Pharmaceuticals Anonymous

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

The Roots of Authoritarianism in Psychiatry and Psychology


This is the image that Freud, a cocaine addict, hung above the famous couch where he dispensed "advice".



"In recounting the story of the Rat Man (“A Case of Obsessional Neurosis”, 1909), Freud digresses into that of another patient, a civil servant, who had many eccentricities. One was an obsession with cleanliness: he paid Freud in banknotes which had been ironed in order to get rid of bacteria. Another was his treatment of young girls. Among his friends he would play the role of a jolly uncle. In this role he would invite his friends’ daughters out for a day in the country and would contrive to miss the train so that he and the girl would have to spend the night in a hotel. Although he always arranged a separate room for the girl, he would come to her bed during the night and masturbate her with his fingers. Freud suggested that this was not a good idea on grounds of hygiene: “But aren’t you afraid of doing her some harm, fiddling about in her genitals with your dirty hand?”. To this remarkably mild objection – would such conduct have been acceptable with clean hands? – the civil servant responded by flying into a rage and declaring that his attentions had never done the girls any harm. He stormed out of Freud’s consulting room and never came back. The pattern that emerges, I suggest, is of extreme and excessive indulgence towards patriarchal authority and its abuse, and a lack of sympathy with the women and children who were, and evidently still are, its victims."
The rest of the article is here


Ritalin (an Amphetamine) and Cocaine are chemically almost identical. So Freud was a speed freak....something to think about next time you or your child are offered medication.