Happy Birthday, Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud, the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology, would have been 150 years old this month.

Whilst many pieces have been written examining different aspects of Freud’s legacy, two stand out for capturing succintly and elegantly what is, without doubt, Freud’s greatest contribution to our contemporary understanding of the human condition.

In his inimical style, Anthony Daniels, writing in The Times, offers this summary of Freud’s contribution to our modern culture:

The influence of his ideas, albeit in vulgarised and simplified versions, has been culturally baleful and even catastrophic. For example, the notion that dysfunctional behaviour in adulthood has its origin in infantile or childhood traumas has led to a general belief in the existence of buried psychological treasure which, once unearthed and expressed in clear terms, automatically, in and of itself, causes the dysfunctional behaviour to cease, without any further conscious effort to control it on the patient’s part.

Freud thus strengthened a tendency for people to place the blame for their vices first on their parents and secondly on the doctors who failed to “cure” them of those vices. He was one of the most powerful modern destroyers of the concept of personal responsibility.

Writing in The Spectator, the British philosopher, Roger Scruton offers a similar assessment to that of Daniels.

The tendency, that Daniels mentions, for humans to seek to blame their vices on others may not have originated with Freud but certainly Freud’s theories bestowed upon this pathosis a level of credibility that had otherwise been denied to it. He legitimised the abdication of personal responsibility which has poisoned so many aspects and sections of our society: from the medicalisation of all sorts of deviant behaviours to the acceptance of social determinism (”He had a bad childhood, your honour”) as a mitigating factor in the sentencing of serious crimes.