In one sense, his philosophy was simple and can be ade-
quately encapsulated in the maxim "knowledge through sci-
ence". But this is not really a philosophy. Rather, it is the
reuction of philosophy to scientific materialism. In Freud's
case it was psychologism. In another sense, it was complex. He
acknowledged his indebtedness to Schopenhauer and Nietz-
sche for their contribution to his own vitalism and recogni-
tion of the irrational element in man.

Freud, however, was v ur able to harmonize these two disparate
elements, reason and the irrational, in his philosophy. He remained am-
bivalent about whether the knowledge we gain through a
purely scientific examination of man can ever be used to
curb his fundamental irrationality so that the needs of the
individual can harmonize with those of society.

Freud was a scientist. But science alone was not enough
to satisfy his personal ambitions. He wanted to be more than
a scientist. He wanted to be a revolutionary: "Acheronta
movebo" (I will move all hell). So be added to his scientific
findings a mythology that would ensure that his larger view
of man would secure his historical immortaliry. Bur the phi-
losophy he bequeathed to the world, composed as it is of
two radically incompatible and antagonistic elements, is, in
the last analysis, incoherent. It promises freedom on the one
hand, but on the other, it virtually guarantees chaos. It pur-
ports to understand man, but, in fact, reduces him to
neuro-anatomy.

Freud, from the standpoint of the history of the West, is
indeed one of its great intellectual revolutionaries. He saw
himself as leading the Third Revolution of this type and
aimed to "lance the poisonous bubble of pride in man".
Man's pride (known to the Greeks as hubris) bad been se-
verely wounded as a result of two preceding intellectual
revolutions. As a consequence of the Copernican Revolu-
tion in mathematics and astronomy, man could no longer
regard his earthly abode as being the center of the universe.
This was a cosmological revolution. After Darwin, man could
no longer think of himself as completely unrelated to brute
animals. This was a biological revolution. Freud laid bare man's
unconscious and revealed its powerful, irrational drives,
thereby removing the illusion of self-mastery. This was a
psychological revolution.

And so, for Freud, as science advanced, man diminished.
As science displaced religion, meaning and morality began
to dissolve. The process of learning more unpleasant things
about himself through science was humbling him. The Third
Revolution did not seem to be improving his lot. Man was
not enjoying the new status that scientific knowledge had
carved out for him. He was becoming increasingly discontent,
though he found consolation in the belief that be was losing
his illusions.

Freud's philosophy has three basic qualities that warrant
serious examination. Each represents a retreat from reality
and consequently from an authentic experience of life. Its
reductive, irrational, and mythic features cannot be integrated
into a coherent whole. As such, they tend to weaken and
fractionalize the human being, rendering him more suscep-
tible to the forces of discouragement and death.

1. Reductive: Jacques Maritain states rather bluntly, "The
whole of Freudian philosophy rests upon the prejudice of a
radical denial of spiritualiry and freedom." (Jacques Maritain,
"Freudianism and Psychoanalysis", in Cross Currents of
Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis, ed. W. Birmingham and
J.E. Cunneen (New Yoork: RandomHouse, 1964, p 353) Freud, then,
simply followed the pattern of modern materialism, accepting
both its reductive premises and reductive conclusions. In this
way he produced a truncated and unrealistic view of human
beings. As an example, his gratuitous and unscientific denial
of the spiritual dimension of man makes it impossible for
him to explain such universal activities as art, morality, and
religion. Freud, in effect, reduced the world of man and all
his distinctively human operations to mere fodder for scien-
tific materialism. While his explorations into the uncon-
scious and subsequent development of the psychoanalytic
method ensured his lasting stature as an eminent doctor of
the mind, be saw the unconscious as nothing more than a
"seething cauldron", an interior inferno thronged with re-
pressed monsters. By making this simplistic identification,
he divorced the unconscious from the life of reason and spirit,
thereby reducing it to the level of primitive instinct or, as
Maritain states, "into some kind of pure bestiality crouched
in the depths of mans being".(ibid. p.354)

Thus, Freud's method of dealing with anything spiritual is
reductive; that is, he reduces it to the plane of the material,
where it is subject to empirical analysis alone. As a conse-
quence, Freud finds himself in the impossible position of try-
ing to explain the higher by appealing exclusively to the lower.
Is it at all reasonable to try to explain Beethoven's motiva-
tion for writing his Ninth Symphony solely on the basis of
what materialist-defined science can examine empirically?
The spiritual cannot be explained by the material, though it
may be related to it in some way.

But for Freud, the spiritual could not be real. Therefore
all spiritual beliefs had to have material causes. As an exam-
ple, Freud claims that the notion of God is merely a father
image projected onto the sky. He theorizes that a child
originally looks upon his own father as omnipotent. As the
child matures and discovers that his father is not divine, he
nonetheless retains the fantasy image of an omnipotent fa-
ther, that is, God. His belief in God persists, although it is
shifted from a real being to one who is imaginary.

Or to take another example, Freud states that Holy Com-
munion is not what it is believed to be on a spiritual level,
but is strictly derived from the primitive state of mankind,
when cannibalistic ceremonies were practiced. Receiving the
sacrament of Holy Communion, therefore, is merely what
be terms "oral introjection". Continuing in this vein, disci-
ples of Freud have taught that the mystical experiences ot
saints are the result of sexual frustrations, that saying the
Rosary is unconscious masturbation, and so on.

Of course, we must point out that Freud was at least con-
sistent. It is quite logical for him, having dismissed the spir-
tual order, to explain all art, morality, and religion solely in
relation to the material order. The great father of modern
materialism, Thomas Hobbes, had done it three centuries
earlier, and Darwin bad offered his own materialist reduc-
tionism in the century of Freud's birth. Materialist premises
can yield only materialist conclusions.

Psychiatrist Karl Stern states that the most remarkable of all
Freud's reductive statements is this: "Religion is nothing but
obsessive-compulsive neurosis." (Karl Stern, The Third Revolution,
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1954, p 119.) Now, it is undeniable that
some obsessive-compulsive people are also religious. This does
not mean, logically, that all people who are religious suffer from
this abnormality. We would not conclude that all people who
are sick must have a fever on the basis that all people who have
are sick. The field of discourse for sick people in general
is much wider than it is for its subset of those who are
fevered. So, too, the range of religious people is much broader
than its subset of religious people who happen to be obsessive-
compulsive. To equate the two is both prejudicial and re-
ductive. It is also, ironically, unscientific.

Because Freud operated in the arbitrarily cramped quar-
ters of the material, he lacked the vision to be able to see
things in their wholeness and thus be able to make a realistic
diagnosis. He was not in a position, for example, to say, "Peo-
ple whose religion is tied to their neurosis do not experience
the true nature of religion and therefore do not receive its
appropriate benefits." Freud simply reduced religion to a
neurosis and remained blind to what be refused to see. His
reductive method prevented him from apprehending a healthy
reIigion that is free of neurotic entanglement.

Freud also reduced free will to instinctive drives, thereby
reducing real guilt to mere "guilt feelings". By such reduc-
tionism, Freud lost sight of moral responsibility, and vices,
no less than virtues, became merely the result of the inter-
play of deep, irrational instincts and other psychological de -
terminants.

Thus, he could explain violent human aggression,
hate, and evil in relation to the body. In this way as Ernest
Becker remarks in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial
of Death, Freud was able to "keep his basic allegiance to
physiology, chemistry, and biology and his hopes for a total
and simple reductionist science of psychology". (E.Becker, The
Denial of Death, New York, Free Press, 1975. p.98)  The price
of this reduction, however, is the loss of any sense of an in-
tegrated moral person. It also brings with it a sense of utter
helplessness in preventing the emergence of a Culture of
Death.

The notion that evil chooses man is far more despair-
ing than that of man being capable of freely choosing evil,
since lic has some control in the latter instance, whereas lic
has no control in the former. In freeing man from moral
responsibility, Freud did not free man, but left him defense-
less against himself. Being radically unfree is a greater hand-
icap than being capable of experiencing true guilt.

2. Irrational: Maritain has criticized Freud for infecting his
philosophy with "a deep hatred of the form of reason". "Maritain,
"Freudianism", p. 355). He is by no means alone in this assessment.
Psychotherapist Rollo May is equally critical of the overemphasis
of the "irrational" in psychoanalysis:

"Has it not been always the function of psychoanalysis, that
we - whether we literally are murderers or not - are always
pushed by the "irrational," daimonic, dynamic forces of the
"dark" side of life that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well
as Freud, talked about? Freud dethroned deliberation as the
motive for actions. Whatever we do, infinitely more than
our "rational" reasons and justification is involved. (Rollo May,
Love and Will, New York: W.W. Norton, 1969, p. 233)

Schopenhauer had seen the blind, instinctive rush of Life
everywhere. Nietzsche felt its irresistible urge in his Will to
power. Freud reduced it further and situated it in the pri-
mordial instinctive center of the human being. He called it
not Life or Will, but Id. As such, the Id is a source of mo-
tivation, a drive for pleasure. It is inherently irrational, a thor-
oughly blind instinct. Freud tells us in Beyond the Pleasure
principle that, as an instinct, it is "an urge inherent in organic life
to restore an earlier state of things". (S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, 1920, standard ed., London: Hogarth Press, 1955, 18:6.)