What do you think when you think about Sigmund Freud? Serious, piercing blue eyes penetrating you through pince-nez over even more serious-looking nose? The irritating inescapability of his analysis of dreams, making everything about your relationship with your Mother? Or his tenacious ‘Father of Psychology’ tag, holding strong for decades until recently?
Because, indeed, Sigmund’s legacy has been under relentless attack from the identitarians and postmodernists for most of this century, infuriated by what felt like his straightjacket determinism. If everything is metaphorically about Mum and Dad, how can we possibly be able to construct our identities into whatever we wish, they activistically wail?
The surest way is to discredit the source, evidentially-based in terms of patient notes as most of Freud’s work was. Far worse than Freud’s monolithic determinism was the fact that he was an ageing white European male - and for something else for the haters, a semitic white male, too.
The concept of Penis Envy was always difficult, much hysteria being essentially based on this perceived ‘lack’, when the likes of Judith Butler were campaigning that sexual identity doesn’t even exist at all. The eternal Adam and Eve-style ‘jealousy’ inherent in the Penis Envy thesis, however well-founded by Freud’s own analysis, would never survive in the age of truth being decided by the most effective message: PE simply wasn’t fair, and that won’t do.
Beyond that we have Freud’s Id, Ego and Superego, examined clearly in Dr Naughton’s analysis. Very simply the Id is ‘primal being’, the Ego is how we wish to be seen, and the SuperEgo is how we want the community to see us. For Freud, all these aspects of personality must work in balance for psychic health, but the current identitarian scene will not allow for the Id - the natural, violent, amoral ape inside everyone.
Indeed, everything is now really based on the SuperEgo in the way that a busy person might frame their day in terms of newspaper headlines. There couldn’t be any worse approach for an out-of-whack existence, but that’s where the intellectual binning of Freud by academic activists has landed us.
Socio-Criminologist Naughton identifies two groups within society and the law relating to uncorroborated allegations of child sexual abuse (CSA), those aligned with Child Protection Discourse (CPD) and those who subscribe to False Allegations Discourse (FAD). Anecdotally, the majority of the former group are female, and the majority of the latter are male or the loved ones of males, and increasingly never the twain shall agree.
The algorithmic reality of the technological, digital age ensures that these groups receive their dopamine hits by attacking the other as ‘wrong’ or ‘evil’, and to go beyond this into understanding takes an almost religious effort of integrity, out of reach to most.
These entrenchments are rewarded with in-group treats such as knowing you are on the right side of history because your respected peers told you so, and ‘we have the stats to back it up’. That those stats are doctored by other members of your in-group with the same political axe to grind is nothing but an inconvenient, easy-to-swerve detail.
Freud achieved the influence he did by the laser-like objectivity of his observations, and knowledge that talking about uncovered truths could lead to a healthier mind, and thus person. His attempts to help all humanity with his work has been replaced with a tribal quest for individuals to help their group prosper, whether others suffer through that or not.
There is very little objective academia left, as universities increasingly become businesses, with lecturers afraid of being complained about by their students (customers), and thus side-lined or cancelled in one way or another. At the same time, over 90% of western academics are left-leaning, usually meaning ‘progressive’: thus not interested in pale, male, stale figures from history such as Freud. With this Year Zero, anti-historical bent, it’s no surprise that the progressives will constantly attack Freud’s psychic revelations, based as they are on observation and reflective theory.
The work of Drs Kevin Felstead and Lawrence Patihis amongst others lays out clearly the problems of false memories being created, and believed, by the psychologist’s couch experience. The Child Protection Discourse (CPD) lobby/group will then immediately dismiss such research as victim-blaming done by entitled males, prioritising the identity of the maker over that which they are presenting, as a political weapon. The False Allegations Discourse (FAD) set will then react with bafflement to the political attack, and genuine understanding of where the other side is coming from - increasingly their pain - is lost.
Naughton’s reading of Freud’s analysis of group psychology is a politely presented howl at the inability of 21st century activists posing as objective academics to understand the in-group trap in which they find themselves; and inability to quite reach the healing of the sunlit uplands, always seemingly just out over the horizon.
By Sean Bw Parker
Full Reference of book chapter reviewed: Naughton, M. (2024) ‘A Freudian analysis of the competing groups on uncorroborated allegations of child sexual abuse.’ Chapter 16 in Byrd, D. J. and Miri, S. J. (2024) Sigmund Freud as a Critical Social Theorist: Psychoanalysis and the Neurotic in Contemporary Society. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.
Further information available at: https://brill.com/display/book/9789004713789/BP000023.xml
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