244 Ideals in the Modern World
the alternatives. Anything that could conceivably change the life of
renunciation into the life of joy is an object of Freud’s debunk ing
drive. You might save yourself through love; you might save
yourself through creating art; you might save yourself through
compassion; you might do so by exercise of courage or of idealistic
thought. But all these activities are out of bounds. Embracing them,
for Freud, causes only trou ble.
It is possi ble that to deny human beings these primary satisfac-
tions makes them sick. It causes a disease, it does not cure it. If you
live life without courage, compassion, the true exercise of intellect
and creation through love, then you will not feel very well. You may
even get quite ill. When you cordon off the great sources of human
meaning that have arisen through the centuries and say they are all
illusory, then you will have contributed something to creating an
ill and worried herd. There will be no chance to redeem the inner
State of Self with its divisions that Freud so ably describes. Freud,
in other words, is right about everything once you have joined him
in shrinking the world to certain dimensions. No one can tell you
more about Self, and this knowledge becomes a form of absolute
wisdom when you are persuaded that Self is all that there authen-
tically is. Then, when the banishment of ideals has made you
ill, Freud can show you, through psychoanalysis and through the
ethical program of his thought, how to feel a little better than you
do. Psychoanalysis helps the culture of Self create disease. And this
disease psychoanalysis will happily help cure.
One will be told that there have been many developments in psy-
chotherapy since Freud, and this may be true. But it will not be
easy to fi nd any therapeutic form advocating creative Eros, or the
quest for unconditioned Truth, or risking one’s life in a just cause,
or selling what one has and living for the poor. Anyone who does
such things, or even contemplates them, has left the regions of
modern psy cho logy behind. Any so- called therapy that enjoins