Modern psychology acts as if Einsteinian concepts do not apply to mind or body. Modern psychology, despite its outward appearing scientific face, still acts as if Einsteinian concepts have no application to understanding the actions of the brain or the physic nature of the physical body and still prefers to build models of human experience and behavior along the lines of Newtonian mechanics.
Evolutionary theory found a friend in Freudianism. Transpersonal author and mystic Jane Roberts identifies additional reasons why psychology followed Freud instead of Myers at the threshold of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In her provocative book, The Afterdeath Journal of An American Philosopher, in which she re-creates the attitudes and opinions of philosopher-psychologist William James, Roberts (1978) argues that Freud’s theories were more compatible with Darwinian theory than was Myers’s theories. “Evolution’s dogmas became Freudianism’s justification” (Roberts, 1978, p. 66).
The Freudian concept of the self lacked any good intent; that is, it was stripped of altruism in any trustworthy or purposeful form. It was the only kind of a self that could logically survive the theories of Darwin as popularly understood, the end result of an organism that survived by triumphing over other life forms in an endless battle for life. That self’s one ‘virtue’ was that it did survive, and if it lost its intuitive feel for nature in the process – well, that was nature’s fault. Altruism, displays of valor, philosophy itself, or creativity in terms of the arts – these were only possible because of their self-serving qualities, and beneath their gentle guise lay the infant’s savage determination to exist, and the male’s drive to slay his father in order to supersede him in life’s battle. Such theories stripped human personality of any majesty and denied the possibility of heroic action that was not tied to the meanest inner motives. (Roberts, 1978, pp. 65-66)
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Nature was cast in a new light. Nature too was cast in a new light by the theories of Freud and Darwin. Religion’s insistence upon humanity’s superior status over the animals was replaced by a belief that nature (like our nature) was something to be dominated and controlled. Evolutionary and Freudian concepts allied with business, technology, and science made nature fair game for exploitation and turned humanity away from its natural and practical relationship with plants, animals, and the earth itself.
Myers’ subliminal self is transformed into Freud’s id. Myers’s subliminal consciousness became a kind of psychological chamber of horrors that required only the most expert of guides (the psychoanalyst) to navigate its hall of distorted mirrors, lest the unwary become swallowed up in recesses of one’s own primitive and untrustworthy subjectivity. In all of this, contemplation of the soul had little place. Myers’ subliminal self became replaced with Freud’s id. In Freud’s hands, religion’s demons were likewise transformed into the instinctive impulses of the id, which were stamped upon the psyche in its infancy. Freud, unlike Myers, gave expression to those darker elements of the human personality that modern psychology and American society needed to understand, letting the soul slip away and disappear, stripped of its powers only to be recast in terms of the mechanical reactions of instinctive impulses.
Freudian psychology taught the individual to mistrust his own impulses and to turn away from the inner voice of intuition. The Freudian concepts were basically in direct opposition to Myer’s subliminal self. Myers did not deny the confusions, distortions, fears, and guilts that could arise in human experience – the subjective terrors – but he did not regard these as the most basic badge of humanity. He saw them instead as regrettable instances of human ignorance that served to hide from man the existence of his subliminal power, that source of being from which each individual life springs. (Roberts, 1978, p. 102)
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