In the final chapter of David Adam's book called, --- "The man who could not stop"; a very strange sentence appears. It must be a result of David's meetings with a psychiatrist who favored Freudian principles.
On Page 279 David is listing the possible reasons for his OCD
behavior. The last two lines contain
the following words: “The psychological
conflict that I suffered and buried when I was cruelly separated from my faeces
[feces] when I was potty trained.”
The above words represent the most flagrant
non-valuable information that I have ever encountered from a psychiatrist in
his attempt to help his patient. To
David Adam’s credit, earlier in the book he does write about the dismissal of
most of Freud’s ideas in modern psychiatry.
The above two lines of offending advice seems to have
survived in David’s mind in spite of his previous warnings. David could not have come up with these words
on his own, only a Freudian style psychiatrist would use them.
Indeed, if separating an individual from his or her
stools when one is potty trained constitutes the beginning of psychological
conflict and suffering then, --- 99.9999% of us have such problems.
I suppose if the patient states that he was chastised or physically abused when he or she made a mistake in the "potty training" period, then the Freudian-leaning psychiatrist would state that this was the reason for his or her unresolved psychological problems and hang-ups. In other words, the Psychiatrist can not be wrong.
Actually, this conclusion on the part of the
psychiatrist is more in keeping with his or her desire to make as much money
from their patient as they possibly can, --- rather than help the patient
personally.
The real cruelty would occur if the individual in question
was never trained to control his or her solid waste removal. It appears altogether likely that Freud
himself had problems with potty-training and decided that this was an important
aspect of the maturing process. It
certainly is important but it does not mean that this one achievement can
become the tipping point towards normal or abnormal behavior.
Freud used this type of reasoning in far too many
instances and it usually took him into a dead end. Unfortunately some of those dead ends were
suicides by his patients that were not being helped but rather hindered by
Freud’s disjointed meanderings.
As I state rather forcefully in my book called, ---
The Human Mind, --- life is nothing more or less than an unending series of
achievements each one of which has the potential to activate the emotion of
fear.
If one’s failed attempts at success in too many of
those achievements leads to a conglomeration of distorted fears, then indeed ones behavior is
affected adversely and someone, usually a psychiatrist, might label you with one
of an expanding list of problems that indicate that you are mentally ill. This nonsense has got to stop, --- yesterday if
possible.
