Effects of Freudian Psychoanlysis

 There are certain theories that suddenly came up on the horizon and conquered the human minds without having given a second thought. Psychoanalysis is one such theory, developed in an infinitesimal amount of time. Compared with other scientific developments that took long time to get one idea after the other, the development of all such complicated structures and ideas like ids and egos, the tensions and the forces, the pushes and the pulls, seems to be too much for one brain or a few brains to have cooked up in such a short time, and such a hurried development is bound to have lapses. People like Freud, Adler, Darwin, etc. gave serious setback to the human thoughts and emotions through their theories and have had far reaching effects on human mind.

Freud and Adler, the two champions of Psychoanalysis, may somewhat seem to have differed on the ideological front, but the end result of their thought is one and the same. Freud was the creator of “conscious” and “unconscious” who and believed in a constant struggle between them. He propounded the theory that man’s unconscious whips instincts for evil and sexual licentiousness. He suggested that those who fail to fulfill the urges of the unconscious get inflicted with hysteria or nervous disorders and prescribed succumbing to the urges of the unconscious. As termed by Joad:

Where Freud has revealed the beast in man, Adler claims to have exposed devil.

Similarly, the modern psychologists have termed the man as nothing but a “carnal beast”free from ethical bounds. There is very minor difference between behaviourism and psychoanalysis. Behaviourism treats man as a mere machine without the freedom of choice in matters of action, while the latter recognizes the freedom of choice but consider it to be a slave of instincts. Much of the sexual anarchy in the western society stems from these materialistic concepts. It has progressed to the extent of even incest being seen as acceptable. All this is the result of the contributions by people like  Karl Marx, Freud, and Darwin. This permissiveness is permeating deep into the human society all over the world alongside the dazzling economic success of the west.

Thus, while the modern scientific discoveries point to the presence of a conscious brain behind the entire universe, the modern psychology has exerted contrary pulls over the human society. In the final analysis, it could be said that while materialism has begun to fade, the strangling hold of materialistic ideologies continues. Therefore, several of the interpretations from the point of view of mechanism, motion, and concept of matter and energy, have gone obsolete. That is why the contemporary materialist psychology has been rendered out of date. It is merely because it could not keep pace with modern discoveries.