Michel Onfray's lectures at the Popular University this year focused on Sigmund Freud. Twilight of an Idol (the title borrowed from Neitzsche) is his recent book on the topic. He sets outs to debunk the legend.
Schools have a habit of teaching things in the form of post cards. They show you a picture of Plato pointing to the sky and Aristotle pointing to the ground and that image becomes the lesson. Onfray presents ten such post cards that make up the lesson/legend of Freud and for which he will present "counter post cards" over the course of the future lectures:
- Freud discovered the unconscious all alone.
- Our (Freudian) slips point to the unconscious.
- Dreams are interpretable; they are the royal road to the unconscious
- Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis was the result of hard science, namely, 18 cases.
- Freud discovered a technique for treating psychopathology.
- Repression is at the base of the problem. Pointing this out will solve the problem.
- The oedipal complex is universal.
- Resistance to psychoanalysis is a sign of abnormality, repression, and oedipal complex.
- Psychoanalysis is an emancipating discipline, it leads to sexual freedom. (Freud said himself that this was not at all desirable).
- Freud represents rationalism, in the tradition of the enlightenment.
Onfray concludes his introduction by borrowing again from Neitzsche who said that there was only one Christian and he died on the cross. There was only one Freudian, says Onfray, and he died in his bed September 23, 1939 in London.
