Sigmund Freud, Slavoj Zizek, and the Feminist Game

…by Jonas E. Alexis

Slavoj Zizek reminds me of Tevye of the 1971 movie A Fiddler on the Roof. Like Tevye, you never know what Zizek is going to say next, and if you listen to his explanation of love, you’ll end up asking yourself, “What the heck is he saying?”

Zizek’s writings are more substantive than his lectures, but still I don’t usually agree with them. His embrace of Jacques Lacan’s ideology and Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis destroys him as a cultural and Marxist philosopher precisely because the Freudian edifice is simply a house built on sand, and the scientific community itself has viewed it as such. As one observer put it,

“The scientific standing of psychoanalysis and of its therapeutic claims has been severely compromised both by a lack of empirical support and [by] its dependence on an outdated biology.”[1]

Zizek himself admitted in 2006 that psychoanalysis “is outdated scientifically,” but given enough time it will prove to be right.[2]

Well, that hasn’t happened yet. On the contrary, Frederick Crews of the University of California (Berkeley) has recently pointed out that that psychoanalysis continues to be alive because

“biographical Freud studies have been dominated by partisans of psychoanalysis with a vested interest in preserving the legend of epochal discovery.

“Nearly all of Freud’s apologists, heading a tacit plea on his part to be exempted from dispassionate evaluation of his claims, have engaged in protective discourse: ascribing special acuteness to the master, always granting him the benefit of the doubt, and, when there appears to be no dodging the evidence of his illogicalities and ethical lapses, blaming them on the autonomous operations of his unconscious mind.”[3]

Crews, who has recently written a devastating biography of Freud, declares, “By exaggerating Freud’s competence in various respects, this Freudolatry has obscured the central drama of his career.”[4] Freud, boasting that psychoanalysis had some scientific validity, wrote to a Swiss colleague by the name of Oskar Pfister, “Why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psychoanalysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godless Jew?”[5]

Why did they have to spend their time and energy on something that is against the moral order and common sense? Why did the people in the psychoanalytic movement have to propagate their ideas as a cult?[6] Why did Freud himself fail to acknowledge that there were other people who were basically saying the same thing that he perpetuated in psychoanalysis?

Why did Freud deliberately have to write them out of history? Why did he have to form cult-like devotees like Ernest Jones who would excommunicate anyone who even questioned his ideological enterprise?[7] Why did he have to make up much of the evidence for psychoanalysis? Didn’t Freud himself say that psychoanalysis cured no one?

And why is it that no serious intellectual pay close attention to psychoanalysis anymore? Why did Crews even explicitly argue that psychoanalysis is “a pseudoscience” way back in 1995?[8] As Crews puts it, “In 1999, a comprehensive citation study in the flagship journal of American psychology reported that ‘psychoanalytic research has been virtually ignored by mainstream psychology over the past several decades.’”[9]

In any event, Zizek is both a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, but his fundamental philosophy seems to be a function of psychoanalysis. In fact, he has built much of his intellectual life on the work of Jacques Lacan, who also was an avid Freudian. But Zizek has recently made an interesting comment which seems to destroy the game that feminists constantly plays in Hollywood and elsewhere. He said:

“When women dress provocatively to attract the male gaze or when they “objectify” themselves to seduce them, they don’t do it offering themselves as passive objects: instead they are the active agents of their own “objectification,” manipulating men, playing ambiguous games, including reserving the full right to step out of the game at any moment even if, to the male gaze, this appears in contradiction with previous ‘signals…’

“Female sexual liberation is not just a puritan withdrawal from being “objectivized” (as a sexual object for men) but the right to actively play with self-objectivization, offering herself and withdrawing at will. But will it be still possible to proclaim these simple facts, or will the politically-correct pressure compel us to accompany all these games with some formal-legal proclamation (of consensuality, etc.)?”[10]

If we take Zizek seriously here, women can “objectify themselves” when they dress provocatively or seductively, particularly when their original intent is to seduce “the male gaze.” If that is the world that feminism actually wants to present to men out there, then it is dangerous precisely because once the “male gaze” is seduced, all hell breaks loose. In that world, the male gaze will more than likely violate the moral order. In fact, seduction itself entails a violation of the moral order. That is why Dionysus asked Pentheus if he would like to see women dance naked in Euripides’ The Bacchae.

So, can we really say that the feminist movement is completely innocent when rape or sexual harassment occurs? Don’t these people have to carry some responsibility? Can they continue to deliberately flash their cleavage on social media day and night and then later cry like babies, saying that they were sexualized and then raped?

Sure, men do have to take responsibility for getting caught with their pants down, but who made these sexual crimes alluring? Shouldn’t people like Megyn Kelly take some responsibility for degrading themselves on the Howard Stern show?

Will the sex culture carry some moral burden by refusing to produce pornography in the name of “democracy” and “freedom”? Don’t we all know by now that pornography damages the brain?[11] Will colleges and universities around the United States stop offering “courses” on pornography to their naïve young students?

These questions deserve serious reflections and answers, and British-American actress Angela Lansbury has recently come to similar conclusions. She wrote that attractive women “must sometimes take blame” for sexual harassment, which she said “backfired on us.” Lansbury added:

“There are two sides to this coin. We have to own up to the fact that women, since time immemorial, have gone out of their way to make themselves attractive. And unfortunately it has backfired on us, and this is where we are today.

“We must sometimes take blame, women. I really do think that. Although it’s awful to say we can’t make ourselves look as attractive as possible without being knocked down and raped,” ”

Back in 2004,

“It was reported that a local porn queen received college credit in her art class at the University of Southern California for an exhibit of hard-core ‘performance art.’ The class project that earned her rave reviews was undressing in front of the class and performing sex acts with two other women using vibrators.”[12]

Candice de Russy is a former professor and a trustee of the State University of New York. She argued that “sex toys, ‘bondage sex,’ and even ‘pedophilia art’ are now topics being taught in women’s workshops on campus, English literature classes, art departments, and in new centers of ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies’ at a growing number of respected colleges on the campus of SUNY.”[13]

There is more. De Russy pointed out that courses or topics were and probably still are being offered on subjects such as

“Sodomy, Miscegenation, and the Impossibility of Privacy, along with a performance by a Los Angeles drag queen known as Vaginal Crème Davis. A previous conference on the same campus, ‘Revolting Behavior: Challenges to Women’s Sexual Freedom,’ promised to offer ‘cutting-edged scholarship in the field of lesbian sadomasochism’ and ‘how to’ manuals for lesbian sex, and booklets on how to dispose of razors and other instruments used in ‘cutting rituals.’”[14]

Last November, Harvard University hosted “anal sex workshop,” which included “a presenter denouncing the ‘stupidity of abstinence’ and the joys of ‘putting things in your butt.'” It was reported that

“At one point the presenter leading the workshop passed out gloves and butt plugs to students as she offered instructions on anal relaxation techniques. ‘Remember it’s all about practice, practice, practice,’ said the presenter, Natasha, a representative of the Cambridge-based adult shop Good Vibrations.

“Identifying the event with the sexual positivity movement, Natasha said the goal was to ‘encourage people to go after their desires and not feel shame.’ ‘Come up front guys, were gonna have some dirty fun,’ she said as the presentation began. Noting ‘not all men have penises, not all women have vaginas,’ she added ‘the butthole is the great sexual equalizer. All humans have a butthole.”

Last year, the University of Chicago launched a “sex week,” which again included “love enchantments, ‘sexual pain’ workshop, BDSM tutorials.”In 2014, the same university offered “field trips to kinky sex dungeon.”

Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues are still being praised on college campuses. The whole point of The Vagina Monologues, as E. Michael Jones points out,

“is to break down the natural sexual reserve and modesty of the largely female teenage performers and audience as a prelude to colonization. It was a classic instance of sexual liberation as political control….

“Modesty is the first defense against the arousal of passion; it facilitates rational moral control of sexual impulse, but modesty was deliberately violated and ridiculed by the people putting on the [Vagina Monologues].”[15]

You see, none of these issues has been reported fairly and truthfully because the regime wants to bury decent Americans beneath an avalanche of hoaxes, deceptions, fabrications, and just plain lies.

More importantly, college and university professors across the country taught that moral relativism is true for decades, but when men begin to grab women “by the pussy,” to use Donald Trump’s phraseology, all of a sudden professors begin to propound that “There Is No Moral Relativity in Sexual Harassment”![16]

These people need to stop using double standards and accepts some responsibility for the sexual debauchery they have created. They despise morality and attack it viciously in the school curriculum, in higher education and even in films, but they embrace it whenever their own ideological philosophy gets them into trouble. The sex industry praises people like Michel Foucault, who bragged, “To die for the love of boys: What could be more beautiful.”[17]

Focault declared:

“The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for. It is in this (strictly historical) sense that sex is indeed imbued with the death instinct.”[18]

What we are seeing again and again is that “female sexual liberation,” as Zizek himself has implicitly argued, is Frankenstein reincarnate. Zizek agrees that

“the rise of Political Correctness and the rise of violence are two sides of the same coin… And the French linguist Jean-Claude Milner was right to point out how the anti-harassment movement unavoidably reaches its climax in contracts which stipulate extreme forms of sadomasochist sex (treating a person like a dog on a collar, slave trading, torture, up to consented killing).”[19]

The same people who created the monster is now complaining that the monster is killing their children by the truckload. Perhaps they need to pick up a copy of E. Michael Jones’ study, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control.[20]

——————————————————–

The interesting thing is that instead of leading his readers to the moral order and practical reason, Zizek takes them back to Sigmund Freud,[21] who himself declared: “Sexual morality—as society, in its extreme form, the American, defines it—seems to me very contemptible. I advocate an incomparably freer sexual life.”[22]

Keep in mind that Freud made that statement in 1915, long before the sexual revolution stormed America. On his way to America in 1909, Freud declared: “We are bringing them the plague.”[23] And with Crews’ recent biography of Freud, we now have a mammoth of evidence which shows that Freud was deliberately attempting to destroy the sexual mores of the West, which to a large extent was based on the moral order. Psychoanalysis, as it turns out, was a function of Freud’s own sexual perversion. As he put it to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in 1897:

“I have found, in my own case, the phenomenon of being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood.”[24]

This theory got morphed into other perverse ideas. For example, when a young woman by the name of Emma Eckstein came to see Freud with “sharp leg pains” and “gastrointestinal distress and dysmenorrhea, or extreme pain during menstruation,” Freud risibly summoned his own invented theory to advise that Eckstein, according to Crews, suffered from “a misconstrued erotic incident…”[25]

When that didn’t work, Freud and Fliess invented another theory out of their magic hats: the nose was essentially “the control center for other organs and their maladies.”[26]

Freud was obviously incapable of treating Eckstein. He therefore concluded that she had a sexual desire which she expressed through “spurts of blood.”[27] If you think this is weird, then fasten your seatbelt because Freud is going to take you to a bumpy ride. Crews declared:

“Freud super-added an element of weirdness that was all his own. Women—all women—impressed him as sinister creatures whose genital concavity bears a menace of ‘castration’ to any male who ventures across its threshold. And he believed that every man dreads being ‘weakened by the woman, infected with her femininity and of then showing himself incapable….’

“Even worse, Freud divined that the secret ambition of every female was to acquire the envied penis by absorbing and severing it. Thus all women were monsters at heart…The very tenderness of women, he would remark in his little book on Leonardo da Vinci, conceals a ‘ruthlessly demanding’ sensuality, ‘consuming men as if they were alien beings.’

“Here, then, were the broodings that would lend classical psychoanalysis its tone of grim fatalism. That doctrine’s bogeyman, castration, instead of deriving from close clinical observation of either women or men, came straight from Freud’s interior house of horrors. It was daring on his part to publish such evidence of his morbidity for all to see. He did so, however, under the misapprehension that all men were similarly warped.”[28]

So, it is really interesting that Zizek would lead his followers back to psychoanalysis—“Freud’s interior house of horrors”—which Zizek himself admitted in a lecture last October is “not an objective theory” like biology or mathematics, but is a “subjective experience.” Here again Zizek implicitly destroys the scientific pretension of psychoanalysis which, as Crews has nicely put it, should now be regarded as “Freudolatry.”

I must give Zizek some credit for deconstructing David Horowitz’s argument when Horowitz horridly compared the Palestinians with Nazis “who wanted to kill Jews.” Zizek immediately responded, “Did you ever visit the West Bank. It is totally safe there for Jews to visit! Sorry, Palestinians [in the West Banks] are screwed up [by the Israelis].”

Horowitz preposterously responded, “Yeah, they’re screwed by Hamas, they screwed by the PLO, they are screwed by Saudi Arabia, and they are screwed by Egypt.” Horowitz implicitly brought the anti-Semitism card, which astonished Zizek who, as we have already seen, is an avowed Freudian!

• [1] Quoted in Frederick Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017), 2.
• [2] Slavoj Zizek, “Freud Lives!,” London Review of Books, May 25, 2006.
• [3] Crews, Freud, 3.
• [4] Ibid.
• [5] Quoted in Joel Whitebook, Freud: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 377.
• [6] See for example Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: The Origin of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); The Aryan Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung (New York: Random House, 1997); Peter Watson, The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (New York: HarperCollins, 2000); Nandor Fodor, Freud, Jung, and Occultism (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1971); Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
• [7] Anna Freud, one of Sigmund’s daughters, chose Ernest Jones specifically to write a biography of his father because, as Crews put it, “he could be trusted to do Anna’s bidding.” Frederick Crews, “Freud: What’s Left?,” NY Review of Books, February 23, 2017.
• [8] Frederick Crews, “Cheerful assassin defies analysis,” Times Higher Education, March 3, 1995.
• [9] Crews, Freud, 2.
• [10] Slavoj Žižek, “Sign a contract before sex? Political correctness could destroy passion,” Russia Today, December 25, 2017.
• [11] See for example Gary Wilson, Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction (Kent, CT: Commonwealth Publishing, 2015); William M. Struthers, Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2009); Gail Dines, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality(Boston: Beacon Press, 2010); Pamela Paul, Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families (New York: Times Books, 2005).
• [12] Jim Nelson Black, Freefall of the American University: How Our Colleges Are Corrupting the Minds and Morals of the Next Generation (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 190.
• [13] Ibid., 191.
• [14] Ibid.
• [15] E. Michael Jones, “The Vagina Monologues at Notre Dame: Who Has the Most Famous Vagina in History?,” Culture Wars, April 2003.
• [16] Ani Kokobobo, “There Is No Moral Relativity in Sexual Harassment,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 15, 2017.
• [17] Quoted in Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 157.
• [18] Quoted in E. Michael Jones, “Twilight for the Oligarchs, Part II,” Culture Wars, November 2016.
• [19] Žižek, “Sign a contract before sex? Political correctness could destroy passion,” Russia Today, December 25, 2017.
• [20] E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000).
• [21] Žižek, “Sign a contract before sex? Political correctness could destroy passion,” Russia Today, December 25, 2017.
• [22] Quoted in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life of Our Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 143.
• [23] Quoted in Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 47.
• [24] Crews, Freud, 516.
• [25] Ibid., 469.
• [26] Ibid., 424.
• [27] Ibid., 479.
• [28] Ibid., 420-421.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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