Sadly Freud was Right

(There are implicit book recommendations in here, hence I’m including this in the ‘reviews’ category)

I didn’t want Freud to be right about anything.

I didn’t want him to be right because I don’t like reading his ideas about human beings. I find some of them distasteful and gross. I may be wrong and unfairly judging him since he put me off reading much of his writing. Nevertheless it seems to me he was a probably a sex addict who projected his own pathology onto the whole world and claimed everyone was just like him.

Here’s a helpful introduction to the theory founded by him (from this page):

I started reading about psychotherapy/psychology approaches after I was diagnosed with Bipolar. I thought maybe I’d find some help there for managing my own mental health.

I learned a little about Freudian psychoanalysis. Yikes. Eww! I also discovered the newer approaches of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and its direct descendant (as best I recall), Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT). Ah, here were two approaches I could get on board with! They made intuitive sense to me right away and I could apply them myself, to myself, starting immediately.

I read Feeling Good by David Burns which is basically a self-help book on CBT. It wasn’t at the right level for me (I felt talked down to) but nevertheless it was helpful in explaining how to apply CBT to myself. I also read the professional textbook on REBT by its founder: Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy by Albert Ellis. He comes across as grouchy but I loved this book! It was at just the right level: it was a serious text but with little enough jargon that I could follow it in spite of being completely untrained in psychology or psychotherapy.

In addition to preferring the level of Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy to Feeling Good, I liked that it wasn’t about self-esteem. For me self-esteem is an unhelpful rabbit hole I’d rather not go down. It works for me to separate what I do from my identity because then my identity is never defined by my actions. In other words, yes I made a mistake or did something wrong. But no, that does not mean “I am a bad person”. For me that difference is critical. If I never let my actions persuade me I’m a terrible person, I won’t need to fix that by telling myself I’m amazing in front of a mirror every day. For me it’s easier to avoid the [self-esteem] problem in the first place than allowing it to happen and then having to fix it.

To be fair to CBT, I don’t know whether intentionally trying to raise one’s esteem is part of the original CBT approach. I read a fantastic CBT based book about communicating well in marriage, one I’d recommend to anyone with a close partner btw, by the founder of CBT, Aaron Beck, called Love Is Never Enough. That was at the perfect level. And as best I recall, it said nothing about self-esteem. (Although if you follow the methods in the book, you and your partner will feel more respected by each other).

In any case, after reading about the approaches I mentioned above I started applying CBT/REBT right away and have found them very helpful ever since. And I became very wary of psychoanalysis and its offshoots and hoped whatever good was in it was also addressed by CBT/REBT. Because then I could ignore psychoanalysis. (Aha! the psychoanalysts are thinking. Exactly!)

Even setting aside all the weird sex stuff, treatment with psychoanalysis requires professional help and takes years. It’s literally a random walk through dreams, freudian slips and free association guided by therapist questions which as “what’s the first word you can think of beginning with “A”? or “what does this image remind you of?” The idea is that by doing this, unconscious desires will surface and can be dealt with. No wonder it takes years!

The other problem with it was, frankly, I didn’t believe in the concept that significant things were so hidden from me that I needed that sort of lengthy expensive treatment for them. Maybe people who’d been tragically very very abused had that level of repression. I didn’t have any evidence of it so I would go ahead with CBT/REBT on myself and see how far that got me.

In site of my aversion to psychoanalysis I accidentally found myself going to a psychoanalytic marriage therapist with my husband, decades ago. My illness had brought a huge amount of stress into our marriage relationship and as best I recall we thought seeing a professional might help. I got a personal referral from church (back then I liked that) to a non-Christian marriage therapist (necessary since my husband is Christian-averse). Unfortunately I didn’t realize she was a psychoanalyst. We tried her anyway and went for a number of weeks. Eventually, as we had lunch together after the session, we both agreed we weren’t getting anything out of these sessions and we might as well quit. It was probably the case that as my illness receded things were getting easier between us anyway.

We told her we were quitting at our next session. We knew she wouldn’t think we were done since we’d been going for weeks not years. And she didn’t. She seemed predictably stunned and asked in bewilderment, “But how will you manage without me??” How indeed. Shockingly we did manage without her, since, here we are, over 20 years later, still married.

My wariness and skepticism of psychoanalysis was if anything reinforced by the experience with that therapist. Until a month or so I was still unconvinced Freud had anything useful to say that wasn’t addressed by CBT/REBT. Then my husband helped me me realize that I was faithfully living by a rule in my life – programming installed when I was young – that I was totally unaware of. I had no clue! I denied it at first, but then I realized he was right!

But that also means Freud was right! It’s true that we can be driven and limited by unconscious limitations we literally have no awareness of! Now I have first-hand evidence that Freud is right, I want to have another look at what he has to say. It’s on my to-do list for when I have time.

Freud was right about unconscious desires ruling over our lives but – I had also found out that he was very wrong about people needing years of a random walk through Freudian slips, dreams and random association with a trained (expensive) psychoanalyst to uncover and address the unconscious bad programming installed in us. I know he was wrong because I have first-hand evidence that a smart person who knows me can help me figure it out! Without free association and freudian slips. With a much more targeted, rational, efficient process of putting together two things: the question “Hmmm, I wonder why my spouse has a pattern of behaving in this (annoying) way?” together with some stories about when they were young. Maybe one story is enough.

Here’s an important warning: helping your spouse see their bad programming is hard. They probably won’t believe you at first. After all, if they knew it was there it wouldn’t be unconscious, would it? They might believe you about the behavior part but they won’t want to, because it hurt to see/admit it. They may feel attacked and decide to attack you back. Your information may well be causing them to feel crazy or stupid. It objectively does seem crazy and stupid to realize that one is an adult whose life has been ruled over by a bizarre principle/belief such as “I’m not allowed to say “I want”.

It helps me to understand that these types of rules tend to get installed through (often unintentional) abuse and/or neglect when people are young. Once upon a time the rule was a rational survival strategy formed by a child in desperate straits to protect themselves emotionally. It feels stupid now but back then it made sense and probably was helpful and effective. It very likely was all the child could come up with, even if it wasn’t especially effective. We do the best we can, throughout our lives, with the information we have.

As adults hopefully the desperate situation is long past and we have other ways of keeping ourselves safe. The expiration date of our hidden rule/belief may have passed years ago, but until we find it – until we uncover the virus in our system – we don’t even know it needs removing. Until we do, it remains lost to us, hidden under the sands of time, and very hard to find us, even though we’re faithfully obeying the rule, all the time, every time we get put in a situation that reminds us of the one we created the strategy (rule) for.

If you haven’t been put off helping others find their hidden programming yet, here’s a bit more advice. The best way to help anyone else – the gold standard – is by leading the way. By being a role model and being willing to find and accept our own hidden programming. One way to facilitate this would be asking someone who knows us well, “Is there anything I tend to do that annoys you?”

Ok, wait – that may be a stretch goal! I’m not sure I’m ever brave enough to start that conversation with no context! So how about this: wait until next time they’re annoyed, or you are, and then at that time, with that context (or after a cooling off period) you can carefully revisit it together with I statements. Maybe then you’ll glimpse what’s really going on. At the “hidden programming that rules our lives” level. Perhaps you can figure out together some truths that will hurt at first, but then will set you free.

Ah by the way, if you want to work on this on your own, I think that the ‘become your own loving parent to your inner child‘ framing metaphor/approach probably addresses the same hidden issues as psychoanalysis and so could be helpful

Fwiw, thinking about Freud and sex, I think maybe he got it backwards. It’s not that everything is about sex. It’s that sex is about everything else. Sex [with another person] requires a level of vulnerability that’s hard if we are always surrounded (protected) by armor we don’t know we are wearing (hidden rules literally ruling over us). It will be hard for the other person if we are wearing that and it will be especially hard if our modus operandi is “attack is the best form of defense”. Anyway sex is a very personal matter and that’s all I want to say about it. I wouldn’t have even mentioned it but Freud brought it up first!