Neglected Lectures From the Sixties and Seventies

Freud

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, & Sermons

Lesson: Freud

Genre:

Track: 12

Dictation Name: RR254A2

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960-1970

In 1958, Dr. David Hugh Freeman, professor of Philosophy at the University of Rhode Island, when visiting me here in California, urged me to write this book on Freud. When I began my studies, one of the first things that startled me was the dearth of any good conservative approach to the subject. The best book perhaps on Freud was a two-volume study by Harry K. Wells, a Marxist. Most conservatives have found it too easy to condemn Freud and thereby, have simply slipped into the rather facile habit of calling attention the rather ridiculous opinions. For example, attention will be called to the fact that for Sigmund Freud, the three basic instincts in man are first, the desire to commit incest with his mother and sisters; the second, the desire to kill his father; and third, the desire to eat his father. This, according to Freud, is the basic impulse in man.

Now, it is easy to ridicule these things, but we fail to understand their significance, the importance of this man’s thinking, and the danger inherent in it. For Sigmund Freud, together with Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, is one of the three great shapers of the modern mind. To understand what this modern world has become, we need to understand Darwin, Marx, and Freud. Freud is the last of these representing the culmination of the Enlightenment, also in a sense, signed its death warrant.

The Enlightenment came into being in the late seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries as an attempt to replace Christianity and western civilization as its new faith. A faith in man and in reason, a faith in science, a faith in man as manager able to create a social order in which he will play God. Now Freud came along. The last of the three great architects, the climactic figures of the Enlightenment, and signed, in a sense, its death warrant. Because Freud attacked that faith in man, Freud saw himself as one of the three great destroyers of civilization. He said first was Copernicus who destroyed man’s faith in this world as central. Then, Darwin who destroyed the uniqueness of man physically, and he said, “Now myself, who have destroyed the uniqueness of man psychologically.” Freud, in his finished opinion, his completed study, said there was no hope for man, that all that was possible was to understand man’s predicament.

But first of all, the young Freud’s started out as a utopian, an idealist, hoping that somehow, socialism spread from pole to pole would create a great new world order, and that science could help this by freeing man from the effects of his actions. Indeed, very early, Freud wrote to Flied{?}, who was hoping to solve the problem of birth control, that he, “Set his hopes on Flies solving the problem as on the Messiah.” Freud wanted a world in which man could indulge himself sexually, and in every way, live as it were in a world without inhibitions which, at the same time would be a world without consequences. And yet the ironic fact that Freud, in his personal life tended to be rather puritanical, inhibited, and very, very prudish.

When he was courting his bride-to-be, Martha Bernays, he was very strict in his requirements for her. He insisted on superintending everything she read. He forbad her to read, for example, Don Quixote. He felt it would be an unwholesome influence on his bride-to-be. Also, he, although a great lover of opera, told her it would be very unwise for her to see the opera “Carmen,” because he wrote, “The mob gives vent to its appetites, and we deprive ourselves. We deprive ourselves in order to maintain our integrity. We economize in our health, and our capacity for enjoyment, our emotions. We save ourselves for something, not knowing what, and this habit of constant suppression of natural instincts gives us the quality of refinement. This was Freud in his personal life.

His son, Martin, has written on the life of his father, that although his father’s works have much to say about sex, Freud had nothing to say about it at home, and on one occasion during their vacation in the mountains when something came up about calves and colts, and Freud realized that none of his children knew how little things were born and where they came from, he said his father exclaimed, “You must be told these things,” but like the majority of fathers, he did nothing whatever about it.

Freud moreover, had, for one who is associated with sexuality, very inhibited notions that run counter to those of many followers of Freud. It’s a little startling to realize that Freud regarded one of the most horrible experiences a man could have, simply this: to see a woman naked, and he wrote of this, “Probably no human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals. We cannot explain it is that some of these become homosexuals in consequence of this experience. Others ward it off by creating a fetish and the great majority overcome it.”

Then also, Freud had some very peculiar ideas about the United States. No country in the world was hated more by Freud than America. He came here many years ago, well before the first World War to give some lectures at Clark University, and for the rest of his life, he blamed everything that happened to him on America. Somehow it affected his metabolism, his system. It even affected his handwriting, he claimed. He was very hostile to the United States. Although ironically, no where in the world did he have a greater influence than in America, and in no other segment more decisively than with the clergy, and next to the clergy, educators. Freud again was very much addicted to numerology, and many other superstitions that characterized Freud’s personality can be cited. All these things are sides to give something of a perspective on the man.

He was a curious figure, and yet, he had a great dedication about him, and a ruthless integrity and honestly in spite of these manifest absurdities in his makeup. Freud’s basic purpose was to create a scientific worldview that would eliminate religion, and as Freud analyzed the picture, he concluded that although science had, up until his day, had a great deal to say about religion, had proved, he claimed, over and over again that it was unscientific, that men were simply indulging in superstition, that it should be discarded, that there was no sense to adhering to Christianity or to religion in any form, because his hatred of Judaism was perhaps more intense than his hatred of Christianity. All the same, he said, up until now, scientists have been wasting their time.

It is impossible, he maintained, to eliminate religion unless you deal with the basic problem, and with this we get into the significance of Freud, a significance that has far-reaching repercussions, as we shall see, on the whole of the modern world. Because, said Freud, man’s basic problem is the sense of guilt. Man feels himself to be guilty, and because he feels himself to be guilty no matter what any scientist tells him, he is going to seek solace in religion. He is going to go to a priest. He is going to go to a church. He is going to solve somehow the problem of guilt, and he said the problem of guilt has heretofore been a religious problem, and because it is a religious problem, the basic power over man’s soul has, therefore, been religious. Therefore, in order to establish the scientific control of man, the scientific government of society, scientific management planning and control, we must convert the problem of guilt into a scientific problem and answer it scientifically. Thus, his concern was to disassociate guilt from sin, and make guilt a problem for science rather than religion.

Hence, Freud went first of all to anthropology, to William Robertson Smith. Now, William Robertson Smith represents in himself an interesting subject for study, because the influence of Robertson Smith on Christianity has been very extensive. He has not been studied. He is a neglected figure, but virtually all of your biblical studies today with respect to the Old Testament have been decisively governed by the thinking of Robertson Smith, and hence it is that the churches have been so ready to join forces with Freudians, to accept Freudianism, because the same source of influence comes to them through the Old Testament scholars as comes to them through Freud.

Now, according to Robertson Smith’s thesis, which I will present in Freud’s interpretation, originally man evolving, developed as a kind of pack, the primitive hoard, and the primitive hoard was governed or ruled by the father, and he possessed sexually the wife and all the daughters, and as soon as the boys grew old enough he drove them out or killed them, because he wanted to maintain sexual possession of all the women. This, he said, is the only possible evolutionary thesis concerning the origin of society, but he said, finally in society, these sons, having the sexual drive to possess the women, their mother and sisters, successfully killed their father, they possessed the mother and sisters, and then they ate the father, and this, he says, was the origin of the Eucharist, because after doing these things, they were possessed with guilt, and therefore, they began to make atonement to the memory of the father and to commemorate him as a kind of father figure who was semi-god, and as ages passed, this father image became, in their minds, God, and the cabalistic feast, as the sacrament of the Lord’s Table, or as the sacrament of the Passover, and because their conscience troubled them, this, which constituted their basic impulse, these three instincts; incest, parricide, and cannibalism became not only their basic desires by also their basic inhibitions, so that at one and the same time, man desires to do these three things and at the same time, he feels most intensely this prohibition in his being that it is wrong to do these things and that he is guilty because he feels that somewhere in his primitive past he did these things.

Now what is the answer? Well, Freud said it is impossible to go back, a la Marquis Desade, and to say “let us commit incest, parricide, and cannibalism to our hearts content and be free,” because said Freud, man now has guilt as an instinct. The instinct to do these three things and the instinct against doing them is equally balanced, so that he feels the desire and he feels the prohibition and the sense of guilt, so that man has the desire and yet a law written into his inner parts, that this which he desires is the most fearful crime he can commit, and so he is guilt-ridden. Now, Freud said, if primitive man was so firmly bound by this inner law, this inhibition, how then can modern man in whom all of this has far deeper roots, hope to escape it? Thus, psychoanalysis for Freud was not cure, because he felt that cure was impossible. These three instincts and the three prohibitions which had become instincts in man were hundreds of thousands of years old, perhaps millions of years old, depending, he said, upon the evolution of man. They cannot be erased in a moment. They cannot be erased in five or ten thousand years, although he hoped perhaps in that time we would overcome these prohibitions sufficiently to be what he called free people. All that we can hope for, since cure is impossible, is simply this: to understand ourselves, to realize why we feel guilt. We’re going to feel guilty but now we’re going to know that there’s no religious reason for our feeling guilty, that there is no god to whom we are responsible. It’s just this primitive background that we have, our evolutionary inheritance.

Freud developed, therefore, in terms of this, his concept of the basic instincts and the basic prohibitions, six fundamental concepts. First, he said, there is the primal hoard myth and its effect on the Id and the superego, this deeply ridden guilt in the Id and the superego of man. Second, there is the doctrine of philogenetic memories. That is, the primitive experiences become biological inheritances. Third, the concept of the biologically innate, infantile, sexual phases which every child experiences in expressing these basic instincts. The child, therefore, repeats his past inheritance. He feels these basic instincts and these basic prohibitions, and he goes through certain phases in his sexuality expressive of this primitive past. Fourth, he said the Oedipus complex is biologically determined. The wish to possess the mother, he says, is a biologically determined thing. Fifth, this primordial language of archaic symbols is a part of man’s inheritance and it expresses itself in dreams, in myth, in folklore, in religion, and in various other forms, and sixth, this biologically inherited, racial unconscious is the repository of philogenetic memories, of all these things that he has described in the previous five points.

Now, all of this is derived from Freud’s anthropology, and of course, that anthropology has, in recent years, been pretty well criticized and some say it has been exploded. Thus, there has been a great deal of Freudian revisionism. Many, many psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, Karen Horny and others, have attempted to revise the basic anthropology of Freudianism to deal with these contradictions with modern anthropology, but all of them have retained this as the basic aspect of Freudianism, and this is passed from those who call themselves Freudianism to almost every aspect of modern psychological and psychiatric thinking. Namely, that guilt is a problem for science rather than religion, and that guilt represents something out of man’s primitive past, but Freud stuck to his guns with respect to anthropology, because he was consistent as an evolutionist.

He knew, because Freud was an intelligent man, and a ruthlessly honest man, for all his quirks, that whether one followed evolution or whether one became a believer in the biblical faith, an active faith was required. A great act of faith had to be made. If you followed the doctrines of scripture, you affirmed that God existed and that he was the creator of heaven and earth. If you followed the evolutionary hypothesis, you could not have evolution without the acquisition of acquired characteristics, and so he said, we must stand by Lamark{?}. Without Lamark{?} he said supernaturally created characteristics were necessary, and it was either supernaturally created characteristics or acquired characteristics, and so he said, in facing this dilemma, the transmission of acquired characteristics which he recognized was held by most to be unprovable or false, or created characteristics, and he said I must stand by Lamark{?}. He was better aware, he felt, and I would agree, of the basic issues than any of his opponents.

Freudian revisionists have not been so astute. Incidentally, Lysenko, the Russian scientist, has misread Lamark{?} in making the mechanism of acquired characteristics a like an a trifling one, a product of good husbandry. Lamark{?} and Freud saw it as a product of ages of evolutionary development. Freud declared, very bluntly, if nothing is acquired, nothing can be inherited. This was his principle. If nothing is acquired, nothing can be inherited. Either God or Lamark{?}. These slowly acquired characteristics he held were the laws of man’s being, and they represented millennia of power, and they could not be broken readily.

Freud had hoped to deliver man into free love and all that sort of thing, but he saw no hope for it, and so he said stoicism, storical{?} self-knowledge is the only possible solution for man for some ages to come, and so accordingly, in terms of this, he analyzed the being of man. Let us look at his analysis before we go on to deal with the implications of Freud.

Freud said there are three basic aspects to man’s being: the Id, the ego, and the superego. At first glance, these sound like very arbitrary classifications, but Freud gave new names to rather old terms. We could call the Id, in Christian terminology, the old Adam in man, the old fallen will. We could call the ego the mind of man, and the superego, the conscience, and we would have the Freudian system. The Id is the oldest aspect, he said, of man’s personality and it contains everything that is inherited, everything that is fixed in man’s nature, and it is instinctual, beyond law, beyond logic, beyond any law of contradiction, and it is simply psychic energy seeking a discharge. It involves both a will to life and a will to death, because it involves both the three basic instincts and the three basic inhibitions of those instincts.

The ego is the “I” aspect of man. It is oriented not to the basic instincts but to the reality, and so it wants to fulfill the basic desires of man in terms of the reality principle, and so it constantly figures, “This is what I want, this is what my Id tells me I want. Now, how can I get it practically?”

The superego, as the conscience of man, is that which we pick up from our religious training and from our home training, our environment, acts as a brake upon us. The superego can be cleansed relatively easily, Freud held. You could eliminate the conscience. This just comes from priests, and rabbis, and clergymen, but even though you eliminate the problems the superego has created, you still have these basic inhibitions from the Id, and so man is faced with a fearful conscience, the libido which we hear so much in connection with Freud, is simply ego energy. The dynamic manifestation of man’s sexuality. It is the expression of the life instinct of these three basic instincts; incest, parricide, and cannibalism expressed in man. So, the sex instinct, or the libido according to Freud is simply these three basic instincts.

Now, since man wants to fulfill these instincts and also has an instinct not to do, his life is one of frustration, and so man is caged, trapped within himself, facing this perpetual conflict. Now to analyze Freud’s conception of man before we pass on. Freud’s observations upon man as a sexual creature were based upon a study of animals, but upon caged animals. Zoo animals. The zoology of Freud’s day was not natural zoology, but artificial zoology, in that the animals in zoos were studied and they said these are the instincts of these wild animals, but there is a difference between a caged animal and a wild animal. Now caged animals think primarily of sex, and they have no inhibition with regard to incest, nor they have any inhibition with regard to tearing up one another, but wild animals are not primarily sexually motivated.

The basic motives in wild animals are first, territoriality, a sense of property, and animals have a strong property sense. Those of you who have homes and can sit in your breakfast nook and watch the birds, know that you have certain birds who stake out a part of your yard as their territory, and no other bird dare trespass that territory. They have a strong sense of property virtually every animal the property says is deeply ingrained in all living creatures.

Second, as the basic instinct of animals is the sense of status. There is a pecking order among all animals, not only among chickens but among wild animals, always a fixed order, so that if a pack of animals are observed, it can be possible with close observation to rate them, from one to twenty or thirty, as many as there are. So Freud was dealing not with free animals, but with wild{?} animals. Accordingly, his psychology dealt with man as he is in a welfare state, and it has been successful, and it has been very readily utilized because what does man become in a welfare state progressively? Similar to a caged animal, and over and over again in history, as a welfare state has crept in, as socialism has crept in, as totalitarianism has governed society, man has like caged animals, confined himself to sexuality as his basic interest. Normally, it is not even secondary, but in the kind of society we have today, it becomes increasingly prominent, so that things forty years ago were never heard of, are everyday newspaper material and conversation concerning people we run into all the time, because we are creating out of men today caged animals, zoo animals, welfare state animals, and so we are creating people who begin to resemble Freud’s weird picture of man.

Now Freud also hoped very definitely that there would be a world order, which could create a new world and free man, but increasingly, he saw that there could be no utopia that way. He did not, however, abandon this dream of a one world order. He saw that man could not be cured. What could be done then with man since cure is not possible? Since it will take thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, for man guided by psychoanalysis to overcome his inhibitions.

First, he said, as we have already indicated, man can understand himself, and understanding himself come to realize that guilt is simply a primitive inheritance, and has no reality. He never tried to cure anyone. No true psychoanalyst, if he is faithful to Freud, can offer a cure. He can only offer understanding. Freud, for example, in a letter of April 9, 1935, wrote to a woman whose son was a homosexual and had asked him to cure her son, and he rebuked her for her horror and her shame. “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation. It cannot be classified as an illness. We consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly responsible and respectable individuals have been homosexuals. It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and a cruelty, too.” Then, as for curing her son, he added, “To abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place, in a general way we cannot promise to achieve it. What analysis can do for your son runs in a different line. If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains homosexual or gets changed.” So the purpose of homosexuality is to make you happy with what you are. This is the purpose of psychoanalysis, of Freudianism, to make you happy with what you are. A French cartoonist, Vertais{?}, portrayed this point very tellingly in a cartoon. Someone raised a question after hearing a lecture on psychoanalysis, “Do you mean that if the artist Van Gogh had been psychoanalyzed, he would not have cut off his ear?” and the answer was, “Oh yes, he would have cut off his ear, but he would have understood why he did it.” This is cure according to psychoanalysis, Verily{?} understanding.

Now, there is no crime, there is no sin, you see for Freud? Because there is only a primitive myth, an instinct which has no meaning. Because there is no sin, there is no crime. At best, all we can have then is mental sickness. Now this is where the concept of mental sickness comes in. There is no sin involved with guilt. There is only the mental sickness which means worrying over our condition. So, whatever kind of pervert we may be, whatever our mental problems, we are mentally sick if we worry about it, we are mentally healthy if we stop worrying. This is the essence of the mental health program. It does not seek to change men. It seeks to get men to accept themselves for what they are, and this is the deadliest menace of the mental health program which has many ugly aspects. What it proposes to do is to give a blank check to every kind of abnormality, and I say the person who is a pervert is better off if he is troubled about it and thinks there is something wrong with him than the one who has been given mental health, that is, convinced that he is perfectly alright as he is.

Mental sickness, as a poster has said, is no disgrace. It might happen to anyone. Therefore, go and get your whitewashing and go out and feel mentally happy with what you are. There is no crime, no sin, only guilt, and when you learn that the guilt is meaningless, you simply grin and bear it.

But, said Freud, if the masses understand this, if they understand what I’m talking about, if the people at large understand in what is involved in all of this, then we will have anarchy. They will have no fear of God. They will, “certainly kill without hesitation, and so follows the necessity for either the most rigorous suppression of these dangerous masses, and the most careful exclusion of all opportunities for mental awakening, or a fundamental revision of the relation between culture and religion.” This statement comes from his book, The Future of an Illusion, in which he deals with religion. Thus, if the people at large realize that their sense of guilt is meaningless, if they understand what Freudian science is teaching, they’ll go out and kill without mercy. They’ll take whatever they want. This is the truth, but it is a dangerous truth, Freud said, and therefore, there must be a façade so to speak that will conceal this truth from the masses, lest they lash out and kill, and destroy everything. Therefore, the need is for a totalitarian state to ensure growth without anarchy. Enlightened scientists to take charge of this controlled order. This is man’s only hope. These scientists controlling this world order will gradually lead man, over the ages, to be free from guilt without running amuck, which he was afraid the masses would do, and would be so totally governed that the right ones could be enlightened while the ignorant could be used in whatever station they were assigned, and in which they could be totally controlled.

Freud reduced man to biology, but he found no way of transcending biology, and so he left man trapped in total frustration, and left man with no way of escape. Left man facing a world in which the scientific managers, the super-Freudians, knowing the truth that there is no truth, are to manipulate most men while they themselves live beyond all law. Other men can kill and run amuck if they know they cannot be trusted to do this, but this power can be placed in the hands of the scientific manager, to have total power over the life and death of the rest of us.

Hence, the total jist of Freudianism is to accentuate guilt, to accentuate guilt with most people, to release those they want to make mentally healthy from guilt, and it is easy in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis to reduce everyone to guilt. There is a story that a secretary in Los Angeles left her job with a psychiatrist because, she said, “I could not win. If I was late to work, I was hostile. If I was early, I had an anxiety complex, and if I was on time, I was compulsive.” This is good Freudianism. The framework is there to clobber anyone, but the framework is there also to tell anyone, “You’re mentally healthy, except what you are,” and that’s mental health. “Do as you please, but do it knowing that there is no real guilt attached to it. Bind some, free others.”

What is the direction that Freudianism has since taken? I could spend another hour on this, but I will go just a step or two in that direction. Freudian revisionism and development has taken two directions in subsequent psychology and psychiatry. First, there are some who have tried to say that hope can be introduced, that is, the hope of release from guilt into this paradise of free love, by strengthening the life instinct and curbing the death instinct, by the proper direction of Eros. Marcos and others have emphasized this aspect, but more and more, the revisionists and others are following the second path, that of bypassing any mental solution for chemical or electrical answers, through drugs, through electrical treatment and electrical control, to govern people so they can be controlled into submission, so that they could be managed and governed, and the mental health program calls for the reconditioning of man by experts in order to free him. That is, in order to make him useful to society as it is envisioned by these scientific planners, the Freudians at the top. This is a case indeed, of experts playing the role of God. The Freudian system is a logical one. It is easy to point to absurdities along the way, but Freud was right. He knew that however absurd the thing sounded piecemeal, it was either Lamark{?} and Freud on the one hand, or God on the other, and so he was confident that the future belonged to him because he felt that religious faith would wane, and there is no way out of the impasse into which Freud has led us, and the menace with which he confronts us, except to reject entirely his answer, including his evolutionary presupposition and insist on the truth of biblical faith. Either God will be God for us, or men will play god over us. This is our choice. Thank you.

Are there any questions that any of you have that you’d like to ask? Yes?

[Audience] {?} objective of the mental health program {?} you said that the objective was to change him to be free in order to make him useful, according to the master planner. {?}

[Rushdoony] No, not entirely in that their conception of health depends on their conception of what they want you to be in society, so that mental health is to accept yourself but in their terms, in terms of your place in their world, because they are planning this world totally, and your place in this world depends on what they consider is healthy for you.

[Audience] But I thought that the third definition of health used {?} of the condition.

[Rushdoony] Exactly. This is the abstract definition, but when they apply it socially, then they qualify it. Now if you’re to be an expert and a manager, your health is to accept yourself and join the ranks of those who live above the law, but if you’re going to live as one of those who are going to be managed, then there is a different version of what is mental health for you. So, there is the abstract theoretical definition and there is the practical one.

[Audience] Do you think that Marx believes this and that Marx sponsored this type of thing?

[Rushdoony] No, of course, Freud came after Karl Marx, but the Marxists, while they do not accept Freud’s position, hold to something that is analogous in that their psychology is based on Pavlov, and on conditioning, so that man is to be conditioned to give the responses that they feel are desirable, and so man, by Pavlovian conditioning is to be molded into that aspect of society into which he is to fit. So, man is to be manipulated in either system. There are differences as to how he is to be manipulated. Freud, by the way, was not hostile to Pavlovian thinking, and he was not hostile to the use of chemistry. He was dealing with the theoretical foundations. He was quite receptive to a variety of practical methods.

[Audience] That’s one of the best expositions I’ve every heard. Best interpretation.

[Rushdoony] Thank you.

[Audience] Well, {?} which does seem to predict, it’s coming to pass. Then isn’t that communist?

[Rushdoony] Well, there are more roads than the communist road to that totalitarian road, so we can’t reduce them all to that. Now, Freud was often very sympathetic to the Soviet Union, and at other times he felt that many of the Soviet leaders were utopians, so that he took a rather cynical perspective, although basically a sympathetic one. Yes?

[Audience] You touched on the fact that the mental helpers are using a guilt complex on self. Would you elaborate just a little on that?

[Rushdoony] Yes. I cited the instance of this L.A. secretary, that whatever she did, whether she was early, on time, or late, somehow she was guilty. This is used with many. If you want a good example of this kind of Freudian psychiatry by one of the best of them, read Edmund Burgler, a New York psychiatrist. Ed Burgler, whose books have a very wide circulation, ends up by making you feel there’s something wrong with you no matter what you do, and in his book on humor, there’s some good jokes in it, but you read through them, and if you laugh at these jokes, it says there’s something warped with you. If you don’t laugh at them, there’s something wrong with you also. So that whatever your response, you’re a sadist or a masochist. Now, you see this is a suburb weapon for holding people in a sense of bondage, inhibiting them, controlling them, but those who say All I have to do is understand myself and then I’m free from all law, can manage. They’re the elite.

[Audience] What do you think of Adler?

[Rushdoony] Well, I haven’t done much work on Adler, but Adler, of course, accepts this basic anthropology, and simply gives a different kind of answer to what motivates some aspects of man’s being, but they’re all part of one common system.

[Audience] In shock therapy, is a patient supposed to forget what his guilt, what he is guilty about, or what was the purpose {?}

[Rushdoony] Well, of course, Freud didn’t comment on shock therapy, but he was not hostile to this type of treatment. He felt he was dealing with theory, and these practical aspects were fine, but shock therapy, as I understand it, is used with those who, well for example, a manic depressant, who has a pattern of violence. What the electric shock therapy does is to break the mental patterns. It produces a certain loss of memory for a time, and the idea is that with this loss of memory, the old habit patterns, thought patterns, will be broken and a new pattern can be established. So, it gives the person. Theoretically, a breather between the time of the therapy and the time of the reestablishment of the memory, in which they can supposedly reestablish new habit patterns, and that’s the theory of it.

[Audience] Can you comment on Eric Fromm’s book, The Art of Loving?

[Rushdoony] Yes, Erich Fromm is a revisionist, who like Marcuse, hopes that man will be very quickly freed from this fearful burden of inhibition, and so he says by training in this art of loving, man can be totally freed from guilt and from law, and so he represents a rather utopian strain of Freudianism, that man can be released into freedom to express themselves sexually without being socially destructive. Freud would have treated him with contempt.

[Audience] How much Freudian influence is there, say in the current “Playboy” {?} Hugh Hefner?

[Rushdoony] Well, I would say he represents more the Erich Fromm type of thinking, the utopian interpretation.

[Audience] What happened to the study of physical anthropology? Do they teach that anywhere? I hate to admit I’m so old, but I took a course once in anthropology and I never did hear about this {?} anthropology.

[Rushdoony] Yes. A very good question. Your cultural anthropology, with the exception of one small school, is predominately to the left, and this theory of Robertson Smith is not as far out as some of the more recent cultural anthropologists. They are the one who are always quoted what you have talk about the quality of races, and the fact that races are non-existent, the idea that race is a myth, and so on. There are physical anthropologists, but they are in the minority. They are the ones who are doing the real work. Recently, the physical anthropologists have been striking back. They’ve been realizing that these others have been ousting them because they represent a kind of reactionary science, and they have started publishing a little journal, Mankind Quarterly, published in Edinburough, Scotland, and circulating throughout the world, in which they have articles dealing with physical anthropology as it bears on contemporary world problems, on races, and similar subjects, and also giving information and excellent book reviews of the more important works as they are coming out in physical anthropology. It’s very much worthwhile reading. It is hated because these physical anthropologists are pointing out that the fact of race is so great a reality that you can take the Swedish people and trace several strands in them, and actually identify a person in terms of his inheritance. So that within the Swedish people themselves, these strands can be very carefully described and charted, the physical differences being so marked.

[Audience] Who are the anthropologists behind this? Are there any American anthropologists{?}

[Rushdoony] There are some Americans, some British, some in Australia and New Zealand, some in various continental countries.

[Audience] Are there any noted anthropologists {?} such as {?}

[Rushdoony] Off hand I couldn’t say. I read the articles but I don’t pay any attention to the names because it isn’t a field that I am too greatly concerned with. However, it is worth your while to investigate it because it is an excellent journal and they put out also a number of monographs regularly.

[Audience] Well, thank you very much, Ladies and Gentlemen for being here, and I hope that you have a message now to pass onto others, and thanks again for being here. The meeting is adjourned.

End of tape.