The True Freudians

Psychoanalysis, which is a religion to its followers, has its own high church, and an elaborate collection of schismatics and nonconformists. The simon-pure fundamentalists are the anointed followers of the late Dr. Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis. Most of this tight group of disciples are in the U.S. Out last week was their first Year book of Psychoanalysis, which reverently reiterated their creed that in the beginning was sex, is now, and ever shall be.*

Under the watchful eye of Manhattan's Dr. Abraham Arden Brill, 70, pocket-sized, learned apostle who knew Freud in 1908 in Vienna, the Freudians hold it necessary for salvation that the neurotic sinner be subjected to total immersion (perhaps 200 or more one-hour sessions) to wash him down to the childhood facts behind neuroses and persuade him to face them. This often does a lot of good. The true-blue Freudians have only scorn for what Dr. Brill calls "societies and individuals who offer the public better, cheaper and quicker psychoanalyses." A true Freudian is a monotheist and believes in one God, libido, the sexual urge, as the dominant force in human existence. He regards the school of Jung as pantheistic heretics (they believe that libido includes other drives besides sex); ditto for the school of Adler (which invented the inferiority complex).

Formidable Lingo. The Freudians' Yearbook (International Universities Press; $10) contains contributions from Dr. Brill; Dr. Gregory Zilboorg (the apostle to the publishers, who psychoanalyzed Marshall Field III and Ralph McAllister Ingersoll); Dr. Karl A. Menninger (head of Topeka's famed Menninger Clinic); Dr. Franz Alexander (high priest of Chicago's Institute for Psychoanalysis). Laymen who would like to take a peek inside the temple will have a hard time; the services are conducted in a formidable lingo, which puts new meanings to such familiar words as sublimation, transference and catharsis, and uses such arcane runes as abalienation and stereotypy. Sample liturgical phrase: "narcissistic identification as a preliminary stage to object cathexis" (which means that a person is drawn to other people because they remind him of himself).

Love & Hate. The Yearbook recites a litany familiar to devout Freudians--love that is really hate and submissiveness that is aggression, as well as much stuff that anybody's grandmother would have dismissed as just a dirty thought. But in the case histories, new & old, translated for the most part out of the Freudian pig-Latin into something resembling the vulgar tongue, the Freudians talk so that laymen can usually understand their sex theory. Examples:

P: The woman who does not really enjoy housekeeping but persists in "dutiful or neurotic drudgery" and complains to everybody about it. Freudian explanation: she is probably sexually maladjusted, since people should like work, which is a form of sexual satisfaction, besides satisfying an "instinct to master" the environment.

P:The young woman who was always late to appointments. She was the youngest of three children, and at first her father liked the others best. She "rejected his love with a fierce hatred" when he finally showed affection. Result: "Everything in life came too late for her."

P: The man who always had what he called a "wake hour" beginning at 2 a.m. It finally turned out that, when the patient was four, his father always rose at that time to go to work, often made love to his wife before leaving.

P: The woman who thought anything anyone else touched was thereby polluted. For reasons only Dr. Brill can explain, the patient was temporarily better just after the execution of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray for murder (1928).

P: The "as ifs." These are people who act as if they are perfectly normal, but actually lack the ability to feel affection or attachment to anyone. So they usually imitate others, which makes some of them perverted, others virtuous. One patient bought a dog to imitate its friendliness.

* Until World War I, a yearbook of psychoanalysis used to be published in Vienna.

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