[Buddha-l] Buddhism and Psychology research

[Timothy Smith]

Dan,

You are entitled to feel the way you do, but I don't think you're entitled to assert that you have the whole truth on
Jung or Freud.  That's why this is a strawman, a way of injecting the 'anti-semetic' argument into a discussion
that had nothing to do with human flaws, and more to do with the merit of each individual's flawed contributions.

As I've said twice before, the literature on the controversy is voluminous.  You've obviously picked your favorite sources
and are now busily flogging them to the finish line you must imagine exists.

I think you're correct when you say that we tend to whitewash the sins of our favorite miscreants.  What you don't say is
how we can also use a broad brush to tar the miscreants we don't like.  I don't see Jung as a hero, nor do I see Freud as a villian.
I do think that both erred morally with clients, and that both learned from the experience.

BTW what's so bad about dynamite?

  
Timothy Smith
Office/Mobile 831.624.8138
Fax  831.659-5112
www.wheelwrightassoc.com







On Sep 3, 2010, at 1:10 PM, Dan Lusthaus wrote:

>> Ot sure why you feel compelled to erect this particular straw man at this 
>> point.
> 
> Primarily because it is not a straw man. The evidence of Jung's antisemitism 
> prior to and during the war is not in question. The smokescreen emerges in 
> the discussion of what he did -- what he was --  after the war. He never 
> owned up to what he did during the war, spent the '40s blaming a "Jewish 
> conspiracy" and the "Freudians in India" for trying to besmirch his good 
> name, and made sure to keep embarrassing things, like his Zarathustra 
> lectures out of the English-reading public eye (those materials only came 
> out after his death -- try to buy a copy... Bollingen only makes the 
> expurgated version available -- and guess what sort of stuff is 
> expurgated?). Case closed.
> 
> There are a number of ways one can look at these sorts of things. Generally, 
> it seems, if one "likes" a miscreant, one finds way to forgive, whitewash, 
> or de-emphasize the negative. Find some socially redeeming value in the 
> smut. The parallel with Shimano, et al. is that folks don't want to see 
> their heroes tarnished. It's wearisome, upsetting, unsettling, and downright 
> uncomfortable.
> 
> As for why this comes up now, someone has been repeatedly tried to smear 
> Freud with the charge of cocaine addict. There is no comparison between 
> being an antisemite for one's entire life (Jung couldn't even disguise it 
> during his first meeting with Freud -- read Freud's diary of that meeting), 
> and having a temporary experimental episode with cocaine (I'll bet a good 
> percentage of the readers of this list have had a comparable period in their 
> life). Just as Buddha spent 29 years in gross indulgence in pleasure, and 
> then 6 years of ascetism to counteract that (6 months of intense 
> self-abnegation), in order to arrive at a Middle Way by understanding how 
> pleasure and pain operate in our lives, Freud's experiment -- for which he 
> became quite enthusiastic -- helped him understood what he came to formulate 
> as the pleasure principle.It was a phase he passed through, and left behind 
> once he learned more about it. Unlike Jung's antisemitism, Freud moved on. 
> (See? I've illustrate the principle mentioned in the previous paragraph. 
> NIfty, huh?)
> 
> So what does one do with imperfect beings? The Nobel peace prize was 
> established by A. Nobel who made his fortune developing and selling 
> dynamite. Does that taint Nobel? You bet. Is it better that he spent some of 
> that explosive money on something like a peace prize instead of further war 
> machinery? You bet. It's Better. Not good. Certainly not best.
> 
> Are there "fatal" flaws, flaws so unredeemable that one cannot tip the 
> scales back? I guess that will be in the eyes of the beholder. At the least 
> one has to make an effort to fix the problem -- hiding and accusing 
> conspirators of creating it is not a fix.
> 
> Was Freud a flawed man? No doubt. But he studied himself, and he and we 
> learn from his observations. Jung never faced up to his antisemitism, his 
> philandering, or the many other now well known flaws in his behavior. I 
> guess if one is looking for a way to ignore antisemitism (or condone 
> sleeping with one's patients), Jung can be one's model. Let's not forget 
> that Brian Victoria has shown that the same pack of Shimamo backers in Japan 
> were also deep antisemites. These are NOT unrelated matters, Tim.
> 
> Dan 
> 
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