Malleus Maleficarum

I’ve been groping for a suitably pithy phrase to describe the Malleus Maleficarum. “Vile Epic?” “Tribute to psychosexual projection?” “Classic Hate Screed?” “Grim grimoire?” I admit defeat on this point.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), was written by two Dominican monks, Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, sometime between 1485 and 1487. Kramer and Sprenger had been named as witch hunters in a Papal decree in 1484 and they seem to have made a job of it. However, their work was not without controversy, and the Malleus itself was first condemned by the University of Cologne, then later put on the Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the banned book index. Despite this (or possibly because of it), the Malleus became an early bestseller, and served as a bible for witch hunters in Europe for the next several centuries. It should be noted that, because of the Church’s condemnation of it, the book was used more by Protestant witch hunters than Catholics.

I doubt that there is any reading of “cultural relativism” that would concede that the Malleus can be taken at face value—as an objective portrayal of the habits and practices of witches. On the other hand, there are probably at least 20% of the inhabitants of the U.S. who would declare that the Malleus is true (and I shudder to think of the degree to which the 20% may be an underestimate).

However, I’m obviously not writing anything for that fraction of the populace, so we’ll begin with the observation that most of the text is just made up. So here we bring to bear the notions of projective psychology. Invented text (including fiction by me and thee) is projective in nature, and so displays a great deal about the interior landscape of those who are inventing it, by whatever means.

In the case of Kramer and Sprenger, the analysis is complicated by the manner in which they produced the text. Much of it was reportedly the result of their inquisition and the methods used. To put it bluntly, a good part of it was probably produced by persons under duress, torture in other words. So here you have an unusual collaborative process. Those who are tortured attempt to tell the torturers what they want to hear, but that in itself adds yet another projective layer into the process.

Jung seldom writes of the “collective unconscious” as the product of torture, but there it is. Indeed, the folk process in all its forms requires more psychic energy than is required to merely dream or view an inkblot. Communication must occur and the impetus for communication is often more violent than we’d like to think.

The book itself is ugly and humorless, a compendium of misogynistic sadomasochistic projection. It is also a record of tales of the witch inquisition itself, and, given our own beliefs that people cannot actually raise hailstorms by pissing into a trench or fly through the air on demonic power, the record of persons being burned at the stake for these activities does cause revulsion. In such cases, one tends to cling to the hope that the entire matter was entirely fictional.

Generally speaking, witches in the Malleus seem to spend an ungodly amount of time raising hailstorms, roasting and eating babies, and copulating with the devil or his incubi and succubae. Interestingly, there don’t seem to have been many homosexual witches; Lucifer apparently didn’t tumble to that bit of fun until modern times, or maybe the monks didn’t consider it to be as essentially sinful as women.

In any case, the Malleus virtually demands the classic Freudian interpretation of repressed sexuality getting all gnarly, then escaping in all sorts of projective behavior. Our recent dance with “repressed memory” and “Satanic Ritual abuse” contains practically all of the important parts of the fantasies contained in the Malleus, right on down to the baby eating. It’s worth noting that such fantasies play a big role in the psychopathology of anti-Semitism as well, and Protocols of the Elders of Zion makes an interesting companion piece to the Malleus Maleficarum. If I wanted to write a really sick and twisted horror novel, those two are where I’d start.

Dragon Blood

[Crossposted from WAAGNFP]

OK, there was this time in college, I was dating a girl named Rhoda, and she invited me home for a weekend, and so I thought … no way am I telling that one.
–Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle

There are some stories that I can’t just change the names and get away with it. Probably the most important part of that is that the individuals involved would still recognize themselves, and it would, despite all attempts at anonymity, still be an invasion of privacy. Some stories are just too intrinsically personal.

Moreover, there are some bits of personal history, that, no matter how much I might try to take all the blame for whatever bad things happen, it wouldn’t be enough, and other people would be shown in a bad light. I’m not always against that, mind you, but sometimes I am, especially when I had too great a hand in the unfortunate events.

Sometimes, making a story more generic removes all its flavor. At that point, there’s no reason to tell the thing in the first place. That’s one of the places where you opt for out-and-out fiction, keeping the flavor, but creating new characters for all the events, and distancing the events by wrapping them in the outlandish, putting them in the future, for example, or having them occur while there is a serial killer on the rampage. Even that is a risk, of course. Sometime people still recognize themselves in your fiction; sometimes they do so before the writer does. Tough. That’s the biz, baby.

The one I’m about to tell takes generification to some sort of limit, I think, but there are some philosophical points that I’ll get at, probably not the most important things in the real story, but the only nuggets that I can pull from this stream at this time.

In the early 1980s, I had my heart broken by a woman who had no idea at the time that she was doing it. That can happen when you carry a torch in sufficient secrecy for long enough.

It was hardly the first time I’d had my heart broken. If you’re still single in your thirties and haven’t had your heart broken a few times, you’re really not trying very hard at life. Still, this particular one felt different. It didn’t have the feeling of failed infatuation, for one thing. It didn’t damage my self-confidence that way a humiliating heartbreak does. Rather, there was a deep sense of loss that I couldn’t fully plumb, and a feeling that my future had somehow changed. It was some combination of freedom and being adrift.

Maybe it’s only hindsight, but I also had the feeling that I was in for some trouble. Or maybe that I was about to go looking for trouble.

When you really want to get into trouble, (and by “you” I mean “me”), the best enabler is usually a woman. That’s my drug of choice anyway. It only took me a few months to find the right one. I’ll call her June, which is obviously not her name at all; I’ve never dated a June.

Okay, here, massive generic evasion. I am not going to give any specific details about why June was trouble. I’ll note that, between the first time I met her, and the time we’d agreed to have lunch, something really bad happened to her, so she missed our first lunch date. I’ll also stipulate that you aren’t likely to figure out what that “really bad something” was, so don’t bother trying to guess. Just realize that, when I heard about it, I knew that the danger content of knowing her had just gone up by several orders of magnitude, and that we were going to become lovers, and that it would end badly.

There is an absolutely brilliant sequence in Alan Moore’s groundbreaking comic Watchmen, concerning Dr. Manhattan, who is the only character in the book with truly superhuman powers. Okay, Ozymandias can catch bullets as a bit of a trick, but Dr. Manhattan can teleport, transmute elements, and be in several places at once. He also experiences time, his own personal history, all at once, so he can foretell the future. At one point, he takes his girlfriend to Mars, and makes a reference to a time, several minutes in the future, when she surprises him with the information that she’s having an affair with another hero.

Then, several minutes in the future, she mentions the affair, and Dr. Manhattan is surprised. He knew what was coming, but he was still surprised when it happened.

He has to be surprised sometime, and that was the time, even if he knew about it in advance.

So I knew it was temporary and that June was going to dump me at some point; I even told that to a close friend when she asked me about the relationship (out of concern for my well-being, bless her). Furthermore, I’ll even suggest that whatever attempts I’d made to cushion that eventual blow, made the breakup even worse, because it added to the degree to which I was culpable, and it meant that I’d not been as good a person as my own ego ideal would like to believe. Some of the attraction had been that I was playing white knight, and instead I seemed to have a bit of dragon blood in me, as it were.

And it hurt. It really, really hurt. All the pain and humiliation that I hadn’t felt with the original heartbreak, well, I made up for it when June dumped me. And, just as an indication of the original, obvious danger content, it wasn’t a clean break, and couldn’t be, because circumstances meant that I still saw her on a regular basis.

Pretty good job of it, eh?

Okay now, the bit of philosophical payoff that I referred to earlier.

I’ve been following various feminist discussions on the net for quite a while, from even before what is now called teh blogosphere. And one of the issues that comes up frequently is the “nice guys don’t get laid,” discussion, also known as “Why do good girls like bad boys?” (from the song by Angel and the Reruns, in the Tom Hanks movie Bachelor Party). There are plenty of snarky things said about guys who say this, and rightfully so. The gist of the rightful snark is that being shy and insecure is not the same as being a “nice guy” and exactly why is being “nice” supposed to be rewarded by sex? That expectation, in fact, sounds like something other than “nice,” doesn’t it?

As a critique of male hypocrisy, the argument is spot on. I’ll stipulate that I agree with it.

However, after the episode with June, after the initial acute pain and humiliation wore off, I found myself in a state that combined pain and anger. Neither of those was intense, and I was raised well, and I’m a polite fellow. But there’s plenty of psychic energy in both pain and anger, and the mix is potent.

And I was catnip to women. They sat down next to me at lunch counters and struck up conversations. They latched onto me at parties and invited me home. They asked me to walk them to their cars from bars and they gave me their phone numbers. They invited me up to their rooms at conventions.

Okay, I was also in my early thirties, employed at a good, high status job, and I’d been practicing Aikido and doing weight training, so I’d filled out an astonishingly thin (in college I was just over 6 feet tall and weighed 130 lbs) with an extra 15-20 lbs of muscle. I was blond with dark black eyebrows and dark beard (since gone to gray) and had a sardonic look. So it wasn’t as if I’d somehow gone to sleep one night as a pimply geek and woke up the next as some sort of hunk. I’d never been unattractive physically, and I’d been complimented on my appearance before, and I wasn’t anything approaching a “30 year old virgin.”

But this was new, and I found it very easy to take advantage. Moreover, there were at least a couple of occasions where I was, by my lights anyway, something of a bastard. And it was expected of me, as nearly as I can tell. The women expected it, and, for all I know, would have been disappointed if I hadn’t acted that way.

It wore off after a while. The pain and anger faded, and I’m not very good at the bastard part anyway. But I can’t say that I didn’t have fun, because I did. And I hope that the women involved enjoyed it half as much as I did, because then it was worth their while as well. They got to play with what was, when all is said and done, a pretty tame monster, to no lasting damage. I suspect that’s the purpose, in fact. We all like to think that we can tame the monster, and there’s really only the one door. It leads to both the Lady and the Tiger, and they are one and the same.

Max Headroom

Karl Hess once told me that he thought Ayn Rand stole all her best ideas from Max Stirner. I disagreed. I didn't think she was that well-read.

Max Stirner was the pseudonym of Johann Kasper Schmidt (1806-1856), a German philosopher who is considered to be one of the earliest proponents of egoism, nihilism, existentialism and anarchism. Only Descartes (cogito ergo sum, and all that) and Goethe (who planned a novel entitled The Egoist, but I don’t know nearly enough about Goethe) have real claim to priority.

The "Max Stirner" name itself was his nickname from childhood, a pun on "Stirn," -- German for "forehead." So his nom de plume translates to something like "high brow," or perhaps "Max Headroom." So call him Max Headroom, if you like. There is a pretty good article on Stirner in the Wikipedia, and I recommend it.

So, bit of background, Stirner was writing in 1844, after the ice of religion and aristocracy had cracked, but before the floes were freely moving in the water, at least in Germany. Then, as now, there were a myriad of philosophies fighting for control of men’s minds, Church and State were now not the only games in town, so a lot was at stake.

Some of the players went under the banner of Liberalism (which, I’m sure you know, was considerably different from the doctrines now taking that name), some Socialism, and some Communism (though again, much different from the current notions grouped in those categories). One of the strands of liberalism had recently been espoused by a fellow by the name of Feuerbach, who seems to have been one of the first to achieve what we know call Secular Humanism, the substitution of Man in the place of God in all the moral equations. Stirner is particularly harsh with Feuerbach, and that seems to have been responsible for most of what splash Stirner’s book made at the time. However, Marx devotes a substantial portion of one book to attacking Stirner (in typical Marxist fashion: a personal attack rather than any attempt to meet the ideas themselves), so there was obviously something else going on.

Stirner's Magnum Opus was Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, (DEusE). Its English translation was titled The Ego and Its Own. My German sucks as badly as a single semester of college German can suck, but I can recognize a clunky translation when it bangs my head, and "Ego" qualifies. The original English translator stipulated that his title was a bad translation, but felt that it was a good enough title for something largely untranslatable.

"Einzig" means "only, sole, single" and "Eigentum" means "property," but there is also an internal bit of wordplay, because of the "Ein/Eigen" thing. Friend Ben Sano suggests that a better translation would be “Myself and Mine,” whereas I thought “The Only and the Owned” was pretty clever. Tthe Wikipedia article says "The Individual and his Property" and "The Sole One and his Property" have also been used, but I don't like those for other reasons. In any case, The Ego and Its Own is the title you’ll find in the second-hand bookstore.

Still, the reference to Ego (and Egoism) does allow the bringing of Freud into the matter later, which I may do, and there are various reasons for thinking that Freud was familiar with Stirner’s work. Stirner’s book was translated into English in 1907 and found some audience, though never a large one. I think there was a revival in Germany a little prior to that; the surrealist painter Max Ernst is known to have been influenced by Stirner.

The "Ego" part also hints at another problem that comes with reading Stirner: it's not just the German to English translation that causes problems. Stirner wrote DEusE heading on two centuries back and the meanings of the words have slipped some. "Ego" doesn't mean the same now as it did before Freud, or when Steven Byington translated it DEusE into English in 1907 (when Freud was also just penetrating English consciousness). All in all, you get a problem similar to the one Walter Kaufmann dealt with in translating Nietzsche, leaving "ubermensch" untranslated, rather than using "superman" because of the pop culture that had accumulated around the latter term.

The translation problems hardly stop there. The year of DEusE's publication, 1844, is inconceivably distant now. Stirner uses European Jewry as metaphors and exemplars at times, but there is no way for a post-Nazi world to understand how it read at the time. He wrote for his contemporaries, so jokes, allusions, all the rest, just slide right by all but the most devoted scholar of the period (which I am not), and such scholarship carries its own karma. And so forth. So what remains are the grand sweep of ideas, which are themselves open to misinterpretation. In fact, owing to the nature of Stirner's message, misinterpretation is almost demanded.

There is a web site devoted to Stirner: http://www.nonserviam.com/stirner/

Reading the essays there is enlightening. Are they reading the same book as I have? Probably not, when you get to it. It's a phenomenon that in some ways validates Stirner: each reading is unique, each an Enzig’s Eigentum, as it were.

So enough introductory, what is it the Stirner said that was so damn fascinating? Well, he was specifically attacking certain sorts of abstract ideas, which he called “spooks” and their elevation to a position above men, or specifically, Stirner himself, since he stipulated that he was speaking for himself alone, and damn proud of it, thank you very much.

What were these ideas, (he also referred to them as “fixed ideas” in the translation, though in current times we would probably call them “fixations”)? Things like God, and the State, and Mankind, and the Common Good, the Law, the Public Interest, the Proletariat, well, you get the idea. Liberte, Equalite, Fraternite. Grand ideas that have been at the center of quite a lot of bloodshed throughout time, but, accordingly, ideas which are quite dangerous to attack. Ideas that are supposed to be larger than we are. “Bats in your Belfry,” Stirner said of them.

What was the nature of Stirner’s attack (other than sheer peevishness, which is often quite enough, isn’t it)? Let’s use a single one of the spooks to serve for all, but remember that the argument is fairly general. Let’s consider how Stirner would address a theist, someone who is religious in the old style, who demands that all men must live to serve God (which, in the practice of Stirner’s time meant that all men must live to serve the Church).

Anyway, Stirner would say something like this:

First, you cannot actually serve God, you can only serve your own idea of God, or perhaps someone else’s idea of God. But since God does not speak to you directly, (unless you are Jean d’Arc, presumably), you are stuck with following a disembodied spook.

And yet, let’s consider this idea of God. Who does God serve? Well, no one. God exists in himself and for himself, and asking who God serves may even be blasphemous. Well, why should I not demand the same? Why should I not serve myself? In fact, (and here the argument gets specific to God, and I’m putting words in Stirner’s mouth, but it’s a pretty obvious extension of Max’s ideas), if God made Man in his own image, why did he leave out such an important bit, the right of existing for his own sake?

Then, Stirner inquires slyly, aren’t theists really serving themselves when they claim to be serving God? Your worship holds out the promise of life after death and eternal life at that. What is your eternal life to God? There are plenty where you came from (wherever that may be). On the contrary, your eternal life is of importance to you and primarily you. You are actually an egoist pretending otherwise. Your selflessness, your disdain for selfishness is a sham.
Of course, that final argument is self-canceling to a substantial degree. If you are really acting in your own self interest in being God fearing (and if the Old Testament God really exists, you’d be daft not to fear Him), then how is owning up to it going to change you or your behavior?

Well, it’s good to be rid of these fixed ideas, anyway, Stirner says, and there is some truth to it. If you’re behaving in your own interest in a certain way for a long time, if you have developed a fixed idea, in other words, you may get stuck and continue to behave that way long after it has ceased to serve your own interests. Then too, honesty can be refreshing. To believe in a God that is both a bully and all loving suggests a centralized hypocrisy.

There is a similar argument made when Stirner gets to the Eigentum, property in other words. He notes that liberalism (old school) makes constant demands for freedom and liberty. But what are these good for? Nothing really, you’re just hoping that freedom and liberty give you an unimpeded path to what you really want, whatever that may be. Food, a clean bed, a palace or a nice house, whichever your taste. A respected position, perhaps, or your own private railroad car (Stirner noted the insatiability of desire with a demand for the possession of flight - having just been on a five hour flight from Detroit to SF, I can say that the process is overrated). Sex, drugs, rock and roll. A happy life and a loving spouse.

In other words, Stirner says, don’t confuse means with ends. Realize what it is that you really want, rather than what you think is the means to get what you want. Again, pretty decent advice, within its limitations.

But there are those limitations. Indeed, when you follow Stirner as far as he goes, you find yourself bereft of most of the things that people want from a philosophy. Design an ideal society? Why would anyone want to do that (or think that it could be done)? Stirner himself spoke vaguely of a “Union of Egoists” but never explained how it would be different from what we, in fact have. Abolish the State? What’s in it for me?

There are no absolute prescriptions or proscriptions to be found in Stirner. If Mother Teresa were to tell him, “Very well and good, but I choose to serve my own idea of God,” then what?

The philosophy of egoism has no real answer, other than maybe, “Good for you, as long as you’re clear on whose responsibility it is.” And figuring out what one wants, and the getting it, those are the hard parts. What happens when you want contradictory or unrealistic things? Resolve the contradictions? Isn’t “contradiction” a fixed idea? And how often have you gotten what you thought you wanted, only to discover that maybe that wasn’t it after all?

So we come to my suspicion that Freud read Stirner and tried to answer some of those questions, and his answers wound up being so unpalatable and disturbing that we’ve spent a century trying to sweep Freud under the carpet one way or another (and by “we” I mean both Freuds’ supporters and his detractors).

However, I don’t think that Stirner--or Freud--are useless or even wrong. Here’s an example of why. A while back a friend of mine was trying to sort out a set of romantic entanglements that had developed around him. He was trying mightily to “do right” by everyone involved. After listening to him for a while, I said, “You know, you are allowed to consider your own interests in this.” He blinked, smiled, and said, “Thanks, I need to be reminded of that from time to time.”

Jung and Easily Freudened

In my previous essay Sublimation, I took a backhanded slap at Carl Jung, specifically at his theory of the collective unconscious, which I (and I’m not alone here) hold to be a depersonalization of the unconscious. In fact, Jung specifically splits his theory of the unconscious into the “personal” unconscious and the “collective” unconscious, and made no secret of his belief that the latter was by far the larger, deeper component.

I think this is bad psychology, in the sense of bad psychological theory, though I will concede that it may be “good psychology” in the sense of making it easier for some therapeutic clients to confront the idea of the unconscious mind. Jung was, it should be acknowledged, an almost universally acclaimed therapist, and maybe the depersonalized unconscious gave him some additional traction. However, it’s also widely understood that good therapists do pretty well no matter what theory they operate under, even including astrology, numerology, and chiromancy (palmistry). So I remain dubious about this collective unconscious thing, especially insofar as it leads to the “let’s blame it on somebody else,” idea, when the real effort on psychological growth depends on understanding that the only one who can hope to control you is you.

I’ll also note, while I’m feeling like letting Jung off the hook, that during his most fertile theoretical period, the woo-woo-ESP-psychic powers-etc. hypothesis wasn’t as thoroughly discredited as it is now. We’ve had another half century or more of people trying to find the damn things, and we’re no closer than when Harry Houdini was exposing spiritualists, except that the field has contributed substantially to the theory of double blind experiment protocols, operator bias, and protection against fraud in experimental settings.

Which brings us to the second place where Jung just fell asleep at the switch, “synchronicity.” His 1952 paper "Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle" would seem to have gotten it right in the title; this is about things that are not causally connected, but which seem to be meaningful to the observer. That’s a perfectly valid thing to look at and theorize about. Some days, all the traffic lights turn green just before you get there, the weather is great, and you get to the restaurant just before the lunch crowd arrives and get seated just across a beautiful creature of whatever sex most interests you and she/he smiles at you once or twice. You feel you are in tune with the universe. Other days, well, everything goes wrong and that evening you wind up wanting to buy a cat just so you could kick it.

Coincidences affect mood, in other words, and vice versa. If you start the day feeling happy, you’re going to notice the green lights and whistle through the red ones. And some coincidences feel very important, so there’s yet another doorway into the psyche. Excellent starting point.
Then Jung ties it all into his view of the collective unconscious and other action-at-a-distance hoo-ha. In short he tries to find the cause of a phenomenon that he starts by labeling acausal.

I mean, really, that’s just asking for it. It just screws the pooch, as Tom Wolfe’s astronauts said.

Nevertheless, there is much that is either admirable or interesting (or both) in Jung. For one thing, he invented the word association test, one of the most powerful methods in psychoanalysis.

Then there’s that business of archetypes. Forget for a moment that Jung went woo-woo for the “collective unconscious” thing, and recognize that, by categorizing symbols that seem to easily pass from person to person and culture to culture, he pointed to a way in which the basic structure of human psychology could be examined. Think of it this way: if alien scientists had access to nothing but human athletic equipment from various cultures, it’s quite likely that they would be able to describe the human body, at least in general terms, because various forms must conform to various functions. In some cases, like athletic gloves, the human body is precisely mirrored, but even without those, an alien could still probably theorize hands and their functions.

Then too, by providing lists of archetypes, Jung provided a wealth of raw material for artists and writers, once they’d run out of memory repression stories, rewriting Oedipus and other things they could steal from Freudian psychology.

Then there is the Jungian theory of personality types, the introversion/extroversion scale and the opposing rational (thinking vs feeling) and arational (intuition vs sensation) functions.

Most people encounter Jungian personality types though the Myers-Briggs tests, which is unfortunate, because Myers-Briggs gets it wrong. Jung’s notion of introversion/extroversion was not oppositional. The oppositional functions are like the Yogi Berra quote: “Good pitching stops good hitting and vice versa.” But introversion doesn’t interfere with extroversion in the same way that thinking interferes with feeling. The question is one of focus, other-directed vs inner-directed in Maslow’s terminology, though that differs from Jung in some aspects. The critical question is whether the individual is drained or energized by interacting with others.
Also, Meyers-Briggs tests tend to be pretty superficial, taking the testee at his or her word. So someone pounding the table and exclaiming, “I am not influenced by strong emotion!” will test as a thinking type, while a reflective, “Yes, emotions do often affect my decisions, how could they not?” will test as a feeling type.

Finally, Myers-Briggs adds a last dipole: Judging vs Perceiving. But here is one of those nomenclature problems I’ve railed about in the past. Someone high in “Judging” isn’t “judgmental” nor is someone high in Perceiving necessarily “perceptive.” There’s a prescription for confusion. The actual tested functions seem to be “structured” vs “unstructured” or “improvisational.” The difficulty with this last one, as any jazz musician or improv actor will tell you, is that you need a lot of structure before you can properly improvise.

So the last M-B category seems contaminated with a cluster of possibly unconnected functions. Someone high on the authoritarian scale would probably score high on J, but so might a scientist or lawyer, and either might, in fact, be pretty spontaneous personalities. On the other hand, someone might have contempt for rules and authority but still have OCD. Self-assessment can be tough.

Yet I’ve found that generally, just reading the descriptions given by Jung in Psychological Types, often produces a single “Aha! That’s me!” from individuals. That makes it very different from the usual sort of vague “cold reading” descriptions often found in things like astrology or even Myers-Briggs results. But you do have to read the original descriptions from Jung. I’ve been looking at the type descriptions that you can find online and they generally get them wrong. Jung’s descriptions are more complex, and the online capsule summaries seem more like caricatures. Or maybe I just think that because I’m an introverted thinking type.

Sublimation

May 6, 2006 was the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud, leading to numerous articles, opinion pieces, diatribes, and discussions. So nobody should mind my sticking an oar in.

In many ways, anti-Freudianism is as interesting as anti-Darwinism, though there is perhaps more irony in the former, since it’s generally people’s psychology that is on display in these matters. Both Freud and Darwin are subject to the constant barrage of “That’s not Science!” from their detractors, usually as a result of a combination of misunderstanding what the theories are about and a refusal to accept the results and implications. There is also the matter of not conforming to someone’s overly restrictive view of What Science Is, but that’s a different essay.

Still, many otherwise intelligent and educated people have a disdain for Freud, despite their actually believing in many of Freud’s discoveries and results. One common stance is to focus on some of Freud’s more outré ideas, such as Penis Envy. Now I can quite understand any woman not believing herself to have an unconscious envy of the male organ. In fact, I’m entirely willing to believe it to be a Freudian mistake, occasioned by the fact that Penis Envy is a very common component of the male psyche. In other words, Freud may have been Projecting, but then you can’t believe that without buying into a Freudian trope, can you?

The attack on Freud by modern psychologists has taken two forms, really. The first was the complete denial of cognitive psychology by an academic establishment that was, for a time, dominated by behaviorists. That’s just garden-variety academic in-fighting, of course, but no less unfortunate for all that. The second attack, if that’s the right word, was the wholesale appropriation of the Freudian phenomenology by more cognitive-oriented psychologists, all the while denying that Freud was the originator. Ben tells me, for example, that he has seen academic papers where the final conclusion is something like, “This looks a lot like Freud’s ‘latency period,’ but it isn’t the same. Really.”

Just as often, the Freudian phenomenon is repainted to make is more palatable. Jung, for example, made the concept of the unconscious more easily swallowed by coming up with the “collective unconscious.” See, it’s not really you that’s responsible for all those dark and nasty things. No, it’s collective; other people are to blame. Pretty easy to see where Jung’s racial theories came from, isn’t it?

Most post-Freudian psychology begins with the Freudian phenomenology, then concentrate on some specific feature as central to the whole shebang. So Adlerian psychology is Freud plus an emphasis on social dominance issues. Maslow emphasized specific motivational needs. Erickson thought that later development was more important than he thought Freud allowed. Wilhelm Reich jumped in with both feet and held that if sex was important, then, by God, orgasms should be at the center of the universe.

That’s just the neo-Freudians, of course. The cognitive psychologists began by rejecting behaviorism, insofar as they accepted the idea that consciousness actually exists and is worthy of study, but at the beginning they didn’t care to talk about the unconscious. That’s not surprising, since they weren’t too keen on the idea of introspection. What exactly do you do about distinguishing between the conscious and the unconscious when the most salient characteristic of the latter is that it is not accessible to the former? Do you ask someone? Uh, no, that would involve introspection, wouldn’t it?

Whatever. In the last two decades, as cognitive psychologists got their acts together, they’ve managed to devise tests and experiments whose results basically got them back to the unconscious, but it’s not Freud’s unconscious, because they weren’t using Freudian methods. Uh, huh.

In my view, the nub of Freud is first the acknowledgement of the existence of the unconscious, then the bestiary of those mental processes that the psyche uses to defend itself against anxiety, especially anxiety emanating from the unconscious. Freud also divided the psyche into the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. The Ego is “you,” your conscious self, the Id is all your primitive wants, needs, and desires. The Superego is the one that is most often gotten wrong, since most people think of it as the “conscience.” But there is another part, the “Ego Ideal,” the person that you’d like to be, or your own idealized version of yourself. When someone has a “Big Ego” what they usually have is a big Ego Ideal, while their Ego may in truth be rather fragile.

Freudian therapy, when it works, is devoted to bringing the unconscious elements of anxiety to the conscious mind, where they can be dealt with, or so one hopes. The best description of it that I ever heard was “Converting neurotic anxiety into honest grief.”

The Freudian anxiety defense bestiary is fairly small, but insightful. The anxiety defense mechanisms are

ASCETICISM: I start with the one that doesn’t show up on most lists (because I’m going in alphabetical order), but it’s what is going on in anorexia, which is usually a problem with adolescent girls. Adolescent boys are more likely to go into some sport or martial art that requires a high degree of self-discipline. Adolescents in general often try to protect themselves by denying, not only their sexual desires, but all desires. Hey, why do you think that Mr. Spock was so popular?

Anna Freud also discusses a milder version of this called restriction of ego. Here, a person loses interest in some aspect of life and focuses it elsewhere, in order to avoid facing reality. A young girl who has been rejected by the object of her affections may turn away from feminine things and become a "sex-less intellectual." (Jung’s term was “angel without wings”). A boy who is afraid that he may be humiliated on the football team may become a science knurd.

DENIAL: Blocking the ego threatening events or facts by refusing to believe them. It may enable person to live through difficult times, or it may make it impossible for them to deal with a problem. Most people reserve their “skepticism” for a short list of things that, remarkably, are precisely those things that make them uneasy.

DISPLACEMENT: Displacement occurs when an instinctual impulse is redirected from a more threatening activity, person or object to a less threatening one. Can’t get at Bin Laden, then invade Iraq.

FANTASY FORMATION: This is Escapism, plain and simple. It’s so much better to worry about the fate of the Galactic Empire than about losing your job.

IDENTIFICATION: You can vicariously take comfort from the successes of someone else (Hero-worship). Or, you can have Identification with the Aggressor, which is the essence of Stockholm Syndrome. Where would Fascism be without Identification and its blood brother Projection?

INTELLECTUALIZATION/ ISOLATION: By analyzing threats in a detached, intellectual way, anxiety is isolated, separate from the psyche. Fritz Leiber called this “living in the mirror.” Trust me, it works.

PROJECTION: Projection involves attributing to others one's own feelings, thoughts and intentions. One's own personality is displaced upon people, objects or animals. If you know someone who always blames other people for the bad things that happen to them, you’ve got a pretty good candidate for a Projection diagnosis. People who feel inferior can project inferiority on selected racial, ethnic, or social groups; people who are obsessed with sex become very censorious of others’ sexuality, which leans toward Reaction Formation.

Altruistic surrender is a form of projection that at first glance looks like its opposite: Here, the person attempts to fulfill his or her own needs vicariously, through other people.

RATIONALIZATION: Rationalization is the idiot child of Intellectualization and the sibling of Denial. Here, the intellectual arguments are fallacious or dishonest. Rationalization provides ethical-sounding rationales for unethical motives, or dishonest excuses for bad results. The least harmful example of rationalization is probably sour grapes.

REACTION FORMATION: “Believing the opposite.” Anger becomes exaggerated concern for the one who made you angry. Fear leads to anger at the one who scared you. And boys hate girls, and vice versa.

REPRESSION: Repression was Freud’s biggie, the primary ego defense that makes all other psychological defensiveness possible. Repression is suppressio_, the temporary and conscious pushing of something out of one’s mind, writ large. In Repression, suppression is habitual and unconscious.

Repression is also part of one of Freud’s most controversial theories: Repressed memory, where past trauma is not remembered, but where there is still a neurotic price to pay. The past 20 years of the “repressed memory syndrome” fracas was, more or less, a replay of Freud’s own work. But, of course, everyone ignored what Freud actually said because Freud wasn’t “scientific.”

REGRESSION: Reverting to an earlier, more secure, stage of development. Someone may be regressing when they act fatigued or ill, throw tantrum, or curl up into a fetal position in the corner.

SUBLIMATION: Sublimation diverts instinctual impulses into some other activity, often advantageous. Don’t want to finish the report? Clean the oven.

I don’t think I’m revealing any secrets here by noting that I’m pretty much an Intellectualization/Sublimation/Fantasy kinda guy. Indeed, one of the benefits of being an science fiction and fantasy writer is that it’s possible to combine them into one grand scheme of Working on the Next Story, or even, Thinking about the Next Essay.