Freud: The Darwin of the Human Psyche

Freud eagerly read German editions of Darwin's Origin and his Descent of Man and confessed that Darwin's work had been the main motive in his deciding upon a scientific career. Upon graduation from medical school in 1881, he worked for Ernst BrŸcke, a German physiologist and thoroughgoing Darwinian. It is not surprising then that, being so thoroughly steeped in evolution, Freud was convinced that early humans lived in hordes dominated by a male. This was to be the foundation for his theory of the origin of religion.

The official works of Freud occupy 24 large volumes  but there is yet a gold mine of unpublished papers in the archives of the Library of Congress, Washington. Disclosure has been forbidden until the 21st century; however, there have been some leaks, including the…revelation of Freud's "seduction theory." Published in 1896, his classic paper titled "Study of Hysteria" argues that the origin of adult neuroses lay in sexual abuse and trauma in childhood.

Little known, however, is the fact that in September 1897 Freud effectively abandoned his theory by arguing that the reported childhood experiences of rape and sexual molestation were not actually real, but were imagined. Classical Freudian psychoanalytical methods have been based on this premise ever since.

In the early 1900s Freud's interests drifted from psychoanalysis to ethnology. The purpose was to develop a thesis he called "metapsychology," or the evolution of human religious ideas. He drew deeply at the evolutionary well of an ungodly British trio: Edward Tyler, Robertson Smith and James Frazer. Tyler was the first to interpret anthropological data in evolutionary terms and was professor of the subject at Oxford. He claimed that religion had developed in a straight line from the Stone Age to the present time with variations along the way. He believed that by studying the religions of primitive tribes it would be possible to define the earliest religion. Smith was a brilliant man in several disciplines and was sold out to Darwin's evolution. He believed that totemism, or the veneration of a sacred animal as an action, as a rite, or a cult, was the original religion.

Frazer drew from both Tyler and Smith, combining their ideas with the old Babylonian mystery religion and backing the new thesis with a prodigious amount of ethnological data in his Golden Bough. Freud, at heart a physiologist, brought all these ideas together in a grand synthesis partly published in 1912 in his Totem and Taboo, while the biological aspects have been revealed in some "lost manuscripts" recently discovered by Ilse Simitis (1987). Freud's entire theory on the origin of religion is so far-fetched that as much as is possible will be repeated here in his own words from his autobiography:

“The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill, and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their ideal. After the deed they were unable to take over their heritage since they stood in one another's way. Under the influence of failure and remorse they learned to come to an agreement among themselves; they banded themselves into a clan of brothers by the help of the ordinances of totemism, which aimed at preventing a repetition of such a deed, and they jointly undertook to forgo the possession of the women on whose account they had killed their father. They were then driven to finding strange women, and this was the origin of the exogramy [not breeding with members of one's own clan] which is so closely bound up with totemism. The totem meal was the festival commemorating the fearful deed from which sprang man's sense of guilt (or "original sin") and which was the beginning at once of social organization, of religion and of ethical restrictions.

The theme here of the son killing his father and later unknowingly marrying his own mother will be recognized as that of Sophocles play Oedipus the King. This is precisely the root of Freud's famous Oedipus complex, and thus religion itself is based entirely on the Oedipus complex of humanity as a whole.

As if all this was not bad enough, Simitis' discovery of the paper titled by Freud Phylogenetic Fantasy adds fuel to this fire of madness. Freud believed that different psychiatric illnesses typically tend to surface at different ages. The earliest was anxiety hysteria, followed by conversion hysteria [here he actually means religious conversion, while psychoanalysts today have a technique to deal with this serious malady!], obsessional neuroses, paranoia, melancholia, mania and finally, dementia precox [now known as schizophrenia].

Freud had been completely taken in by Ernst Haeckel's fraudulent Biogenetic Law and believed that, just as the human embryo recapitulates prior stages of evolution, so the various psychoneuroses tend to develop in the human psyche recapitulating particular crises in prehistory. He suggested that there was a time in the past when all was peace, contentment and joy represented by the story of the Garden of Eden, but this was shattered by the Ice Age and the war over women between father and sons.…The fantasy goes on and, while the chronology for his sequence of mental illnesses is now out of date, there is no doubt that this nonsense will be added to that already taught in the universities to explain the origins of our religious beliefs. This, then, is the depth to which human reason has plummeted by adopting Darwin and allowing atheism to develop as its creed.

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