Freud as Talmudist
Freud emerged at a time in history when there was an extraordinary demand for a particular service that had been lost over the course of 300 years: auricular confession to a priest.<p>Since most Protestant sects since 1517 had been consistently rejecting and deprecating the practice of auricular confession, men around the world, especially in Europe, were bursting with secrets. There is a basic human need to disclose our secrets to God, and to feel cleansed and regenerated and relieved of the burdens they&#x27;ve become.<p>So Freud and his colleagues designed psychoanalysis as a comfortable, secular, drop-in replacement for auricular confession, and established a new priestly class among the Protestant laity. Now it&#x27;s great to fill a void, but of course Catholics and Orthodox had never ceased the original practice, and so it was clear that psychoanalysis was explicitly designed to usurp and work at crossed-purposes to the religiously-branded type.<p>In the past two centuries, the new priesthood has succeeded in establishing a secular church, even in disestablishmentarian jurisdictions such as these United States. By medicalizing defects of mind, and applying a &quot;disease model&quot; of diagnosis and treatment (but never cures) even to vices such as substance addiction, the new priesthood has established religious control over the populace in unprecedented ways (okay, maybe they are definitely precedented). The most recent expansion of this religion is from &quot;mental&quot; to &quot;behavioral&quot; health; i.e. not only your internal thoughts, but also your outward actions, are under scrutiny and subject to control.<p>It is interesting that recent developments have seen Roman Catholicism take an approach of &quot;if you can&#x27;t beat &#x27;em, join &#x27;em&quot; and wholly embrace psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry as their own, even going so far as to accept theories of homosexuality and &quot;orientation&quot; as givens and psychological facts. There are now explicitly branded Catholic practitioners of mental health, where you can go for drugs, psychoanalysis, and support groups, because two churches are better than one, I suppose.