God enables us by the Holy Spirit to understand truth. Yes, we are limited by fallibility and sin. But truth is transcendent and objective and we can know it. Hence postmodernism’s great contradiction:_ If we insist that objectivity is a myth, then we must also admit that we can never be too sure about that!
Freudian Cultism and “Christian” Counseling
One of the most destructive postmodernists in history was Sigmund Freud. Likewise, one of the biggest problems in the church today is pastors who want to counsel church members along the lines of psychotherapy, rather than instructing them to obey what they already know God’s Word says to do. Unfortunately, the philosophy of counseling that has come into the church is traced directly from Freudian psychoanalysis.
Sigmund Freud taught that there is an unconscious mind that is chaotic. There lies buried unresolved conflicts from our childhood that were constellated around one of three “psycho-sexual stages.” With the exception of the “startling insight” that bad parents can cause problems for children even later in life, Freud was wrong about almost everything.
_Freud was a buffoon.
His personal life showed that he cared only about himself and fulfilling his own need for carnal gratification. He taught that neurotics need to vent their repressed memories and that healing can come only through catharsis. This is completely wrong. In fact, the more we dwell on past hurts the more ingrained they become. Sometimes it helps people to have their feelings validated. “Of course you feel that way, you are right to feel that way! You would be crazy not to feel that way!” It feels like a relief to hear that, but it doesn’t solve the problem … ever.
No matter how much we vent our repressed feelings, this is not the way to heal inner emotional conflict. In fact, prior to Freud no one taught this. It’s not biblical and it’s never been proven that it can help to restore emotional and mental health. Almost all studies show that psychoanalysis does little more than make the patient dependent on it. At $100 an hour. What a racket!
Healing comes only through forgiveness and prayer.
Where does it say that in the Bible?
“And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.”
- Matthew 6:12-13
All of us deserve hell, so when we realize that we can forgive even as God forgives us, then that becomes a source of joy, healing — and most importantly — deliverance from evil. But if we keep talking about how much others hurt us, then we haven’t really forgiven, nor have we accepted God’s power to deliver us from evil.
If another Christian has hurt me, I believe in seeking justice through directly confronting the person who has sinned against me. If he refuses to repent, then I should go a second time with a witness. If he repents, I have won my brother. If he still refuses, then I can tell it to the church. Or I can just walk away from the conflict with a clear conscience (Matthew 18:15-17).
Whenever I have done the right thing in confrontation, God always has given me a sound mind about it in time. And whenever the person has refused to see his error, God has always brought providential sanctions on him further down the road. And whenever I have thought someone else wrongfully confronted me, I have stood my ground and God himself has shown who was right in the end.
God is great. God is good. God is just. In the grand scheme of things, if you just obey what He says, no one can ever rip you off.
We all need to be a bit more like Joseph and David and a lot less like Judah and Saul.
The problem is that we have this cult of victimization that teaches us that we need to dwell on our hurt, nurture it and then use it to validate our status as a loser. Somehow we think this makes us a winner. It’s all Freudian nonsense and Christians should know better.
This cult of victimization has a very strong pull. People go on daytime television and spill their guts to an audience that only loathes and pities them. They think that by portraying themselves as losers that some type of justice will prevail. But the catharsis they experience as the American viewing public dines on their wretched bile makes them all the more loathsome.
Then Jerry Springer appears at the end of the show and says:
“Well, what did we learn today?”
We learned, Jerry, that a God-hating, womanizing coke-fiend from Austria named Sigmund Freud still has the ability to wreck havoc in American culture even though he’s been dead for 70 years. And more tragically, the church is partly responsible.
“And God bless you, Jerry! See you next week!”
2 Comments
This is the Freudian idea that we can get delivered from emotional psychoses, by venting them through a dramatic display of emotion.
It's an idea from ancient Greek philosophy -- the Greeks thought that the emotions were part of the sensual person and which is divorced from the spiritual person.
Supposedly catharsis was a away in which the spiritual side could cleanse itself from sensual bondage.
The Bible speaks of a unified person, however, body, soul, and spirit, that each need to be sanctified as part of one human soul.
Cleansing anger with a display of anger won't work for this reason. It just makes you more prone to the behavior in the future.