At the mercy of the past. Freud’s unconscious came to represent the individual’s past and the infantile heritage to which we were all doomed due to the neurotic conditioning in infancy produced by one’s parents. Drives were forever tied to a confused mixture of primitive sexual and aggressive drives and needs whose source lie in infantile dependency. Our spontaneous impulses and deepest creative drives were now suspect. Nonstandard, unpredictable acts of creativity that set new standards, destroyed past limitations, and brought into conscious awareness new areas of action were most suspect of all and became connected with neurosis and even madness. Our highest acts and darkest motives were seen to proceed from the same mechanical, deterministic psychological processes for which we could neither take credit nor be held responsible.
Theories of Freud and Darwin blinded psychology to true potentials of human consciousness revealed by Myers. If the science of the times could not prove the existence of a nonphysical soul that provides inner direction and is responsible for the heroic and extra-dimensional characteristics of human creativity as Myers saw it, neither could science prove its nonexistence. Still, the theories of Freud and Darwin played their role in blinding psychology to the true capabilities of the human consciousness and limited the extent to which the human psyche itself could perceive the greater reality in which it existed. Transpersonal writer and mystic Jane Roberts (1978) summarizes:
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When Freudian psychology merged with Darwinian ideology, but more importantly, when psychology allied itself with Freud rather than Myers, then the balance fell sharply away from optimism…. Darwinian man could not have a soul; his murderous instincts left no room for honest good works; and Freudian man had no effective will, only the instinctive subconscious that reached backward through Darwinian time to the animal’s ‘savage’ nature. Most unfortunately, psychology followed that path, taking science and medicine with it. (Roberts, 1978, p. 93)
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Freud’s Positive Contributions
to Transpersonal Psychology.
Despite Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) profoundly confused and misguided characterization of the nature of the human psyche, his theories influenced the development of transpersonal psychology - even if it was only to give a stalwart position against which to protest. Transpersonal psychiatrist Mark Epstein describes Sigmund Freud as “the grandfather of the entire movement of transpersonal psychology” adding that “it is safe to say that there would be no transpersonal psychology as we know it without Freud’s influence” (Epstein, 1996, p. 29). Epstein (1996, pp. 30-33) identifies three of Freud’s main contributions to transpersonal personality theory that (unknown to Freud) had their roots in meditation traditions of the East.
The conceptualization of mysticism as regressive infantile feelings
The use of evenly suspended attention as a therapeutic tool
The hypothesis of the pleasure principle as the cause of suffering.
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