This blog post is about the way in which psychoanalysis is used as a tool erroneously to ascribe a particular motivation to someone who has expressed a different, or even opposite, reason for their actions.
“For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him?” writes Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians.
“…every one of you knoweth his own self better than he knoweth others.” declares Bahá’u’lláh in The Hidden Words.
What sparked off this post is a paragraph in a book about the poet Alfred Tennyson. Regarding symbolic meanings of characters in his ‘Idylls of the King’, the author of the biography writes:
“…this kind of symbolism was largely subconscious on the poet’s part. The story had become so integral a part of his thought, that, when he began to work it out, it inevitably caught the colour and became the expression of his philosophy of life.”
My question is: how does the biographer know that these motivations were subconscious? I am sure he does not intend to belittle Tennyson by implying that his mind was driven entirely by forces outside his conscious awareness (though mysteriously known to the biographer). Such a supposition would imply that he knows more about Tennyson’s mind than does Tennyson himself.
We find this everywhere in the modern media and in literature. Political speeches are ‘decoded’ by sage journalists. Shakespeare’s sexual inclinations are inferred from his poems. The whole edifice of religious belief is reduced to a set of delusional drives by so-called psychologists.
As individuals we are thus encouraged to second-guess our every thought which, though in many cases that might be a good thing to do, threatens our sense of our own nobility and the validity of our thoughts and feelings.
Freudian theories associate many of our actions with sexual drives, maybe perverted or thwarted by childhood experiences. We don’t know what we’re doing half the time because we suppressed these early experiences. I will just mention here that Freud’s scientific credibility is seriously questioned nowadays, though his theories live on. Anyone doubting the ability of apparently sensible people militantly to promote falsehoods against all rational argument need only call to mind one word: vaccines.
What a liberating thing it is to challenge and, when appropriate (which is most of the time), reject these infantilising notions of human nature.