Ch. 12
The Resurrection of
Sigmund Freud

No, I haven't forgotten; this chapter begins with Magic Formula Number Eleven: Be In With the Powers That Be.

Recent decades have witnessed a rash of new "spiritual," psychological, ice cream, and philosophical flavors. Many people chose triple decker cones or banana splits - mixing perhaps primal screaming, transactional T-shirt printing, male drumming, success workshops, and teepee making. Skipping from Esalen in California, to a T-group in Maine. Any deep scholar of history could tell you - as I am telling you - we can expect a Reaction to this wild, Barbaric Period. We are now - I must Solemnly warn you - into this reaction phase which I call the Period of Retrenchment.

When we Retrench in the United States - a culture characterized by almost continual forward-moving - we find very few Trenches. We've been too busy conquering wildernesses, clamoring after the American Dream, and making the world safe for globalist corporations to set up Shrines. So, we are even more impressed with the few Orthodoxies that have slipped in on us, one of which is Psychoanalysis - the System concocted by Sigmund himself. Thus in one of the trenches we are retrenching to we can expect to find a strange man with a goatee and a Viennese accent.

Freud's disciples in the U.S. had the inside track in the guru field for the first part of the twentieth century - mostly a matter of their being here first. If you are going to encroach on their field, you'd better know - and use - your competition's tactics as much as possible. In fact - and this is the Secret Dynamic of this chapter - you should steal a march on the Fruedians and make a show of resurrecting Sigmund first. He's going to be dug up and dusted off in the next few years - as an Authorized Teacher - so beat the others to the punch.

Either include a major emphasis on Freudianism in your Teaching Programme or - if necessary - sell yourself as being Sigmundian. Fortunately there is in the Psychoanalytic System a plethora of useable, co-optable theories and techniques.

Following the brilliant groundwork laid by de Grazia, you should include in your Programme a monthly Freudian "Worship Service," requiring your disciples to repeat in unison the Prayer of Sigmund:

Our Father, Psychoanalysis, who art in our Subconscious.
Sublimated be thy Oedipal Complex,
Thy Infantile Sexuality be repressed
Thy Birth Trauma be compensated for as it is not in life.
Give us this therapeutic hour our daily free association,
And lead us not into slips of the tongue.
For thine is the totem, the taboo, and the $75 per hour fee,
Forever.

Your Dynamic in using the Orthodoxy of Psychoanalysis is the snob value of History and Tradition. Americans accept anything as being Genuine and Established (meaning Right) if you can show that it:

• Works (or is thought by experts to work)
• Is accepted by America's first, best families (meaning the obscenely wealthy)
• Was the first in its field (or the first to be sanctioned by the obscenely wealthy)
• Has been exposed at least once by the Washington Post or Heraldo

Psychoanalysis probably qualifies on all these counts; hence its unassailable acceptance quotient.

You have in Freudianism, then, a virtual guru's paradise: a System that needs no justification; can sneer at any other would-be system as a ridiculous, up-start pretense; and can haughtily show that what the other pseudo-systems "think" they have that is new or unusual was actually conceived of or practiced by Sigmund himself or one of his Sanctioned Disciples decades ago.

If you ever advance to the phase of having disciples of your own - to carry on your Teachings -- you could do no better than read the history of the Psychoanalytic Movement to learn just how to control, demand obedience and conformity (intellectual and behavioral), establish an official Canon (thereby establishing an Index of Heretical Works), and, if necessary, how to excommunicate recalcitrants.

But we get ahead of ourselves - since you are hardly at the level of having customers, not to speak of disciples. What other Freudian gimmicks should the intelligent guru shanghai?

Most pseudo-gurus in the last twenty years have been using the bunkum of Openness. Preaching Candor and Honesty, they have only misled their victims into Nastiness and Self-Righteousness. The Collective Consciousness of Americans now cries out for Closedness - since their brains always move from one extreme to another. So give them Closedness. And no better way to do this than the old Freudian trick of having the patient lie down facing away from the therapist.

Preach Closedness and Anti-Openness to whoever will listen. Point out how your use of Analytic methodology escapes the Plague of Openness in several important ways:

• no eye contact
• no body contact (at the Guru's discretion)
• no inflammatory group contact
• no open-mindedness

Here I divulge to you another secret garnered from long years of study of Freud and things Freudian. Any follower of Sigmund must - to conform to the pattern - come up with some change in theory or technique, no matter how slight. Take for example, Jung, Adler, or Wilhelm Reich just for openers. No self-respecting Freud follower would dream of doing everything just as the Master did; that would smack of servility and lack of originality.

So the Freudian Innovation I recommend (henceforth to be known as the Doctor Doctor Innovation) is Closedness As A Way Of Life. Explain to your customers and disciples the inner secret of the Freudian Mysteries: Sex is Everything and Everything is Sex. If sex is everything, then the better the sex the better life is. But here is where, you explain, most people go sadly astray. They assume that the best sex is the most sex. Not at all. The best sex - as the DD-Innovation discloses for the first time - is Repressed Sex.

Repressing Actual sexual outlets releases in your patients:

• hostility
• rage
• infantile feelings of being deprived
• most important of all - Phantasy

And that's the Hidden Key: Phantasized Sex is the Best Sex.

With how many persons can you have Actual Sex at any one time? Right, very few. But Phantasized Sex? Your lurid imagination is your only limit. I have had some female patients, one in particular, a Miss Greenswing, whose phantasies possessed absolutely no limitations. There are none of the other ordinary - and neurosis-producing - elements in Phantasized Sex such as:

• bad breath
• being poor, stupid, and revoltingly ugly
• being wealthy and impotent
• having to get up and go to work afterward

I point out to patients who resist (because of Transference) my Innovation, that our whole culture is based on Phantasized Sex. Two hundred million Americans can hardly be wrong, can they? You don't find very many people these days enjoying - or even tolerating - Actual Sex. But just look at what fun we have:

• looking at naked bodies
• watching pornographic movies
• reading Playboy
• talking about rape
• imagining how that long-legged, red-haired secretary at the office would be in bed

Note that none of these pleasant diversions is Actual Sex. Civilization marches on and with it we develop ever-higher Culture-Repressions as Sigmund predicted.

You might assume that Phantasized Sex would create uncontrollable sublimated libidinal energy - since no actual cathexis (discharge) occurs. There were some manifestations of that when I first began my research in this field, but I soon came onto Adjunct Principle One: Total identification with one's Phantasized Self.

Here again, there are ample embodiments of this principle in our culture. People today must learn to see themselves as their rulers define them: buyers, workers, agree-ers, respecters, and enviers. The least self-identification with the supposed real self is taboo.

I have described the psychodynamics of this Principle in one of my major works, Repression in the Service of the Guru. So long as you control the release of the all-powerful sexual energy of your patients, you control them. You build in them the New Ethic of seeing Actual Sex as "nasty, brutish, and short," which provides the useful element of guilt when your patients inevitably Fall. Before they Fall into Actual Sex you have heavy-breathing, writhing, delirious patients - eager to do anything to release their energy. And after the Fall you have remorseful, penitent, pliant patients - scarcely able to phantasize looking you in the face.

Arise, Sigmund!


SIGM. FREUD