Freud surely knew that the most essential part of psychoanalysis was in terms of its orientation towards the mastery (if not quite the overcoming) of anxiety. That is the reason behind his reprimanding of Jung, for ostensibly entertaining mystical ideas instead of dealing with "the difficult question of sexuality" [quote is from the book, Freud and His Mother]. The difficulty of the question of sexuality is because of its psychological relationship to anxiety -- and certainly strongly so for Sigmund Freud, who was of his time and place, and experienced his culture's extreme repression towards sexual issues.
Anxiety and how we cope with it seems to be the subject of psychoanalysis. Yet Freud himself stopped at a particular point in confronting the matter on a few occasions, not least in terms of the question of incest, from which he backed away, believing it to be a fantasy without its counterpart of concrete expression in the real world.
A pre-emptive denial of the basis for the sort of anxiety which could go beyond a certain point of stressing the psyche is built into Freud's system. Freud denied incest because the thought of it was too stressful. The elimination of incest in the world was henceforth to be based upon the principle of repression of its signs, an attempt to transcend its effects, rather than combating it as a pathological manifestation of desire (on the part of insane parents), within the world of concrete human relations.
Besides incest, are there other Freudian "unthinkables"? One might suggest among these the following empirically-verifiable possibilities, acknowledgment of which would produce the highest levels of anxiety in the human psyche: the leader who doesn't seek to serve his followers; and the parent who isn't wholesome and good.
The premature reduction of anxiety (by repression and denial) in the face of these possibilities is the path to the concentration camp ... in a mode of blissful trust.
Anxiety and how we cope with it seems to be the subject of psychoanalysis. Yet Freud himself stopped at a particular point in confronting the matter on a few occasions, not least in terms of the question of incest, from which he backed away, believing it to be a fantasy without its counterpart of concrete expression in the real world.
A pre-emptive denial of the basis for the sort of anxiety which could go beyond a certain point of stressing the psyche is built into Freud's system. Freud denied incest because the thought of it was too stressful. The elimination of incest in the world was henceforth to be based upon the principle of repression of its signs, an attempt to transcend its effects, rather than combating it as a pathological manifestation of desire (on the part of insane parents), within the world of concrete human relations.
Besides incest, are there other Freudian "unthinkables"? One might suggest among these the following empirically-verifiable possibilities, acknowledgment of which would produce the highest levels of anxiety in the human psyche: the leader who doesn't seek to serve his followers; and the parent who isn't wholesome and good.
The premature reduction of anxiety (by repression and denial) in the face of these possibilities is the path to the concentration camp ... in a mode of blissful trust.
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