The Freud Illusion: Two Guest-Reviews for The Occidental Observer
Two guest reviewers offer us intriguingly diverse perspectives on a biography of the great Sigmund Freud. Dr. D’Bea’Qwarr insisted on not capitalizing ‘white’.
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Freud: The Making of an Illusion, Frederick Crews (Metropolitan Books 2017)
This is a guest-review by Dr Benjamin M. Rubinstein
Burn this evil book. Burn it!
Dr Benjamin M. Rubinstein is a forensic accountant and passionate psychoanalyst who trained under a mentor who trained under a mentor who trained under The Master.
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Freud: The Making of an Illusion, Frederick Crews (Metropolitan Books 2017)
This is a guest-review by Dr La’Toksha D’Bea’Qwarr
As a proud Black Woman of Size, I simply could not read all of this book. It wasn’t that Frederick Crews is a white male, because I was relieved to discover that Crews has managed to divest himself sufficiently of white privilege and racist white solidarity to expose his fellow white Freud as the true criminal and pervert he was. Nevertheless, I was unable to process so much about whites and their white wickedness. And there’s worse to come, it seems:
The first director of the [Freud] archives [at the US Library of Congress], Kurt Eissler, saw to it that other papers would remain unavailable for many more decades, extending as far forward as the year 2113. (“A Note on Sources,” p. xv)
The mind boggles at what still remains to be exposed! But the facts are already clear, as Crews lays out in unsparing detail. Freud was an archetypal white: a greedy, selfish, unscrupulous control-freak interested only in power and money, and prepared to tell as many lies and hurt as many people as it took to get what he wanted. I was sickened to my stomach, repeatedly, even in that short portion of the book I managed to fully process.
Fortunately, Crews brings a dry wit and a sure eye for a comic quote or wry comment to the task of cutting Freud down to size. In between being sickened to my stomach, I chuckled heartily many times as I read what I managed to read. Here are some of the additional laughs I found by dipping into the unprocessed portion of the book:
“I read through your manuscript in one sitting,” he [Freud] enthused [to Wilhelm Fliess] in 1896, with reference to The Relationship between the Nose and the Female Sexual Organs. “I was exceptionally pleased with its plain assurance, the lucid self-evident connections between the individual themes, the unpretentious unfolding of its riches, and…its wealth of glimpses of new riddles and new explanations.” (ch. 23, “The Secret Sharer,” p. 426)
In Freud’s world, it appears, all roads led to masturbation. Virtually every upsetting experience caused a child to start masturbating, and later her options were to keep masturbating and become neurasthenic or to stop and become hysterical. (ch. 29, “The Labyrinth of Reproaches,” p. 526)
Psychoanalysts were expected to march in step behind Freud’s anti-masturbatory banner. Between 1910 and 1912 the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society devoted no fewer than eleven sessions to discussing the ravages of the vice, and although dissenting voices were raised, Freud remained adamant. (ch. 35, “Imposing His Will,” p. 642)
[Margarethe] Csonka had kept him [Freud] busy analyzing fabricated dreams that were designed to satirize his preconceptions. Freud was just wary enough to suspect that her dreams were trying to deceive him, but not wary enough to perceive that Csonka herself was the trickster. After each session, having retired to a café, she would amuse her girlfriend with uproarious accounts of her therapist’s fatuity. (ch. 35, p. 644)
Freud schmeud, baby. This creepy Viennese shyster was a pervert and crook in typical white male fashion. Frederick Crews is to be congratulated on making a major contribution to the on-going campaign to expose the white male icons of the past as woefully over-rated, wildly over-exposed and way-way-way over-due for replacement in the so-called Western canon by the silenced voices of Persons of Color – especially Women-of-Size of Color and LGBTQTSIA+ of Color.
Dr La’Toksha D’Bea’Qwarr is the Hymie K. Diamondberg Professor of Black Diaspora Studies at the University of East Brooklyn.
It seems to me that the driving force behind Freud’s psychoanalysis was not Whiteness but Jewishness. He conjured up psychoanalysis from the Kabbala, the Jewish system of magic and mysticism, and stated his wish to replace the Catholic religion with psychoanalysis.
We at TOO agree. It’s a satire of what a Black woman of size might write.
I have a hard time telling the difference between satire and reality, nowadays.
The Right does NOT have a funny bone, despite what boomers have told you. To the younger people reading your website, this stuff is cringe. Deep cringe. I expect TOO articles to challenge me, not make me feel embarrassed for visiting.
On the contrary, it is only the Right that is ever funny. Today’s Woke Left is about the most humorless bunch that ever lived.
“As a proud Black Woman of Size, I simply could not read all of this book”.
In one sentence you have put your finger on the Black Question – physically fat and mentally lazy.
The Black comedian, Chris Rock said, “If you happen to live in an area where Black thieves are active, hide your money in books.
Blacks hate books.
THE BLACK HOLOCAUST
John W. Fountain
author@johnwfountain.com
Last Modified: May 6, 2012
Imagine Soldier Field beyond capacity, brimming with 63,879 young African-American men, ages 18 to 24 — more than U.S. losses in the entire Vietnam conflict. Imagine the University of Michigan’s football stadium — the largest in the U.S. — filled to its limit of 109,901 with black men, age 25 and older. Now add 28,223 more — together totaling more than U.S. deaths in World War I.
Picture two UIC Pavilions packed with 12,658 Trayvon Martins — black boys, ages 14 to 17 — nearly twice the number of U.S. lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now picture all of them dead. The national tally of black males 14 and older murdered in America from 1976 through 2005, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics: 214,661. The numbers tell only part of the story of this largely urban war, where the victims bear an uncanny resemblance to their killers. A war of brother against brother, filled with wanton and automatic gunfire, even in the light of day, on neighborhood streets, where little boys make mud pies, schoolgirls jump rope, where the innocent are caught in the crossfire, where the spirit of murder blows like the wind. It is, so far, a ceaseless war in which guns are often the weapon of choice, and the finger on the trigger of the gun pointed at a black male is most often another black male’s.
The numbers alone are enough to make me cry — to wonder why — we as African Americans will march en masse over one slain by someone who is not black, and yet sit silent over the hundreds of thousands of us obliterated from this mortal world by someone black like us, like me. It is a numbing truth borne out by hard facts: From 1980 through 2008, 93% of black victims were killed by blacks. Translation: For every Trayvon Martin killed by someone not black, nine other blacks were murdered by someone black.
In 2005, — blacks — accounted for 13% of the U.S. population but 49% of all homicides. The numbers are staggering, the loss incomprehensible. Add to the tally of black males 14 and older slain across the country from 1976 to 2005, another 29,335 (slain from 2006 to 2010), and their national body count rises to 243,996, representing 82% of all black homicides for that 35-year period. What also becomes clear is this: We too often have raised killers. And this war is claiming our sons. But that’s still not the end of the story. Add to that number 51,892 black females ages 14 and older, plus five whose gender was not identifiable, and the total, not counting children, is 295,893 — more than the combined U.S. losses of World War I, the Vietnam, Korean and Mexican-American wars, the War of 1812 and the American Revolutionary War.
Is the blood of these sons and daughters somehow less American? Two hundred ninety-five thousand eight hundred ninety-three . . . Imagine the United Center, Wrigley Field, U.S. Cellular Field and Soldier Field nearly all filled simultaneously with black boys, girls, men and women. Now imagine that twice over. Now imagine them all dead. As far as I can see, that’s at least 295,893 reasons to cry. And it is cause enough for reticent churches, for communities, for lackadaisical leaders, for all people — no matter our race, color or creed — to find the collective will and the moral resolve to stamp out this human rights atrocity occurring right under our noses. Just imagine the human carnage and the toll to us all if we don’t.
I can’t. I won’t.
JOHN W. FOUNTAIN
This is actually a very good work of scholarship, which can now be purchased at a heavy discount to initial price (Freud would appreciate that, at least). I suggest interested persons pick one up, as in a few decades it will have become valuable as well as rare.