The Danger of Emergency Powers: A History Lesson

Below is the second of three reposts in this election season on politics. (The third repost will be on November 1.) The present essay was posted on October 7, 2020, six months after the beginning of what I subsequently labelled covid totalitarianism. I used the terms in seven essays posted in 2021 and ’22.
 
 
Emergency powers, as we have learned in the past six months, are dangerous. Any little tyrant in our local mayoral or gubernatorial office can suspend individual rights at the drop of a hat—or virus—in the name of the emergency.
 
In 1933 Adolf Hitler became dictator of Germany through “emergency powers.” Let’s briefly review how that happened.
 
In 1932 in a round of parliamentary voting, the Nazi Party lost to Paul von Hindenburg, World War I hero and president of the Weimar Republic since 1925. The Nazis, however, won a strong second place. After Hitler withdrew support for Hindenburg a third round of voting in November gave the Nazi Party the largest Reichstag share at 33%. Two prominent politicians and a “letter signed by 22 important representatives of industry” urged Hindenburg (1, 2) to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Hitler immediately gave Hermann Göring a cabinet position in charge of the police, which soon became the State Secret Police, or Gestapo.
 
Emergency powers soon followed. In February 1933 the Reichstag (parliament) building burned, blamed by Göring on the communists, but some historians insist it was started by the Nazis. Hitler then persuaded Hindenburg to issue the Reichstag Fire Decree that eliminated many civil rights, including freedom of speech, press, and assembly, banned the communist party, and allowed detention without trial. (Hindenburg at the time was 85 and said by some to be senile.)
 
In one fell swoop, Hitler acquired dictatorial power. In March, with dissenters surrounded and intimidated by Nazi brownshirts (SA) and protection squad (SS), the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act to give Hitler “temporary” power to rule by emergency decree.
 
For the next sixteen or so months, which included book burnings, purges, and other forms of rioting and “cancel culture,” Hitler remained deferential in public to Hindenburg. After the latter died in August 1934, the chancellor eliminated the presidency, solidifying his dictatorship through the 1934 referendum, achieved similarly to the Reichstag vote with “widespread intimidation.”
 
It was in this manner that Adolf Hitler was elected dictator of Germany.
 
In our present cultural and political atmosphere, news commentator Bill O’Reilly recently wrote that the current Democratic presidential candidate [Joe Biden] “is Paul von Hindenburg in 1932 Germany. An old guy who is malleable.” In 1933 and ’34, Hindenburg’s shaper readily persuaded him to grant emergency powers, paving the way to full dictatorship.
 
Are we there yet? Are we heading down that path?
 
Emergency powers are dangerous and no one, least of all our political leaders, should have them. Individual rights are inviolate and absolute. They should never be suspended, whether the excuse is a pandemic or an insurrection or invasion. There is and can be no justification. This includes the suspension of habeas corpus, which unfortunately is allowed in the US Constitution.
 
In a free society no one has the right to force you to stay home during a pandemic or to force you to wear a hazmat suit (or mask) if you go out into public places. If you are so afraid of getting infected, you should stay home and avoid other people. If we had a society with a sound and stable legal system and you are infected knowingly and willfully by someone, you will likely have legal standing to sue or press charges—and with such a system you can expect most other people, lest they be sued or have charges pressed against them, to mind their manners when sick. A free society means you are free to choose and exercise in action your best judgment. We are all fully capable of doing just that. We ain’t stupid.
 
Emergency powers, even if, or especially when, they are declared to be “temporary,” lead inevitably to expansion of those powers. As in the case of Hitler, there seldom is a retraction or reduction of powers.*
 
Associated sometimes with emergency powers is the notion of martial law. Alan Dershowitz points out that the US Constitution says nothing about either, though, he writes, both were prevalent at the time of the country’s founding. Martial law, he says, is a contradiction in terms, because if the military is brought in, “then it is not law. It is power.” Other definitions have said martial law means the substitution of military for civil law.
 
No form of martial law, however, in a truly free society is ever appropriate. And I don’t believe it has been used in the United States. Whenever the national guard or military has been called out, their use has been to assist the police, to detain the violators of rights who are attacking person and property. In the process their purpose is to restore peace and order. Once the criminal violators are detained, the police can hold them for prosecution and incarceration.
 
Curfew? Aside from being a violation of rights, why? As a practical matter, you capture the law breakers, thereby making the streets safe again.
 
The use of emergency powers, martial law, and curfew are all confessions by politicians that they cannot maintain law and order with their own police.
 
Or, they are smokescreens for the expansion of power to establish a more authoritarian government. As did Hitler!
 
Can it happen here? Are the parallels sound? One-party rule, censorship, big business support and encouragement of dictatorial powers??
 
 
* See Jeffrey Tucker on “Lockdown: The New Totalitarianism.” Some true believers are already salivating over the pandemic lockdowns as dress rehearsal for total state control to enforce “climate change” decrees. Tucker, pointing out that the essence of “lockdownism” is puritanism, quotes none other than Anthony Fauci on the future of pandemic totalitarianism: “Living in greater harmony with nature will require changes in human behavior.” This simple statement is a double whammy: we in solidarity with the rabidly radical and toxic environmentalists apparently will be expected to sacrifice ourselves to trees and rocks and we must in addition transform ourselves into the utopian New Man (of Karl Marx, though the notion predates Marx).

What Americans Need to Learn about the Left

Below is a repost from July 18, 2022, that is important for our upcoming election. Most of my previous posts from 2017–22 have political themes and many are linked in the article below. I plan to repost another political essay in October and, again, on November 1. Note that links to my book Applying Principles are to a free, downloadable pdf.
 
 
A retired English professor from Emory University recently wrote: “Stop wasting your time yelling, ‘Hypocrisy!’ Don’t bother pointing out the contradiction. They don’t care. Consistency is not a liberal virtue. Only the outcomes matter.”
 
Instead of “liberal” virtue, a more correct designation would be “progressive,” as in “far left progressive” virtue. Liberals are still around who think of themselves as moderate (and honest) mixed economy Democrats.
 
The professor was talking to conservatives and others who still think the communist-fascist leftists in our midst pay attention to things like logic, consistency, and truth.
 
“Don’t be so naïve,” psychologist Edith Packer, who herself escaped the Nazis, would often say. If bad people are going to kill you, throw you in solitary confinement with no recourse to habeas corpus, remove you from your tenured professorship without just cause, etc., ad nauseam, they will find a way to get rid of you. They are not going to pay attention to logic, consistency, or truth. “You can’t reason with these people, can you?” Dr. Packer would add. The answer to her question was rather obvious.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned, say the leftists! It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters.*
 
There are three points many fail to understand about the left. (1) Today’s far left progressives are in fact advocates of communism or fascism or some combination. (2) The communist-fascist progressive leftists are convinced that they are the ones who are doing what is moral and everyone else is not. And (3) the campaign to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism, communism, or fascism has been going on in the United States for over a century (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13).
 
Thus, it appears to us that  “they just don’t care.” And they don’t care—about anything that relates to capitalism, individualism, or egoism. We are evil and, consequently, they hate us. Tear down the statues of America’s founders. That’s moral in their view. Oppose teaching children that they are racist oppressors. That’s immoral.
 
Today’s leftists are following Marx’s premise of the inevitability of socialism and the necessity of capitalism’s eradication. The sooner capitalism collapses—literally through physical destruction, preferably turned to ashes—the better.
 
To attempt a logical argument with the communist-fascist left is futile because Marx gave us that theory of many logics called polylogism (Applying Principles, pp. 309-310). We subscribe to bourgeois (updated to white racist) logic and socialists to proletarian (updated to victim) logic. The two groups—us and them—cannot talk to each other. The “logics” are contradictory.
 
Sound familiar? “Your truth versus my truth”?? Postmodern epistemology is not so new!
 
Let me now elaborate point three above with a historical sketch of the left’s attempt to take over the United States in the last 120-30 years.
 
As I have written before (Applying Principles, pp. 110-13), the first progressives, from the 1880s to the early twentieth century, were educated in Germany by democratic socialists. They brought those ideas back to the United States to replace the move toward classical liberalism with a more “moderate” or “compassionate” social liberalism (Applying Principles, pp. 36-39; see also 1, 2). This gave us, among other increases in government power, the Pendleton Act of 1883, unelected “expert” and difficult-to-fire bureaucrats, and regulatory agencies to “regulate” businesses to make them more “compassionate.”
 
By the 1920s and ‘30s, with the latter called the “red decade,” communism and fascism were openly recognized and admired replacements for what was understood to be American capitalism. Communists and fascists at the time were bosom buddies until Hitler invaded Russia in 1941. Thereafter, the communists started calling anyone who disagrees with them a fascist. They continue to do so.
 
Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations about Joseph Stalin in 1956 shook the American communist world such that the likes of David Horowitz’s parents (card-carrying communists) stopped calling themselves communists and resorted to progressivism as their preferred political moniker.
 
Horowitz himself became cofounder of the New Left, editor of Ramparts magazine, and participant throughout the 1960s and early ‘70s with such communist organizations as the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Indeed, Horowitz, who has now become conservative, asserts that the turmoil and riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago enabled the left to take over the Party, which, he says, it still controls.**
 
In the years since, progressives have only become stronger and stronger, and more and more irrational, moving their cause further and further left, with seemingly little rational or articulate opposition from the right. Early Party leaders had to moderate their views and intentions. In 2011, however, Barack Obama talked explicitly about “fundamentally transforming” the United States. To what? To socialism, following the lead of one of his influencers, Saul Alinsky, community activist and organizer who advocated open confrontation.
 
Though attributed to a member of SDS, the following could be the motto of Alinsky: The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution. Which means, as Alinsky clearly acknowledges: the end justifies the means. As in: logic, consistency, and truth be damned, and physically destroy capitalism in order to rebuild a society of socialism.
 
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of the left and their panic at the thought of losing the political war, especially to an unintellectual businessman who represented the American sense of life and catered to that sense of life in his constituents.
 
The 1960s erupted all over again, only worse. Putsch (German for coup) is the word Ayn Rand used to describe the “revolution” the 1960s leftists wanted to achieve. Putsch is the correct description of today’s mob terrorism. Its purpose, as Rand says, is to establish tyranny.
 
Logic, consistency, and truth be damned.
 
It’s the outcome, the socialist Garden of Eden, that matters. As the communist-fascist progressive leftists say, “We are the ones who are doing good. You capitalists are evil and need to be destroyed by any means that works.”
 
 
 
* Many links in this post are references to previous posts where I have touched on the topics discussed. The purpose of the present blog is to give a more historical perspective on progressivism and its rise in the United States.
 
** Horowitz is not the only person to turn away from the socialist Garden of Eden. Max Eastman, a prolific writer and editor on the left in the early twentieth century admired Lenin and visited Russia in 1922 and ‘23. Over twenty years or so, he gradually abandoned socialism and started writing free-market articles, many in The Freeman, publication of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). During the years he was affiliated with FEE, he came to know Ludwig von Mises.

Space, Time, and Causality

Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts answers many so-called problems in philosophy. One of these is Kant’s claim that such concepts as space, time, and causality are innate (“a priori”), independent of sense perception and therefore of reality. Whatever we are aware of are phenomena, appearances in our minds, not the noumena of true reality. The positivists took this a step further and declared all abstractions from abstractions “arbitrary constructs.” Let us see what Rand’s theory can say about these broad concepts.
 
An abstraction from abstractions, according to Rand (chap. 3), begins with perceived concretes, such as chairs, tables, and beds. A first-level abstraction from abstractions might be furniture, by identifying the similar characteristics that the three concretes share, namely large objects designed to support the human body and smaller objects. A further abstraction might be household goods when we integrate furniture with furnaces, air conditioners, and kitchen appliances, and, further, the broad abstraction of human-made objects by integrating household goods with bridges, automobiles, and skyscrapers.
 
To keep our knowledge in good order, says Rand, we must be able to trace the steps from broad abstraction back to perceived concrete, in my example from human-made object to chairs, furnaces, and bridges. Consider now Kant’s broad abstractions and alleged innate concepts space, time, and causality.
 
Contrary to Kant, all of these concepts have referents in perceptual reality. Space, to put it rather simply and obviously, is an empty place, such as a room that has no furniture, an available parking location, and the spot on my desk where my water glass was. All of these concepts are perceptual, metaphysical (out there) referents of the (in here) abstraction from abstractions of “space” and “place.”  Note that my examples of space can be described in geometrical terms, respectively, as three dimensional, two dimensional, or just a point, all perceptually grasped.*
 
Time, said Aristotle, is a “measure of motion” as the cubit is a measure of length.** Ayn Rand says it is a “change of relationship,” of one entity that moves from one place to another in relation to an entity that is stationary (256–60). For example, if I move my water glass from the right side of my computer to the left, I become aware of the passage of time.

Historically, time was discovered as the changing phases of the moon in relation to the earth, then later as the movements of the sun across the earth’s sky. It was measured initially by water clocks and sun dials. Today, we base our understanding of time on the revolutions of the earth around the sun and measure it with more and more precise time pieces.

Because we must know several prior concepts—entity, change, motion, measurement—time is a broad abstraction whose referents can be traced back to perceptual concretes. It is not innate.

Causality, according to Rand, is decidedly an abstraction from abstractions, not an innate Kantian category.
 
For Rand, causality is “the law of identity applied to action” (Atlas Shrugged, 1037).  It is the actions of one or more entities in relation to the actions of one or more other entities. Essentially, this is Aristotle’s formal cause, including his distinction between potentiality and actuality, and a rejection of the view that has dominated philosophy of science since the Renaissance. That view looks only at efficient causation, the so-called billiard-ball causality.

One of Rand’s fundamental propositions is that an entity is all its attributes and that is its identity. There is no substratum or glue holding the attributes together, which would take us back to the intrinsic theory of essences. Thus, to arrive at a causal explanation of an event we have to recognize the nature of the entities involved.
 
A billiard ball, for example, going in the pocket of a pool table is not fully explained by saying the cue stick moved in a certain way to knock it in (efficient causation). We have to know that the balls are hard and roll easily on the fabric of the table and a well-chalked cue stick in the hands of a skilled player with good vision hits the ball at the right angle and speed.

The concepts of a round and hard ball, smooth and flat table, chalk and cue stick, and skilled player with accurate eyesight are all attributes of the respective entities and their interactions to cause this event.

Simple billiard-ball causation is not so simple. As can be seen, Aristotle’s other three causes—material, final (when talking about human and other living action), and efficient are relevant in a full explanation of a cause. But formal cause, the nature or identity of the entities involved, is central.
 
The implication of Rand’s view that causality is identity in action is that essentialization is a grasp of causality. Conceptualization through essentialization identifies causes and effects of the existents that the concept identifies. The essential distinguishing characteristic of an entity and Rand’s rule of fundamentality (45–46) say that to identify the essential characteristic of a concept, we must identify the one or more that explains and causes all or most of the others. Again, this means that the explanation is “in here,” in our internal mental process of consciousness and is epistemological, and the causal relationship is “out there,” in reality apart from that mental process and is metaphysical.
 
Thus, cholera is explained and caused by the essential distinguishing characteristics of the comma bacillus (today called Vibrio Cholerae) interacting with the digestive system of the human body. Dew is explained and caused by the characteristics of water condensation, that is, of water vapor in the air interacting with air temperature such that liquid forms on our cars, windows, and leaves of grass. And tides are explained and caused by the attractions between water on earth to the sun and moon as they move, especially the gravitational pull of the moon on the oceans of earth; those oceans that are on the side of earth closest to the moon, and furthest away, “bulge out” and create high tides. The in-between oceans, depending on rotation of the earth, experience low tides.
 
Which is not to say that the above explanations are exhaustive of the respective causes. Qualifications are often required, as the “simple” explanation that water boils at 212º Fahrenheit requires the qualifications “varying by air pressure and purity of water.” Nevertheless, the many concepts involved, which means the many entities with their specific attributes involved, had to be examined in detail through testing and trying in various experiments to arrive at the final essential distinguishing characteristics.

And the word “final” must be taken advisedly as this does not mean these findings are true “eternally.” Knowledge grows and discoveries increase, meaning that our causal definitions are contextual and may need to be adjusted. Einstein’s theory of gravity in relation to Newton’s is just one example of this “editing” of a previous theory.

Conceptualization by measurement omission, which identifies the cause of an event by singling out the essential distinguishing characteristic or characteristics of the existents involved, is the essence of theory in both basic and applied sciences. Measurement is not the essence of science; it is an aid, which may be extensive in some sciences, to the discovery and application of theory.
 
An appropriate note here is to point out that many controlled experiments performed today aimed at determining cause and effect relationships are superfluous, correlational, or performed with less than sound methodology, such as inadequate assumptions or insufficient study time to identify accurate effects. Many such studies only generate historical data, not theory.

Contemporary psychoanalyst Jonathan Shedler states that we do not need to conduct RCTs—randomly controlled trials, as they are called in some sciences, such as medicine—to know that “the sun causes sunburn, sex causes pregnancy, or food deprivation leads to starvation.”
 
These examples, Shedler continues, are known by observation because we know their mechanisms (or means) of action. And these examples, I would add, are applications of well-known concepts that illustrate Aristotle’s formal cause and Rand’s theory of causality. “Mechanism of action” means that by identifying the entities and their attributes in a causal situation—sun, skin, and sunburn; sex organs, sex, and pregnancy; nutritional organs, food, and starvation—we can know their actions and effects on each other.

Conceptualization, grasping the essential distinguishing characteristics of the entities and attributes involved, which includes retention of all the knowledge we have learned to date about the entities, that is, the information in our respective “file folders,” as Rand calls them, are key to knowing the operation of any action.
 
 
* Aristotle in the Physics, iv 212a5–31, preferred to use the word “place,” instead of “space.” Aristotle also regarded mathematical concepts as abstractions from abstractions, stating that the mathematician “strips off all the sensible qualities [of perceptual concretes] . . . and leaves only the quantitative and continuous, sometimes in one, sometimes in two, sometimes in three dimensions.” Metaphysics, 1061a30–35. By implication, using Rand’s theory, we perceive the solid object, then abstract from it the concept of plane, then from plane, the concept of line, and finally from line, the concept of point, which is the highest-level abstraction. Cf. Topics, 141b10–11: “A solid falls under perception most of all, and a plane more than a line, and a line more than point.”
 
** Aristotle, Physics, iv 221a1–3. A little later, Aristotle says time is “not motion, but number of motion.” 221b10. Cubit is an ancient measure of length that extends from one’s bent elbow to the end of the middle finger.

Defensive Habits as Obstacles to Exercising Our Free Will

Ayn Rand divides human volition into two stages: focus and thought. To focus means to direct and control our attention to something in particular, a landscape or a problem to be solved, or to let our minds wander. This, she has compared to throwing a switch (Peikoff, 58).
 
The second stage is the focus of our thinking to acquire knowledge without contradiction and to keep our subconscious minds well-ordered to guide our lives in moral and successful ways. Focus may be like throwing a switch—a dimmer switch more likely—but the decision to think or not, especially the quality of thinking we generate, can face obstacles.
 
Defensive habits in particular are a significant obstacle to clear thinking. Defensive symptoms of the neurotic type are a form of delusion—though not nearly as serious as the delusions of a person experiencing a psychotic episode.
 
A young man, for example, who is fired from his job and jilted by his lover on the same day may become depressed and conclude, “I’ll never find another job or lover.” * This is not true and can be called a delusion, a false belief about reality. This person, in addition, may, without help, have considerable difficulty doing much of anything for several days or weeks. His thought processes are turned off, partially or completely.
 
Much of what we think, feel, and do as adults has been influenced and shaped by the conclusions we make as children and teenagers. An influential part of our psychologies is what Edith Packer (chap. 2) calls core evaluations about our selves, other people, and the world in general. How well these premises have been formed, meaning how correct and healthy they are, determines how we will act later.
 
This gives rise to a question: how well can we focus our minds to develop a well-ordered subconscious when we experience a host of psychological problems? Not easily is the answer.
 
The formation of these premises depends greatly on our parental upbringing and teaching in school. What we believe and feel as adults is often not as simple as flipping a switch, though generally, absent drug influence or physiological damage to our brains, behavior is controllable. Which means we can refrain from pulling out a gun and shooting someone, or cheating someone through a dishonest act, but certain areas of our lives may not exhibit what an outside observer would call clear thinking.
 
The influence of defensive habits, I believe, is underemphasized in Ayn Rand’s writings, though she does call these types of failures to focus and think errors in knowledge, as opposed to willful evasions.**
 
Technically, this is true. The person with psychological problems does have free will and did in his or her younger years when initially creating the false premises, though the formation of many of these premises occur by emotional generalization and chance.
 
Many false premises become repressed and shaped into habits manifested as symptoms that cloud our perception of reality. Such a person often does not know how to correct the errors. And with the present influential view of determinism by genes and environment, many conclude, “That’s me and I can’t do anything about it.” However, free will as a controllable behavior means we can seek help, professional or personal, or continue to live our lives despite the obstacles. Dealing with our psychological problems is more difficult, especially in today’s culture, than many realize.
 
Alcoholics who want to stay sober, for example, must every day confront strong obsessive urges for a drink. Clouded thinking is often the result. The same is true of people with other psychological problems and their neurotic symptoms.
 
Let me conclude with this quotation from contemporary psychoanalyst Jonathan Shedler (432) who understands the relationship between psychological problems and free will:

Psychoanalytic therapists believe expanding our understanding of the meanings and causes of our behavior creates freedom, choice, and a freer will [my italics]. People can change, people do change, and psychoanalytic therapy helps people change, sometimes in profound ways. Every legitimate psychotherapist, deep down, believes in the human capacity to grow, change, and experience a greater sense of freedom and equanimity in the face of life’s inevitable hardships. If behavior were unavoidably determined, there would be no reason to practice psychoanalytic therapy or, for that matter, any form of therapy.

 
* I first used this example in Independent Judgment and Introspection (94).
 
** Rand seems to view our subconscious minds as equivalent to Sigmund Freud’s preconscious, the store of unrepressed knowledge that we are not now aware of but can recall at a moment’s notice. She does not make allowance for motivation by repressed premises and therefore is quick to condemn people as dishonest and immoral. Using her terms, though, non-self-defensive shooting of someone, or cheating, is clear evasion of what is right or moral for decent life. The criminal personality, as Stanton Samenow has well demonstrated, lies, cheats, and steals as a way of life and enjoys getting away with the forbidden.

The Place of Emotions in Science

Thoughts underly our emotions. As psychologist Edith Packer (140) says, paraphrased, “When we are feeling something, we are thinking something.”
 
The opposite also is true—when we are thinking something, we are feeling something, which means we have emotions running through our minds whether we are aware of them or not.
 
Consciousness, to borrow a word from William James, is a stream, not separate compartments that can be shut off at will, though the evaluations that stand behind emotions can be repressed.
 
Scientists clearly have emotions, not just in their eureka moments of a major discovery, but in their typical workdays. Emotions are what motivate us.
 
When we acknowledge the presence of emotions in science, and scientists, we acknowledge that evaluations are present.  Behind every emotion the evaluation, as Packer argues, has two aspects, one universal that applies to all instances of a particular emotion, such as joy or anger, and one personal that includes all the concrete details of the moment when we have experienced the emotion.
 
Joy, for example, at the universal level means “I have achieved an important value.” Thus, “eureka”—or “I have found it,” the translation of the Greek—is a form of joy. The scientist’s personal evaluation—“all of my years of research have been worth it”—in the eureka moment might be expressed in behavior as energetic shouting and jumping up and down such that he almost knocks a beaker off the table. This would be a personal evaluation and experience that likely would last a long time in the scientist’s subconscious memories.*
 
It is this inner conversation or voice, as Packer describes personal evaluations, that constitute a key part of the content of our personal knowledge. Which means that knowledge, general or personal, is not “value-free” as the logical positivists for decades have insisted it must be.
 
Every emotion exhibits not just an evaluation, but also an action tendency, or urge to act. The scientist who, when young, is given a chemistry set for a birthday may later get excited in high school chemistry class and begin to think about a career in chemistry. Meeting and talking to professional chemists—a chemical engineer and a research chemist, for example—may help the young person solidify his or her career goals.
 
Going to work every day in an office or lab, after all, is motivated by our emotions of pleasure or pain we associate with the work.
 
Emotion is the driver of everything we do. Writers of both fact and fiction say they follow their emotions to come up with subjects, themes, and even the phrasing of sentences.  Many write “by ear,” more so than by the current rules of grammar and syntax.**
 
Whatever we have liked or disliked in our past, influences our present. Emotions contribute knowledge to our thought processes.  Those past emotions often are the sources of connections we make in the present, sometimes called creative insight, as well as guidance to follow particular lines of thought and experimentation.***
 
Repressed persons are also motivated by past emotions, though usually negative ones that they seek to avoid. Some who are repressed may appear in the present to experience no emotions.
 
A severely repressed scientist, for example, may exhibit a highly muted reaction to the eureka moment, such as a sober, unexpressive face and words that say, “This is good.” But the emotions, which means evaluations and values, are there at some level. Such a person is often desperately trying to avoid the error and appearance of the fallacy of the appeal to emotion.
 
Where does this fallacy come in to play? It is actually a simple notion that says it makes no sense to say or write, “It is true because I feel it.” This does not mean that we should not be motivated to become a scientist because of our emotions from the past or that we should not get excited over a eureka moment. It is indeed unfortunate that the repressed scientist does not jump up and down.
 
The point of the fallacy is that whatever emotions we have in the process of identifying a fact of reality, we must follow Aristotle’s laws of logic, especially the law of non-contradiction. Ayn Rand defines logic as “the art of non-contradictory identification.” Thus, in our work, we bring up our emotions to see if any of them are influencing our perceptions of reality.
 
If I am feeling that a leprechaun is on my desk instead of a glass of water, I assure you I am committing the fallacy. Or, consider the young man fired and jilted on the same day (in Individual Judgment and Introspection, 66–67); he feels that he will never find another job or lover. This is all the fallacy refers to, a feeling (in here) that contradicts the facts (out there).
 
Thus, scientists, I am quite certain, when coming up with a solution to a problem can, without guilt, go wild and crazy to celebrate!
 
 
* Another example: the universal evaluation of anger says, “An injustice has been done to me.” The personal evaluation would be the specific experiences of the moment when feeling anger at another person or institution.
 
** I have told students who could not come up with a term paper topic to “go with what grabs you,” meaning what your emotions are telling you. See this short essay on writing by ear and Ayn Rand (Kindle, 88): When writing, as opposed to editing, “you go by your emotions.”
 
*** For example, when researching my book Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, I was pleasantly surprised to find a connection between Maria Montessori, John Dewey, and Ayn Rand. They obviously do not agree with each other, but they nevertheless exhibit some similarities. See Linda Reardan, Emotions and Rational Values, chap. 4, for the fundamental explanation of how emotions contribute to thought.

On the Feeling of Standing a Foot off the Ground

In a 2009 post (Applying Principles, 363–65) titled “Life in Three-Quarter Time,” I wrote that the three-quarter time signature in music, especially as exhibited in the Viennese waltz, represents to me the “expression and symbol of effortless joy.”
 
In a variation on this theme, beyond the three-quarter time signature but still in music, I would like to talk about another feeling or emotion I have experienced in music called the feeling of standing a foot off the ground.
 
I first heard this expression when a professional trumpeter came to my junior high school and to the accompaniment of our band played “Come Back to Sorrento.” I was blown away, to say the least, by his seemingly effortless competence and the reverberations of his sound bouncing off the walls of the auditorium. I remember also that he said to us that when everything in a performance goes right, “you just feel like you’re standing a foot off the ground.” The expression can apply to listeners as well. I know I felt it after his performance.
 
A little later, in the summer of 1962, I attended a Stan Kenton clinic in Indiana. Kenton’s jazz band at the time was larger than most, with an extra four mellophonium players. The instrument, essentially, is a French horn straightened out to look and be played like a trumpet. The first night at the clinic, the Kenton band performed. The venue was packed with enthusiastic teenage wannabe jazz musicians. Yes, the band brought the house down, but the better expression, I am certain, is that everyone in the audience felt like he or she was standing a foot off the ground. The sound bounced off the walls urging us to lift ourselves above the floor!
 
This expression has remained with me all these many years. I have experienced the feeling a number of times, though not at every performance. Several factors are relevant for producing the experience. The appearance of effortlessness in the performers is important, because it usually produces a smile on my face along with a wonderment of “how can they do that”—and the emotion “I am so glad I am here to experience it.” A similarly appreciative and enthusiastic audience helps by vicarious sharing of the experience. And the venue matters, to enhance the resonance of the bouncing sounds—wood on the walls and ceilings being a big plus.
 
A recent experience my wife and I enjoyed was a performance of Gustav Mahler’s sixth symphony from behind the orchestra, high up and with only a few percussion players blocked from view by the hanging organ pipes. We felt like we were in the orchestra.
 
The venue was Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, a hall loaded with wood on its walls and ceilings. In its acoustic power the hall has been compared to the Musikverein, home of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Disney Hall did not disappoint, especially in this performance.* The effortless competence of the players was clearly in view along with their music stands in front of them—I could tell when it was time to repeat a section of the music when the players turned their music pages back to the beginning. We also enjoyed a full frontal view of the conductor (Gustavo Dudamel). All of these factors enhanced our enjoyment of the music and contributed to my feeling of standing a foot off the ground—actually, I was on the edge of my seat and wanted to stand, but did not for fear of blocking someone else’s view.
 
This feeling I am talking about agrees with what Ayn Rand has written (50–64) about music as an art form, namely that it appeals directly to our sense-of-life emotions, bypassing any conceptual identifications that may be involved in the experiencing of other arts. Sense of life, Rand states, is “a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics” (26) that can range from the benevolent and optimistic to the malevolent and pessimistic.
 
Without endorsing Ayn Rand’s hypothesis (57–62) that music lacks an objective vocabulary for esthetic judgment—musicologists do have something fairly extensive—I think she is correct in general that the esthetic tastes of listeners to the type of music I have described express similar senses of life as mine. Similar, but not the same. Emotional responses to music are general, not specific or literal. And, while our senses of life can vary in other parts of our lives, we nevertheless experience a positive feeling during these performances.
 
When I say that our responses to music are not specific or literal, I am, as Rand did, challenging the descriptive terms that have been used for works of music, such as “Tragic” for Mahler’s sixth symphony or “fate knocking at the door” as Beethoven supposedly described (or as was invented by his biographer) the first four chords of his fifth symphony. I did not hear anything tragic in Mahler’s symphony. I hear triumph, as I do in Beethoven’s fifth symphony. Interestingly, Mahler composed the work during a happy period of his life, and it is disputed whether he or someone else labeled it the tragic symphony, either when it was first performed or in later years. The name is for the emotion evoked in certain people, maybe Mahler, or in certain critics, audience listeners, or conductors. And “fate knocking at the door” was the emotion evoked in Beethoven (or his biographer), but not me.
 
By calling these musical responses “taste,” I mean that the physics of music cannot at present be connected with specific emotions we experience, which means what we feel is neither right nor wrong (Rand, 55–56). It further means that not everyone, probably not many, including my wife, would feel like standing a foot off the ground when listening to these particular pieces. My wife sometimes does feel like dancing around the room when listening to certain music! What musicians and musicologists have given us is a method or vocabulary for describing a well-composed and well-performed work of music. What it cannot yet do (perhaps never?—I don’t know) predict that this particular music will evoke that particular emotion. (Cf. “Classical Music Alters the Brain—Here’s How.”)
 
The feeling of standing a foot off the ground is, of course, metaphor, and represents a general feeling of joyous, maybe even ecstatic, pleasure. Musical performers, actors, and opera singers, even public speakers I have observed immediately after a particularly outstanding and appreciated performance seem to have a glow about them that says they are standing a foot off the ground.
 
Vicariously, I translate that feeling to my enjoyment of their performances.
 
To close this post, let me describe a different, but I think, similar emotion I experienced two days after President John F. Kennedy was killed. I was with a group of musicians in the lobby of a dormitory where we watched on a black-and-white television Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler’s second symphony, labeled The Resurrection. All of us present were still in shock, stunned by the assassination, but that performance was a salve or balm for our painful emotions. Indeed, I found it uplifting, as in “life goes on.” I did not, of course, experience anything religious, as arising from the dead, but I was inspired and moved to get on with my life despite the immediate calamity. Not quite the feeling of being a foot off the ground, but a profoundly positive feeling, urged and encouraged by compelling music to accomplish my values in life.**
 
 
* We have also sat in the last row of the balcony at Disney Hall and enjoyed every minute of the musical performance. The sound reaches every seat.
 
* Customarily, a requiem (by Brahms, say, or Verdi) or funeral march (such as the second movement of Beethoven’s third symphony) is played as a memorial to someone who has died. Bernstein, I think quite appropriately, chose the Mahler.

The Metaphysical versus the Epistemological as Applied to Consciousness

In Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts (chap. 1, 2), influenced by Aristotle’s fundamental premise of the primacy of existence, Rand makes an important distinction between the metaphysical and the epistemological.
 
Metaphysics, in contrast to the special sciences, studies all of existence—reality, the universe as a whole. This includes consciousness, which is a natural, not supernatural, part of existence that is an attribute of many higher level animals, especially human beings.
 
Epistemology studies the fundamental nature of human consciousness, the mental processes by which we know, or attempt to know, existence. Rand identifies (chap. 6) the two primary, self-evident concepts of existence and consciousness—self-evident in the Aristotelian sense that they are implicitly known in every act of awareness and thus cannot be denied without having to be accepted in the process of denial. Hence, such denials are self-contradictions. She calls these two primaries axiomatic concepts.*
 
When Rand uses the words “metaphysics” and “epistemology” as describing adjectives, such as metaphysical referent and epistemological essence, she is narrowing the usages to draw attention to how her theory of concepts differs from the moderate realism of Aristotle and the nominalism (arbitrary subjectivism) of today. (For example, see pp. 21, 35, and 52 in the Epistemology.)
 
The metaphysical, in its older, traditional sense, is everything that is outside of our minds—termed objective reality—and everything in or related to consciousess is termed subjective. It would be better, however, to use the term “external” as modifier of “outer” reality since consciousness is our internal—and metaphysical—reality, especially when it becomes the object of study to formulate theories of epistemology and psychology.
 
In Ayn Rand’s theory, there are metaphysical and epistemological components of consciousness.
 
In this context, the epistemological is everything our minds do—the mental processes they perform to create accurate concepts and principles, to acquire knowledge of both the external world and the internal world of consciousness, as well as to guide our choices and actions.**
 
Rand here is emphasizing the difference (165–66) between perceiver, the method of using our minds, and perceived, the facts of reality. When the processes of our minds are the objects of study, our consciousness is itself the perceiver and the processes are the perceived.
 
We are at once both observer and observed.
 
“Epistemological” as the describing adjective means, in Rand’s words, for example, the method we use “to discover a causal explanation” (230), that is, to identify the facts. “Epistemological” refers to our use of the processes and products of our minds, such as conceptualization to form the concept “table,” or, for that matter, the concept “concept.” We are being “epistemological” whether extrospecting or introspecting, and this includes the formulation of those sciences of consciousness, epistemology and psychology. The objects of study, the referents of the concept “table” and of the concept “concept” are metaphysical, as are the consciousnesses of each one of us when under study by an epistemologist or psychologist.
 
For years, if not centuries, the subject-object distinction in both philosophy and science has plagued all those who work with consciousness.
 
It is not a contradiction to say that the processes and products of our minds are the objective and metaphysical reality that both epistemology and psychology study. They are “subjective” only in the sense they are “in the subject,” the subject’s mind, as opposed to being “out there” in the external world. Consciousness is our internal reality and is our means of knowing existence—all of existence, including consciousness.
 
Epistemologists and psychologists, in effect, perform a “double duty,” of using the epistemological methods of our conscious processes to identify the metaphysical nature of those processes. “Double duty” just means scientists of the mind must introspect, as opposed to the scientists of matter who extrospect.
 
It is equivocation to say that psychology is subjective because its object of study is “in the head” and therefore not objective, that is, false, arbitrary, or unknowable.***
 
This is precisely what the Kantians and post-Kantians assert, namely that because our consciousness has a nature, we cannot know, or know with certainty, what is inside or outside of our minds. Consciousness, they say, distorts awareness of reality. How do they know that? Yes, some people’s minds distort reality, such as the ignorant and neurotic, and everyone at times makes mistakes, but the solution to this alleged problem is to follow Aristotle’s laws of logic.
 
As I have written before (65), although introspection has been effectively banned from psychology for over a century, logic is “the introspective science” (my emphasis).
 
The criteria of epistemological objectivity are Aristotle’s laws, especially the law of non-contradiction. If I say that the contents of my mind includes seeing the object on my desk as a leprechaun, not a glass of water, there is a contradiction between what I am thinking and what the actual fact is.
 
A valid theory of concepts, or universals, as it is also often referred to, must answer the question, how exactly do the products of our consciousness relate to the facts of both external and internal reality? How do we know that what is “in our heads,” epistemologically, correctly identifies what is “out there,” metaphysically.
 
And in a more complicated fashion, how do we know that what is “in here,” in our own minds, that is, its processes and products, correctly identifies what is . . . “in here”?
 
Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts holds that concepts and essential distinguishing characteristics are indeed in our minds, not “out there” in the thing, but if we correctly identify what is “out there,” and “in here,” the essences and concepts are objective in the epistemological sense, but not intrinsic or metaphysical as both Plato and Aristotle thought.
 
Historically, most philosophers have exerted considerable effort trying to find essences “out there” in the thing, but never found them, often concluding that concepts or universals are subjective, “names” only, hence the theory of nominalism.
 
That the essences are not intrinsically embedded in the things of metaphysical reality does not mean that they do not or cannot have a valid existence elsewhere, epistemologically, in our minds. We are not condemned to skepticism, or to Kant’s and the positivists’ complacent skepticism.
 
Indeed, any doctrine of skepticism is self-contradictory, because its proponents, in effect, and often explicitly, say, “We know that we know nothing,” which is absurd. And the statements of the complacent skeptics—"we don’t need complete certainty to live our lives”—are equally absurd. The concepts of probability and uncertainty presuppose certainty as much as and in the same way as the concept orphan presupposes parent. Rand calls this the stolen concept fallacy.
 
To sum up, the metaphysical refers to existence, which includes the processes and products of consciousness. The epistemological refers to consciousness as an active processor, both extrospectively and introspectively, guided by Aristotelian logic, that correctly (or incorrectly) identifies the reality of the “out there” and the “in here.”
 
 
* Identity is a third axiomatic concept, which Rand points out is a corollary of existence.
 
** Rand sometimes substitutes the word “psychological” for “epistemological,” especially when talking about concepts of consciousness (chap. 4 in the Epistemology; see also p. 256.)
 
*** Note the two meanings of the word “objective” as Rand uses it: the metaphysical referents of existence, the outer physical world and the inner mental world, and the epistemological essences we identify to formulate objective truth and knowledge. If our concepts and essences—as well as our values—are true, they are epistemologically objective. Only if arbitrary or false would it be correct to call them subjective.

The Concept of “Getting At”

When my wife, philosopher Linda Reardan, and I read a new writer whose ideas do not quite fit our established notions, we ask ourselves “what is this person getting at?” The ideas are not ridiculous, to be dismissed out of hand, nor do they strike us as correct identifications of the facts of reality. “Getting at” means these writers are attempting, in their own way and depending on their historical context, to make what they believe to be correct identifications.
 
A major error, of those who have swallowed positivist premises, is to dismiss new (or different) ideas as not “verifiable” or not “falsifiable”—terms that are red herrings from post-Kantian philosophy and especially from Karl Popper’s philosophy of science. Another error, of many who follow Ayn Rand, is to dismiss such ideas because they do not agree with her philosophy, therefore they are not worthy of further consideration.
 
For the past several months (May 2023–February 2024) I have written posts about two scholars and what they were getting at: economist Ludwig von Mises and psychologist Sigmund Freud. Despite accepting some Kantian ideas, Mises produced outstanding works based on defending the epistemological foundation of economics against the positivist premise that all science must be quantitative. In addition, I address the issue of “subjective value” in economics (see also this post) as being essentially the same concept as what Ayn Rand calls socially objective value, which means, consistent with her theory of concepts, that value is not metaphysical, in the thing. Rather, it is psychological or epistemological (both words used by her).
 
Freud, who is far more Aristotelian than Kantian even though he lived in a neo-Kantian culture, focused on reality to help distressed patients discover un- (or sub-) conscious thoughts and experiences that made them unhappy in the present and then proceeded to help them achieve happier lives. He was not a “pan-sexualist,” as critics have said of him. As a result of his accomplishments, Freud must be considered the father of modern psychology.
 
Let us now go back to Aristotle and look at one issue he was “getting at,” though many Greek philosophers could be used here as examples of the “getting at” premise, including Plato. Indeed, Aristotle was developing further the discoveries of Socrates and Plato on universals, reason, and definitions when he came up with his theory of universals known as moderate realism.* Aristotle, in contrast to Plato, believed that the universal essence or form of a thing is intrinsic or embedded in the individual thing, and we abstract it using nous—reason—to arrive at rational knowledge.
 
Aristotle’s theory today is a layperson’s common-sense epistemology that says, “We just see tableness in the tables out there in reality.” But that is not correct, as critics of the theory for centuries have shown. Essences are not out there, in the thing. Ayn Rand, aware that the mental process is more complicated than Aristotle believed, improves his theory by demonstrating that abstraction is a mental process of omitting precise measurement of the many similar tables we have observed. That is what gives us the universal. The process, she goes on to discuss, is even more complicated, requiring volitional effort to form abstractions from abstractions (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, chap. 1–3).
 
Aristotle was “getting at” the right thing, but did not quite get there.
 
Moving along chronologically, let us look at Christianity. St. Augustine, according to Professor E in the Appendix to Ayn Rand’s Epistemology (262–63), was the first in history to give us the concept of consciousness (though the Stoics anticipated it). The Greeks had identified several important processes of our minds, such as perception, imagination, emotion, and reason, but did not put them together into one concept. Augustine’s human consciousness was a reflection of the monotheistic Christian God, who, in effect, is the “giant consciousness in the sky” that causes events on earth and may or may not grant us our wishes through prayers (Independent Judgment and Introspection, 38–40). Augustine’s concept of consciousness nevertheless was a step forward.
 
Descartes, more than any of the previous religious thinkers, in a confused manner, brought the consciousness in the sky down to earth and put it in our bodies, making it personal to each one of us (likely influenced by Protestantism). He attempted to integrate mind and body as a naturalistic entity, but is remembered, though the dichotomy goes back to the Greeks, as the one who gave us mind-body dualism. Descartes’ fundamental error was to assert that consciousness is the first thing we know, not existence. This is his prior-certainty-of-consciousness premise that continues to plague philosophy today. Or, as Linda has observed, modern philosophers, ever since Descartes’ cogito (I think, therefore I am), have been stuck in their own minds trying to find a way out to reality.
 
When we get to Immanuel Kant, we do have to acknowledge that he is the first to solidify the notion that consciousness is not a mirror of nature, as critics of moderate realism say to disparage the doctrine, but has its own identity. Unfortunately, he concluded, or rationalized—philosopher Walter Kaufmann (116) describes him as a “virtuoso of rationalization”—that because consciousness has a nature we can never know true, noumenal reality, only a phenomenal world.
 
Positivism is a doctrine I resist granting anything to after getting it in spades in graduate school, but I must admit that its advocates were attempting, and still attempt to this day, to answer Kant’s conclusions and to defend science—at great expense. The expense of positivism was, and still is, to declare the following meaningless: metaphysics, universals, facts, values, and truth. The “truths” it says we can know are only those that are synthetic, that is, tied to perceptual concretes—they are not universal—and analytic “truths,” which are universal but arbitrary and say nothing about reality. The positivists’ misguided “contribution” is to require in the human sciences a distorted version of the method of the physical sciences. (See “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” in Rand’s Epistemology, 88–121.)
 
Pragmatism, instead of being a villainous philosophy, was a doctrine of empiricism, based on the acceptance of the biological nature of consciousness and the attempt to defend knowledge and science against the attacks of the German, British and American Idealists, this last including the work of Brand Blanshard. The so-called pragmatic theory of truth, namely that truth is what works, attributed to William James, may be poorly formulated, but it is an answer to the rationalism of idealism. It insists that we must stay tied to real activities of life to know what is true. Using this theory of truth, we can say, with qualifications, that capitalism is true because it works, whereas socialism is false because it does not work. My qualifications are that a theory of truth requires more than what the pragmatists offered.
 
John Dewey, whom I read extensively when writing Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism, did not like the word “pragmatism,” preferring “instrumentalism,” in the sense that thought is the instrument of action, which means all thought and knowledge are for the sake of action, not ivory-towered speculation. I learned many things from my study of Dewey. One is to trust the original source of the author’s own words, not summaries. I read three summaries who disagreed with each other and did not sound like what I read in Dewey. After I had read many works of his, I read Dewey’s Metaphysics by Raymond Boisvert and agreed with him that Dewey not only has a metaphysics, but that it is Aristotelian and his theory of truth is a correspondence theory, though Dewey improves on Aristotle’s theory by rejecting any form of intrinsicism of essences or values.
 
For more on what I found Dewey to be “getting at,” read my post in Applying Principles, 295–99. No, Dewey does not have a theory of concepts or universals, nor is he an advocate of capitalism. I did not read his works on ethics. His metaphysics and epistemology, however, were “getting at” something. He is difficult to read, though he does sometimes use interesting business metaphors, such as, subject matter in education is the working capital of thought. His theory of education is not too different from that of Maria Montessori—and is not, I must emphasize, what many progressive educators say it is.
 
Let me conclude this post with reference to two previous posts about the Bible. The first concerns Jewish political commentator Dennis Prager’s The Ten Commandments, which, he points out, should be translated from the Hebrew as the Ten Statements. What is significant about this short book is that it is not deontological in the Kantian sense that they are ten duties. Indeed, Prager says that these ten statements have driven the development of civilization and “are the greatest list of instructions ever devised for creating a good society.” One other mistranslation, he points out, is that “do not kill” in 1610 King James English should really be “do not murder.”
 
My other post looks at Matthew 7:1–6 in the New Testament. The first verse is the “do not judge” statement that Ayn Rand has made pointedly negative comments about, though some of her followers misunderstand her interpretation of the advice. The rest of the Matthew verses relate the Golden Rule, an early statement of justice, and emphasize that we should use the same standard of value when judging others as ourselves. And that we should be careful when forming partnerships, personal or professional, lest we end up throwing our pearls to pigs who turn on us, trampling the pearls and attacking us.
 
Pretty good advice coming from the New Testament. Even the Bible was “getting at” many true things.
 
 
* In an earlier post, I referred incorrectly to Aristotle’s theory as naïve realism. The theory is occasionally denigrated as “naïve” and I seem to recall it in my undergraduate days being identified as such. But the more acceptable term today is “moderate,” or sometimes “metaphysical,” realism, meaning the essence is “out there” in the thing.

The Applied Science of Psychoanalytic Therapy

In my previous post, I discussed essential concepts of Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, that is, his basic science. This month I want to present the practice or applied science of psychoanalytic therapy.
 
Engineers presuppose fundamental concepts of physics and chemistry, along with additional concepts unique to their specialty. Subsequently they apply all of this knowledge to specific cases to build particular, concrete machines and particular, distinct bridges to enhance human life. History, the concretes of a specific case, as well as theory, the universals of the science, are both involved in the practical application of concepts to achieve a specific goal.
 
Similarly, psychoanalytic therapists take Freud’s basic concepts of psychoanalysis, along with specific knowledge of each patient’s personality, character, and history, and apply these notions to help the individual patient become more independent and happy.
 
The essence of psychoanalytic therapy, according to Freud, is the process of talk therapy with the goal of making the unconscious conscious. It means unearthing or digging deep—he often uses archeology as a metaphor for psychotherapy—in the unconscious to find repressed ideas associated with disturbing events and to encourage the patient to re-experience the original emotions. This “abreaction,” which I suggested in my October post was an early form of derepression, became less important (33-34, 219) in Freud’s later years when he began to put more emphasis on the patient’s effort of overcoming resistance to recall and talk about what was painful and repressed.
 
The treatment method of talk therapy, as I mentioned last month, was learned from Josef Breuer (30) who encouraged his patient Anna O. to reminisce about early disturbing experiences that might have led to her conversion hysteria (paralyzed arm among other psychosomatic ailments). In the process of this therapy she said jokingly that she was chimney sweeping, but more seriously described the method as the talking cure. In the early years, Breuer and Freud called this the cathartic method, a cleansing or purifying of the soul. For some years, Freud used hypnosis to overcome resistance, gradually abandoning it in favor of the talk method of finding connections to early and forgotten events, thoughts, and emotions.
 
In the last two sentences of Lecture 31 in Freud’s 1933 New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, he writes, “Where it was, there should become I. [Therapeutic effort] is a cultural achievement somewhat like the draining of the Zuyder Zee” (translation Bruno Bettelheim, 61, 62, my italics). That is, just as the Dutch reclaimed land from the sea, so also therapists help patients reclaim their conscious souls (the I) from the unconscious it.*
 
An important concept of therapy that Freud discovered by chance was transference, the idea that patients, as they improve, begin to associate the therapist with an important person from childhood, usually a parent, thus transferring their feelings about this person, both good and bad, to the therapist (An Outline of Psychoanalysis, 29-32). Often the patients feel an unconditional love (which Carl Rogers, 61-62, in later years called an “unconditional positive regard”) from the therapist that they likely did not experience from their parents. Sometimes, though, anger and hostility may be felt, depending on the type of childhood the patient experienced. And on occasion a patient of the opposite sex may fall in love with the therapist—one young female patient flung her arms around Freud’s neck, convinced that they were in love with each other, and Breuer’s patient, Anna O, at the end of her treatment persuaded herself that she was carrying his baby!
 
Once Freud identified these transference reactions, he identified their value in therapy. Once the patient realizes these feelings toward the therapist are displacements, the patient becomes more motivated to overcome resistance to probe more deeply into the unconscious to identify forgotten, repressed thoughts and feelings.**
 
The applied science of psychotherapy as developed and practiced by Freud does not differ much from what nearly all psychologists and psychiatrists do today. Freud’s so-called free association is more of a probing of the patient’s subconscious in an uncritical, unjudgmental manner to encourage thoughts and emotions to rise to consciousness. Freud’s technique, as becomes clear in his many discussions of therapy, is not the caricature we sometimes see today with the therapist saying repeatedly, “uh-huh, uh-huh,” and not much else. In fact, Freud often explores a patient’s line of thought and offers hypotheses about earlier unconscious ideation. His goal, after all, is to help patients gain or regain their independence—Freud’s word (Outline, 26).
 
The Freudian couch? Initially a gift from a patient in 1890; the carpet covering added by Freud “gave his patients a non-medical bed to lie on” and “the sense of being sheltered from one’s daily cares.” In addition, many patients were female and in his day understandably uncomfortable talking about sex while looking at a man. Freud also did not want his patients attempting to read his facial expressions, nor did her take notes, which he believed to be distracting.
 
Free association? Einfall, according to Bettelheim (94-96), a word that  means sudden or chance idea or thought, would lead Freud to ask, “What comes to mind?” or “What is connected with that?” Freie assoziation were words used by Freud only after the technique had become established and then Einfall was described and translated into English as such. The modifier “free” or  freie, Bettelheim writes, puts too much emphasis on the need for conscious effort, rather than emotional spontaneity coming from the unconscious.
 
The fundamental rule of psychoanalytic therapy, as Freud refers to it, is that nothing is off the table for discussion (Outline, 28-29). Whatever connections come to mind, including especially painful, nonsensical, or allegedly unimportant, thoughts must be expressed while on the couch. This includes the content and memory of dreams.
 
 
Assessment of Freud. Contributions to psychology? Nearly everything—from the nature of the conscious and subconscious mind to the cause of neurosis and its treatment in therapy. Talk therapy today is the dominant technique of psychotherapists (unless, unfortunately, they are the psychiatrists who prescribe psychotropic drugs to allegedly treat and cure psychological problems). What else would therapists do but talk to their patients? What nearly all today do not do is mention the words introspection, free will, or the sub- or unconscious, the former two because they are afraid of being accused of being “unscientific” or even religious, the latter, unless they are psychoanalysts, of being accused of Freudianism.
 
Over the years, ideation has become more explicit as thinking errors in cognitive psychology and in the work of Yochelson and Samenow on the criminal personality. It has become more precise as core evaluations in the psychology of Edith Packer (chap. 1).
 
As for Freud’s alleged weak ego—the I—let me quote him in Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear (162).*** In this work, Freud points out the “numerous voices” (other psychoanalysts) who seem to want to make the so-called weakness of the I one of the “central pillars” of psychoanalysis. Freud responds: “Shouldn’t their sheer awareness of how repression actually works deter psychoanalysts in particular from so enthusiastically embracing such an extreme and partisan position?” The whole point of therapy being to reclaim and support the I.
 
What does impinge on and reduce the power of the conscious mind to control our lives is Freud’s determinism. His search for non-volitional causes of behavior is what I believe led him to focus heavily on the drives, rather than ideation, and specifically on the alleged death or destructiveness drive to explain the harmful and detrimental behavior of his patients. Though the notion of a strong unconscious has a long history, going back to Plato, free will is what enables us to learn how to introspect to explain and change our feelings deriving from an un- (or sub-) conscious “chaos” or “cauldron full of seething excitations,” as Freud describes it (New Introductory Lectures, 91). The chaos is something we have put there, and this means we can, through introspection, clean up the mess.
 
With good parenting and teaching, one would hope, psychology of the future will help prevent the mess from occurring in the first place.
 
 
* The standard translation (100) of the first sentence is “Where id was, there ego shall be.” Or, as I rephrased it in an updated form in Independent Judgment and Introspection (176), using the psychology of Edith Packer, “Where subconscious, mistaken conclusions were, there confident and independent self-assertion shall guide.” See Bettelheim’s discussion (61-64) of Goethe’s Faust, which Freud knew well, and Faust’s struggles to reclaim his soul from the devil—an apt analogy to describe what many of Freud’s patient’s felt, and most likely, what many patients today feel.
 
** Edith Packer minimized the value of transference, but did describe herself as a “friend for hire,” which I would say was a strong motivating force for patients who likely, at the time, did not have many good, that is, understanding and helpful, friends.
 
*** This 2003 translation uses the word “fear” instead of the customary “anxiety” because, the translator notes, it is the typical German meaning of Angst. When Freud means anxiety, he uses the word Ängstlichkeit or Angstneurose for anxiety neurosis (note 3, 264-65).
 
 
Postscript to Students of Ayn Rand. I regret having to make the following comment about Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. I see no evidence that either one read much or any of Sigmund Freud. Rand wrote that Freud was one of Europe’s “hand-me-downs” and Peikoff caricatured Freud’s view of man as an “ordure [excrement]-strewn pervert.” I believe that this post and my previous six about Freud speak for themselves. Ayn Rand said to both Nathaniel Branden and Edith Packer that she did not know anything about psychology. Having known Dr. Peikoff for many years, I do not believe he knows much about it either. A strong infusion of psychology into Ayn Rand’s philosophy is desperately needed today.

The Basic Science of Psychoanalysis

“Basic sciences,” as I wrote in last month’s post, “are fundamental sciences, such as physics, biology, and psychology, on which applied sciences rest, such as, respectively, engineering, medicine, and psychotherapy.”
 
Let me now summarize in brief the basic science of psychoanalysis. Freud says that human beings possess needs that give rise to drives, or urges to act, to satisfy those needs. The process requires mental activity to identify what will satisfy the need and action to attain it. The causal impetus from these mostly unconscious biological drives is what Freud calls the “pleasure principle,” though a better translation of lust, according to H. F. Brull, would be joy or desire.
 
For example, when dying of thirst on a hot summer morning, I often feel a strong desire for a glass of water and experience joy in its consumption. The “reality principle” of our reasoning mind, however, can interfere with, detour, or adapt my unconscious drive because of what is required for daily life in the world.
 
The I may remind us, in other words, as it often does me, soon after drinking the cold glass of water that perhaps it was not a good idea and that sips of water with food would have produced a better outcome. The upper I, our memories of parental influence (plus other influences), may also have something to say about this reminding us not to drink too much water on an empty stomach in the morning, unaccompanied by food.
 
This in a highly simplified nutshell is the essence of Freud’s theory of normal psychology. Deficiencies in meeting our innate (psychological) needs lead to neurosis.
 
Hunger and thirst, of course, are not the drives that Freud focuses on, though he does use them as analogies.* His main drive is the libido, a Latin word adopted by him that means wish, desire, or love. In his younger years it meant the sex urge, but he broadened it later to mean emotional energy that originates in our sexuality, expressing our sense of self. When connected to the I-drive, it emphasizes and expresses self-assertion (Brull’s preferred translation for Selbstbehauptung, as opposed to the standard translation of “self-preservation”). Libido is the life force or love drive that motivates us.
 
Sense of self can be interpreted as self-esteem, which Freud was not unaware of as a psychological need, and he did observe its deficiency in many of his patients. Freud, however, did not emphasize self-esteem as a need or drive, though in several places he quotes patients expressing precisely what Edith Packer calls core evaluations. “I always had a low opinion of myself,” says one patient (Studies on Hysteria, 278). And “I can’t accomplish anything. I can’t succeed in anything,” says another (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 59). Loss of love in childhood, says Freud, can lead to “a legacy of diminished self-feeling amounting to a narcissistic scar” (58), the German word for self-feeling being Selbstgefühls, which also can be translated as self-esteem, though the former is probably more correct.
 
Self-feeling, rather than self-esteem, is more in line with Freud’s concept of narcissism, a self-absorption of children, and adults who are physically or mentally ill. That is, narcissists lack maturity (in the case of children) or health (in adults) to allow themselves to focus on and love—that is, to invest one’s libido in—other people or even material goods to enhance their lives. Being in love, says Freud, increases our self-feeling by reducing narcissism. Suffering neurosis, however, reduces self-feeling, which leads to various symptoms, including the sense of inferiority that most neurotics experience.
 
Narcissism for Freud is inherent in all of us from birth as part of the libido drive that most of us do not and probably cannot overcome. Sublimation, or rising above the lower biological drives, means, for example, pursuing de-sexualized artistic or intellectual careers. Such paths, however, he says, are not open to everyone.
 
In my words, I would say that the libido drive is the pursuit of values, including romantic values, in oneself and in the pleasure of the company of others. The pursuit of mistaken or unhealthy values then is what leads to neurosis.
 
In childhood, this pursuit of values includes the exploration of our sexuality.
 
According to Freud, sexuality develops in childhood in three stages of sensuousness: the oral, sucking of the breast and thumbs; the sadistic-anal, of learning to control defecation (and maybe even playing with the feces) coinciding with teething and therefore “sadistic” biting (though I would put “terrible twos” here, the beginning of self-assertion, but Freud does not mention it); and the genital, with all the questions about where babies come from and the differences between the sexes that follow, and of course, the pleasure of touching the genitals.
 
This was radical for Freud to assert in his time, that sexuality begins before puberty. Sexuality, as he points out, is a broader term than the sex or sexual relations of adults. His Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is a daring and non-judgmental (that is, de-moralized) masterpiece for his time, covering all forms of sexuality, which include all the known deviations from penile-vaginal intercourse. A fixation on the foot or a piece of clothing—fetishes, in other words—or inversions (for example, voyeurism at the same or opposite sex), Freud points out, develop early and cause neurotic problems in adulthood.
 
Freud focused so much on sex because his Victorian culture produced in his patients problems that derived from their early childhood experiences, and especially from the often negative reactions of their parents. Women, for example, may not have been taught or known anything about sex and young men, in addition to suffering threats of having their penises cut off, were considerably bothered by coitus interruptus, the withdrawal method of birth control, and impotence.**
 
When the libido, also called the Eros drive, misfires, the death or destructiveness drive leads us to a “flight into illness” and “withdrawal from reality” (Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, 54). The misfiring produces “excitation” (one of Freud’s neurophysiological terms) experienced during disturbing or frightening events, often in childhood, that were not dealt with appropriately at the time. Thus, the emotions of multiple events are condensed and displaced into a symptom, while the ideation of the events is repressed.
 
In my summary of the “Little Hans” case (October post) I pointed out how anxiety, the fear with no apparent object, is experienced in response to the “excitations” of disturbing events, which can also be described as a misfiring or blocking of the libido, and how the ideas associated with the events are subsequently repressed or pushed out of conscious awareness, not recurring sometimes until adulthood and then only as neurotic symptoms. Repression is the fundamental defense that the I uses to protect itself, but there are other defenses, such as reaction formation, projection, and regression, as well as displacement and sublimation.
 
Most of these concepts of defense—reaction formation the exception—predate Freud, but he gave them new and more developed meanings, especially as they apply to psychology. The Oedipal Complex is original to Freud and is his metaphor for childhood injury that results from parental reactions to the overemphasis of libido on one parent, usually the mother, and underemphasis on the other, the father.
 
The above, I hope, presents a sense of Freud’s large and complex system, or at least some of his key concepts. Next month, Freud’s applied science of psychotherapy.
 
 
* See especially Freud’s (90-92) discussion of the evolution of psychoanalytic theory that began with what he called the “popular” distinction between the drives of hunger and love.
 
** Josef Breuer (21), from whom Freud learned the method of talk therapy, in 1880-82 treated a twenty-one year old woman whose “sexuality,” he described, “was astonishingly undeveloped.” The woman was Bertha Pappenheim but in print was referred as Anna O.