Psychoanalytic

Personal Evaluation

Throughout my life, I have frequently heard Christians use to Freudian theory as a catch-all concept defining the evil agenda of secular psychology to remove the need for God from man. While I agree that many concepts of Freud are antagonistic to Christian philosophy, I also feel that Freud, in a sublime way, confirms Biblical truth. General revelation specifies that all men have built into them an understanding of universal right and wrong; a direct appeal to absolute moral law. Furthermore, the Bible defines that all men understand that they innately cannot live up to this law, a testimony that no one is perfect. This component of general revelation defines that man has a sinful nature. The Freudian concept of the id as a self-seeking potentially destructive entity to the human psyche is a direct manifestation of this universal truth. Psychoanalysis, therefore, recognizes the human propensity for selfishness and counter-moral actions, an indirect admission to man's sinful nature. In essence, Freud's theory validates Biblical truth that even sinners understand moral law. The problem with Freud, however, is that even though he admitted the selfish nature of man, he did not have the truth to understand what to do with it, thus devised the system of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalytic components such as defense mechanisms and the unconscious mind are, I believe, valuable contributions to psychology. Concepts such as the Freudian slip are so readily understood, that they have made their way into mainstream knowledge. On the other hand, the postulation that children are driven by sexual urges towards their parents is a bizarre one. I cannot help but to wonder if Freud himself had these fantasies and that this entire phase of his theory is simply a large scale defense mechanism of projection that Freud imposed on mankind in order to relieve his own childhood guilt