Kill The Cult Of The Self

The prehistory matters because Freud is not introduced as a medical oddity. Source trail 0:001:322:55 Okay, good morning. Today we do Sigmund Freud. First, what I will do is I will put Freud in the context of the Western religious, intellectual, and literary tradition. All right, so in the beginning, the main religion f...But as populations grew and towns came into being, they came into competition. They started to have relationships with each other. And they started to war against each other. That's created polytheism. Polytheism is the... He is placed inside a Western religious sequence. Animism makes humans, trees, animals, life, death, birth, and rebirth part of one circuit. Agriculture raises the mother goddess. Towns compete and turn local gods into pantheons. Then Christianity breaks the pattern by making God so total that no other god can stand beside him.

The radical claim is that monotheism creates the individual Source trail 2:55 And the reason why is, the Christians introduced the idea of the Holy Trinity. Okay? And remember what the Holy Trinity is. The Holy Trinity, the idea is, the Holy Trinity, the idea is, God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit,... . If God is everything, the believer has a direct relation to God and no longer needs the community as the path to the divine. Catholic mediation can hold that relation inside a communal form for a while. Protestant direct access removes the mediator and leaves the believer alone with an impossible demand: absolute faith without doubt.

That is the crisis of faith: the self must prove to itself what cannot be proved. Wealth accumulation answers by making money a sign of election. Jihad answers by dying for faith. Transgression answers by breaking human law and social taboo. The shoplifting example is deliberately ugly because it shows how liberation can be manufactured: break the rule, feel exhilarated, and call that feeling destiny Source trail 9:08 are disgusted and you are appalled by this suggestion what do you get caught well you might get expelled from school you might be jailed your parents may punish you you may be outcast from society and then i tell you as... .

Philosophy answers the crisis of faith as epistemology: how do we know? Kant makes the subject active, imagining space and time onto reality, but leaves reality itself unknowable. Hegel answers with Geist, the spirit or mind behind the material world. Marx inverts Hegel and makes Geist into history, class struggle, and collective action. Freud breaks the sequence Source trail 13:1514:42 the Geist is in a process of working itself with the world it's becoming the world it's bringing us along with it so that one day everyone will achieve full enlightenment Marx inverts Hegel and puts the material world b...of the individual he argues that the individual is really just unconscious forces embedded within the brain okay so these three forces are the superego the ego and the id the ego is who we think we are the superego are... by saying the individual is unconscious force inside the brain.

Freud's person is not a moral agent first. The person is ego, superego, id, and hidden sexual urge. Oedipus and Electra become the deep basis of identity and civilization. Jung then makes the model breathable for modern culture. The unconscious becomes personal and collective; society's memory is in food, conversation, movies, and books. The collective unconscious is not a private basement. It is an atmosphere Source trail 17:26 Freud and he wanted to improve on Freud's theory of the unconscious and over time or Carl Jung will do is he was systemized this idea okay so for Carl Jung we have the ego and the ego is made up of two forces the consci... .

Jung also makes the self into a lifelong project: persona, shadow, anima, animus, self-discovery, self-mastery. Freud should welcome an improvement to his theory, but instead excommunicates Jung. That hostility gives the lecture its three questions: where did Freud get the Oedipal idea, why was he so secretive, and why did psychoanalysis spread so quickly? The answer is already named: modernism is the cult of the self Source trail 20:59 fact, everyone in the community around Freud were now dissing themselves from Carl Jung, and there would be no reconciliation between the two ever. And that's why Carl Jung had to go and develop this theory, okay? So, a... .

Vienna gives Freud his setting. Source trail 23:3824:5526:5727:5128:49 And Freud, okay? So to summarize the main ideas, Freud believes that our sexual urges is what underpins our identity as well as civilization. It's because we cannot control our sexual urges that gives rise to religion,...But when we moved to the cities, it is money and the clock that regulates our life. And it's still true today, right? So when you come to school, what controls your behavior? It's your grades, as well as the clock, righ... Modern city life is regulated by money and clocks; sociology and psychology arise because village purpose is being replaced by abstraction. The city creates anomie, alienation, and disenchantment. Into that psychological field come young women labeled hysterical. Freud listens, wins trust, and hears the same answer: when they were young, their fathers abused them.

Early Freud is the advocate. If a person is hit by a car, a broken leg is not imaginary. The hysterical symptom works the same way: physical trauma becomes psychological symbol Source trail 31:09 So what he's doing is that he's becoming an advocate for these women. He's telling the world they're not crazy, they're not being hysterical, they were traumatized, and that's why they're behaving like this. If you got... . The point is not that the women are crazy. The point is that they were injured. Jeffrey Masson's letters make the split legible: early Freud and later Freud are not the same man.

Later Freud performs the reversal. The father is innocent Source trail 36:24 They have these urges and they have this longing for the father. And it's compounded by the fact that the father in his innocence hugs and caresses his little girl. It's made worse when the father notices that the girl... ; the girl has sexual urges, longing, resentment, fantasy, and a need for attention. The patient's memory of abuse becomes evidence of the patient's own pathology. Jiang's anger is not subtle here. Psychoanalysis becomes a machine that can protect the father by making the daughter unreliable to herself Lens point power-alchemy Power privatizes memory when testimony about injury or social reality is rerouted into fantasy, pathology, expert interpretation, or inner defect, so the threatening claim no longer organizes shared action against the patron, father, institution, or system. Source trail 35:3136:24 All right? So let's look at the new Freud. Since child masturbation is such a general occurrence and is at the same time so poorly remembered, it must have an equivalent in psychic life. And in fact, it is found in the...They have these urges and they have this longing for the father. And it's compounded by the fact that the father in his innocence hugs and caresses his little girl. It's made worse when the father notices that the girl... .

The simplest answer is the strongest: the fathers pay Freud Lens point power-alchemy Power privatizes memory when testimony about injury or social reality is rerouted into fantasy, pathology, expert interpretation, or inner defect, so the threatening claim no longer organizes shared action against the patron, father, institution, or system. Source trail 39:52 A simple explanation, which a simple explanation is, he may be treating his patients who are young women, but who's paying the bills? The father, right? It's the father who's paying Freud. So if Freud went to the father... . If Freud tells a father that his daughter's suffering is the father's fault, the father will not be happy and the bills will stop. The theory changes at the point where testimony threatens the patron. That is why the lecture keeps the question practical: who pays?

Jiang then asks whether abuse was plausible in that world. Source trail 39:5241:0242:0143:03 A simple explanation, which a simple explanation is, he may be treating his patients who are young women, but who's paying the bills? The father, right? It's the father who's paying Freud. So if Freud went to the father...Okay? One of them is called Frankenism. And Frankenism rejected Jewish norms and believed they were obligated to transgress moral boundaries. Okay, remember, the crisis of faith, right? How do you demonstrate your faith... The answer is not presented as complete proof, but as historical pressure: secret societies, transgressive religion, Frankism, sexual rites, conversion, and a theology where God cares about the heart more than outward action. The same transgression that earlier promised self-mastery now returns as a background condition for elite harm.

Semmelweis supplies the institutional lesson. Handwashing saves women in childbirth, but accepting the discovery means accepting that doctors had been killing women before Source trail 45:19 He basically had everyone wash their hands using a formula of water, chlorine, and lime. And we still use it today, exactly the same formula today. And so he tried this protocol, and it was a miracle, because after peop... . So the institution protects reputation first. The point is not only that Semmelweis suffers. The point is that Vienna teaches ambitious doctors what happens when evidence exposes powerful people.

Dream interpretation solves the patient's resistance. If Freud argues with memory, the patient can say she remembers clearly. If Freud moves the argument into dreams, the ground softens. Dreams allow suggestion, new associations, and new memories. The lecture's accusation is severe: interpretation becomes a way to implant a new story and call it depth Lens point power-alchemy Power privatizes memory when testimony about injury or social reality is rerouted into fantasy, pathology, expert interpretation, or inner defect, so the threatening claim no longer organizes shared action against the patron, father, institution, or system. Source trail 48:34 If you talk about your dreams, that allows you to suggest subtly new ideas and new memories, to basically implant new memories and basically gaslight that person. Okay? Does that make sense? All right? So the interpreta... .

Jung systematizes the unconscious for popular consumption, and modernism gives it artistic form. Source trail 48:3449:4451:11 If you talk about your dreams, that allows you to suggest subtly new ideas and new memories, to basically implant new memories and basically gaslight that person. Okay? Does that make sense? All right? So the interpreta...Introvert, extrovert, which is what we still use today. All right. The main influence is in modernism, a transformative art movement beginning around the early 20th century. All right. So arguably the first great modern... Joyce is the emblem. Ulysses wants to imitate and surpass Dante while invoking Homer. Jiang reads a passage and then says the important thing: he can explain Dante, Homer, and Shakespeare, but Joyce defeats him. The opacity is not incidental.

Joyce's writing is musical and allusive. To understand it, you must have read what Joyce read and experienced what Joyce experienced. That is why the lecture makes the theological reversal so sharp: Dante uses poetry to bring people into the mind of God; Joyce makes readers spend years trying to enter the mind of Joyce. The artist becomes the god Lens point poetry-civilization Literature reverses poetry's democratic power when the artist becomes the god: access to truth moves from a shared world into elite allusion, private consciousness, self-salvation, and the reader's long apprenticeship to the artist's mind. Source trail 52:09 Okay? Ulysses is either number one or number two on this list of 50 best books in human history. And there are many who tell me, yeah, James Joyce is hard. But if you spend the time to go over what he's writing and read... .

Modern literature is therefore elitist, self-referential, allusive, and inward. Source trail 53:1154:2255:10 So let's look at the differences. Modern literature, as represented by Ulysses, it is elitist. It's self -referential. Okay? It just has a lot of allusions and references. But you actually don't know what the meaning is...And in it, she's also trying to respond to Joyce. To the Lighthouse, it's very much based on Homer's Odyssey. And it's a very, it's extremely well written. Okay? Let's just look at what she writes. There were the eterna... Homer brings beauty and truth to the people. Modernism becomes a club of people who know the references. Woolf's stream of consciousness captures how the mind moves between suffering, death, books, errands, bills, memory, and perception, but the direction is still inward.

Dostoevsky is the counterexample. The heart is a deep ocean, but psychology responds to the world. Salvation requires other people. Modern literature reverses that: self-discovery promises self-mastery; suppressed memories explain the self; the self can become its own salvation Lens point poetry-civilization Literature reverses poetry's democratic power when the artist becomes the god: access to truth moves from a shared world into elite allusion, private consciousness, self-salvation, and the reader's long apprenticeship to the artist's mind. Source trail 55:10 She's trying to go into the unconscious and trying to figure out how the unconscious works. To the Lighthouse, it's really about memory, about perception, about remembering. All right? But again, it's extremely self -in... . Jiang calls it too optimistic because it detaches suffering from the social world and teaches the self to save itself.

The same psychology appears visually in Picasso and politically in Cold War modern art. The West promotes modernist art because communism calls for collective action. A person who believes the self is the source of everything cannot act collectively Source trail 57:29 And let's read what it says. But it writes, In the mid -20th century, modern art and design represented the liberalism, individualism, dynamic activity, and creative risk possible in a free society. Okay? So in other wo... . Modernism is not just taste. It is a political technology for producing isolated selves.

The anti-individualist answer is that freedom in isolation is absurd Source trail 58:3259:33 Does that make sense? All right. So why would that be bad? Why would the cult of the self be bad? Well, this is Michael Buchanan, and he explains it very well in his writings. Okay? So let's read really quickly what he...And we think that's a good thing because we're taught that individuality, individualism means free choice. It means freedom. What he's saying is that's an absurdity. We only have freedom from our community. We only have... . If no one around you is free, your private freedom is slavery. The self that refuses others becomes easier to control because it has only itself to orbit. Real freedom requires recognition from other free people Source trail 1:00:49 And we recognize that man can feel free, be free, and therefore can achieve freedom. In order to be free, I need to see myself surrounded by men, by free men, and be recognized as such by them. I am free only when my in... ; happiness requires care, kindness, cooperation, sacrifice, family, purpose, and emotional discipline.

Social media democratizes the cult of the self Source trail 1:01:46 You have more purpose in life. All right. So let's bring this to the present day. Social media. What social media is, it is the democratization of the call of the self. Before, only the wealthy could enjoy the call of t... . What only the wealthy once had time to enjoy becomes available to everyone through smartphones: self-display, self-indulgence, self-measurement, self-obsession. Jiang connects the post-2015 smartphone world to a global spike in depression and suicide. The cult that began in Europe has conquered the world through technology.

The lecture ends by answering its three questions at once. Freud's idea comes from the Western religious and intellectual crisis of the individual. Freud changes because power has to be protected. Freud spreads because his system serves powerful interests by turning people inward. The solution is not more therapeutic self-command. It is courage to care about others, put their interests before our own, and kill the cult of the self Source trail 1:02:45 world, not only in North America and Europe, but also in Latin America and East Asia as well. So the call of the self, which originated in Europe, has now conquered the world through technology, all right? So that's it,... .