Freud was an atheist. I'm not saying this is necessarily good or bad. But basically, he believed that 'God' is an 'external projection' of our own 'internal psychological forces' -- and particularly, one force, one wish, one choice, to believe in a Creator and an 'Ultimate Force' that is either behind our own individual choices, and/or is so great, so important, that we become willing to 'submit' to what we believe 'God wants us to do'? But how do we know what God wants us to do except through our own choices of what we want to believe God wants us to do? One person might choose to believe that God wants us to go out and be 'kind to all people'...While another person may choose to believe that 'God wants us to go out and kill anybody and everybody who does not believe in the same God that we do'...
Who's right? Who's making the choice? God or us?
I say we are all 'accountable' for our own choices, our own beliefs, our own values, our own actions...
And anyone who chooses to believe anything else other than 'self-accountability for one's own actions' is 'choosing to run away from, avoid, escape from, bury his or her own head in the sand from, his or her own individual freedom to make choices...
That goes for 'choosing to give God responsibility for making us choose what we ourselves choose', and it also goes for any Freudian theory of determinism which is cloaked in self-deception as well.
Most of us are fully aware of the type of thinking that comes out of our 'id'. First, understand that 'the id' is only a concept and a label that Freud invented in order to help us understand how the personality works. Look at 'the id' as a 'teaching device'. It is a 'classification device'. Anything to do with 'sexuality, sensuality, pleasure, hedonism, aggression, violence, evil, immoralism...' we lump into our teaching device, our classification device, that we then say is 'responsible' for these types of thoughts, feelings, and/or impulses. They may start in our 'unconscious' but here again we have a 'troublesome word' that seeks to avoid self-responsibility, self-accountability...'The devil made me do it'. The 'id' made me think of it'...Same idea...different starting point, different name...people have lots of different names and different 'starting-points' for basically the same ideas...The 'id' at least recognizes that the thought, the feeling, the impulse -- of a possibly 'diabolical' nature -- is coming from us. When we use words like 'the devil' or 'Satan' or 'Hell'...we are usually taking one further step away from self-responsibility, self-accountability. Because now we no longer even acknowledge that the thought, the feeling, the impulse...is coming from 'inside us'...Rather we have to 'project' and 'eject' our thought/feeling/impulse/action out into the world and onto someone else's shoulders -- the 'Devil's shoulders' -- let us all make 'the Devil' responsible for our 'immorality', our 'sexual desires', our 'evilness'. If we say that the 'Devil made me do it'...then I don't have to take responsibility for looking at my own potential for 'sexual thoughts', or 'violent thoughts' or plain downright 'evilness'....Because the Devil -- Satan, Dionysus -- is not inside me, or if he or she is, The Devil is certainly not a part of me -- not a part of my own personality and character that I have 'ostracized', 'marginalized', 'alienated' from the rest of my personality. No sir...because once again to recognize the 'id' and/or the 'devil' (same thing, different name) as a part of 'Me' would mean that I would have to be accountable for, and responsible for, a part of me that I might not view as being very 'ethical', 'moral', 'nice', or 'good'. I might not like this part of my personality...
So, in classical Freudian and/or post-Freudian theory, I 'split this disowned part of my personality' off from the rest of myself, from the rest of my personality...and say it 'doesn't belong to me', 'I don't take responsibility' for this part of my personality...'I throw this part of my personality into the 'garbage of my psyche' -- my 'unconscious' or my 'subconscious' or my 'out of awareness'...Do we know that it is there? Yeah, usually we know that it is there...Will it always stay there -- in the 'garbage' or the 'files' of the conscious psyche -- i.e., the 'unconscious or subconscious psyche'? No, this is one of the first things that Freud and Breuer learned about the unconscious -- or in Freud's later language -- the 'repressed'...
'The repressed will always return to haunt you' until the day that you can finally look at your own repressed material square in the eye -- look at your 'id' square in the eye -- and say, 'Id, you are me, and I am you...and we have to learn to live together as harmoniously as we possibly can because we live in the same house, the same psyche, and isolated from each other, alienated from each other -- without proper mutual self-acceptance and self-integration -- we will tear each other apart, bring each other down to our knees, and destroy each other, as we both seek 'to win power over the same personality domain' when, by ourselves, separate from each other -- our 'id' alienated from our 'ego' if you wish, or alternatively our 'impulsive, sensual Dionysian Ego' alienated from our 'righteous, ethical, restrained Apollonian Ego' -- neither of us can win. We both only can lose in self destruction.
Together we win. Separate and alienated from each other, we both lose and/or we all lose.
This was Freud's most essential message to the world.
And even though Freud might have been an atheist, it is probably also the most essential message from the Bible, or the Quran, etc.
Together, we flourish. Divided, we fall.
Both inside and/or outside our own Integrated and/or Divided Selves...
This is the most important message of Freud, The Bible, the Quran...
And Hegel's Hotel...
Integration works...alienation doesn't...
-- dgb, April 7th, 2010.
-- David Gordon Bain
-- Dialectic Gap-Bridging Negotiations...
-- Are Still in Process...
-- Democracy Goes Beyond (Personal and Group) Narcissism...
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