Freud may influence your life more than you think. Freud generated several major concepts that still influence in our society, and I frequently hear people, including evangelicals, refer to them, often without knowing their source.
One of the crasser manifestations involves referring to someone as “anal.” This alludes to Freud’s theory of psychosexual stages, which hypothesizes that the failure to pass through one of the stages successfully distorts the individual’s personality. The anal stage includes issues such as potty training, and the anal personality is defined as up tight, overly meticulous, and suspicious. This theory of Freud’s is highly speculative at best.
A more serious aspect of Freud’s legacy is found in his view that the human personality consists of the id (desires), ego (conscious rational capacity), and superego (the conscience and ego ideal—what one views to be his ideal personality). The id makes demands such as for promiscuous sexual gratification. The superego condemns those demands. The ego is left to referee between the two.
Pathology results when the battle between the id and superego gets out of hand, placing the ego under excessive pressure. Freud believed that the Victorian sexual restrictions of our society overdeveloped our superegos, creating undue pressure for the ego. If that were the case, people should be really healthy psychologically today. Apparently he was wrong. Nonetheless, his ideas helped spawn the sexual revolution. Now we have liberated superegos, a trashed society, and people in therapy in unprecedented numbers. Where is Queen Victoria now that we need her?
Yet another idea from Freud, one which most people (including evangelicals) believe, is that pathologies result from negative past experiences, which leave emotions bottled up within our unconscious.
Since the source of the problem is buried in our unconscious, the individual cannot resolve the problem himself. Rather, a therapist must help him regress to those experiences and express the bottled up emotions. Doing so will release him from his pathological feelings and behaviors.
Certainly negative past experiences may be the root cause of emotion and behavior problems; however, Freud’s solution is problematic. This process of ventilation makes matters worse, not better. It may give some immediate release, like giving an alcoholic a drink will enable him to feel better temporarily, but in the long run it only exacerbates the problem.
It is easy to understand why. Reliving past negative experiences only refreshes our memory of them, increasing their power. Nonetheless, likening of negative emotions to a polluted swamp that must be drained by validating the negative experience is widely held in our society. As a result, more people feel better temporarily but ultimately prolong the agony and the pathology.
None of this reflects a biblical perspective of the human personality, nor is any of it developed out of good research or supported by it. It was embraced and is kept alive by faith in Freud.