proud to be ethnically Jewish. One thing he pathologized in religions was the belief in a
supreme being. He felt that the concept of religion in the ‘final form’ taken
by present-day Christian civilization was fatally flawed. He was highly critical of Christianity and
saw it as an expression of infantilism.
Though Freud may have had revulsion to religion, the origins of psychoanalysis
are deeply rooted in encounters with Biblical religious traditions. The Bible is among the primary sources where Freud extracted
his symbols and myths, and from where all of his patients were situated, upon whom he based his prognoses, Ipso facto,
the entire corpus of his knowledge or experiences of religion and spirituality
were extracted from within the Judeo-Christian context.
Although much of Freud’s work serves as a critique of religious feelings,
psychoanalysis nevertheless employed and carried forward the core themes of the
Bible. Judeo-Christian tropes dominate psychoanalytical concepts, as Freud
mined Biblical literature to extract analogies for his favorite phobias. The ‘primal
scene’. which Freud associated with Original Sin, signifies the experience when
a child sees the parents engaging in sex, which means, according to Freudian
psychoanalysis, that the child will be traumatized for the rest
of his or her life, or until properly psychoanalyzed.
In Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin,
Science and Psychoanalysis, Richard
Webster explains how the ‘cryptic Judeo-Christian ethos’ was the very foundation
of what was touted to be a scientific theory. Webster notes that Freud
misdiagnosed several of his early patients as traumatic hysteria when they were
“actually cases of injury-related brain damage and epilepsy”. He called psychoanalysis a “crypto-theological
system” which encompassed “a modernized reworking of traditional Judeo-Christian
morality, sexual realism, and restraint”.
Its very structure was church-like, in that psychoanalytic
treatments in Freudian practice were modeled after the Catholic confessional. The psychoanalyst replaces the priest, who is
relatively invisible to the patient just like the priest is not visible during
confession. The patient confides the
traumas he or she has experienced just like the Catholic confides sins. In so
doing, the patient is relieved of a burden, and redeemed into good mental
health just like the sinners who confess are saved from their sins. (For more
on this, please read page 141, chapter 13)
Freud brought phallic symbolism intimately into our lives. In A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis,
David Friedman notes how
psychoanalytic interpretations have enduringly placed the penis and associated
anxieties at the center of society.
Friedman suggests that: “attitudes toward the penis have been instrumental in mapping
the course of both Western civilization and world history”. He notes that
through the centuries, “the penis has been deified, demonized, secularized, racialized, psychoanalyzed, politicized
and, finally, medicalized.” This
extreme cultural focus on the phallus, codified (overcoded?) by Freud, brought
concepts such as ‘castration anxiety’ and ‘penis envy’ into popular discourse.
Freud had visions of grandeur,and his personality and ideas
certainly achieved immortality. He
shared with Karl Marx a belief that religion is an illusion—neither
man believed in a soul or life after death.
E.M. Thornton wrote in The Freudian Fallacy:
Freud’s concept of the unconscious must be attributed to his
cocaine usage. Death wishes, infantile incestuous desires and perversion are not
the pre-occupations of the normal mind. Constantly recurring throughout the
drug literature are the same words and phrases used by Freud and his followers
to describe his concept of the unconscious mind. In both psychoanalysis and
this literature the same metaphors of looking down into an abyss occur.
Sometimes a Saint is Only a Saint
In The Future of an Illusion, Freud portrays religion as a fantasy that fulfills “the
oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind”. In 1927, Freud sent a
copy of his controversial book to his friend Romain Rolland, the renowned
French Nobel laureate and humanitarian. Rolland, who was a student of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, began
a thirteen-year correspondence with Freud. (For more on this, please read
page 142 and 143, chapter 13)
Women, Infants, Hindus and the Irish
There were many similarities between the writings of these two
colonial officers, [Berkeley-Hill and Daly] who were self-educated in what
could be called pop psychoanalysis. Hartnack
notes that they both had a derogatory style and an exclusive focus on negative
content. Both consistently failed to note
any achievement or positive aspect of Indian culture. Hartnack elaborates:
Instead, they compared the behaviour of Indians with other
dependent people, with women, infants and the Irish, and time and again with European
neurotics. They tried to explain group behaviour by attributing it to
psychopathological defects of individuals, a procedure quite common in the
international psychoanalytical discussion of their time.
Hartnack notes that this work had clear colonial overtones.
Several contemporary works use parallel approaches to Indian Studies. Both
[Daly and Berkeley-Hill] identified themselves fully with British colonialism. Indians were a threat and had thus to be fought, and
resistance had to be smashed not only on a military but also on a cultural level. Unlike Orwell, who left Burma in order not to cope
with the dual identity of a colonial bureaucrat by day and a questioning and
critical human being by night, Daly and Berkeley-Hill worked to abolish these
scruples and contribute to a properly functioning colonial world.
One critic in the Hindu diaspora in the USA, when reading an earlier
draft of this chapter, asked “Is Doniger’s anxious eagerness in accepting
Kripal’s and White’s astounding theses a symptom of the same colonial mindset?”
Hartnack continued:
Contemporary psychoanalytical thought offered Daly and Berkeley-Hill
models to legitimize their degradation of, and thus their separation from
Indians: If one were not a healthy adult British male, one was in trouble, for
all other human beings were looked down upon. They [the Hindus] were in the
majority and there was the potential of hysteria, violence, revolution, sexual
seduction and other supposedly irrational acts, which would be difficult to
control. Therefore, it was the white man’s
responsibility to keep them under surveillance, if not behind iron gates. In
this context, psychoanalytical investigations offered structures of
explanation, the first step toward a mastery of the perceived threat.
Contemporary professional psychologists, such as Alan Roland and
Salman Akhtar, distance themselves from and disapprove of this reductionist,
infantilizing approach. Some of the caveats and foibles in what has been called
the Wendy’s Children genre of scholarship are also found in Freud’s work. The
psychoanalytic movement at the turn of the century has been compared to that of
a religious cult, disdainful of its critics and hyper-attached to a particular
hyperbole. Many
similarities are in evidence.
In The Memory Wars: Freud’s
Legacy in Dispute, Frederick Crews, professor
emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, describes the coercion of
clients by Freud to fulfill the mission of his institute. As a
result of this, and other examinations of Freud’s methodologies,
his data gathering has been
shown to have been less than authentic—a charge similar to what has been
leveled against some members of the RISA school of thought.
Ninety years ago, the innovative thinkers who challenged Freudianism,
such as Wilhelm Reich and Carl Jung, among others, were ex-communicated from
the psychoanalytical society. Similarly, in RISA and other associated venues,
not much dissent is allowed. (For more, please read 144, chapter 13)
Today a number of scholars rely on applied psychoanalysis to
create new and ever more exciting research, even though they are not competent in
psychoanalysis. This methodology has found its way into History, Sociology,
Anthropology, and Religious Studies, among other disciplines.
Hindu-Americans who question scholarship written about their religion
are perceived as invalid, inferior. They are not considered ‘legitimate
intellectuals’. Those who write articles on websites such as Sulekha are spoken
of as ‘dangerous’, perhaps capable of irrational acts and as Berkeley-Hill also
described Indians a hundred years ago, ‘difficult to control’. Some scholars of Hinduism Studies are threatened by
this contemporary challenge to their established paradigms. They have furiously
begun to psychoanalyze the Hindu diaspora as the first step toward a mastery of
the perceived threat. Simultaneously, Hindu-Americans have turned the ‘surveillance’
inside-out, and are gazing back with their own tools—such as the Chakra
Hermeneutics described in Chapter 9—to better understand those who control the
narrative about Hindu traditions.
Read chapter 13 part 2 from page 140 to 145
Go to Chapter 14
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