We shall read the word of God from the book of the prophet Ezekiel chapter 18. Ezekiel chapter 18. Beginning to read at the first verse. The word of the Lord came to me. What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel? The fathers eat sour grapes. and the children's teeth are set on edge. As surely as I live, declares the sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For every living soul belongs to me, the father as well as the son. Both alike belong to me. The soul who sins is the one who will die. Suppose there is a righteous man who does what is just and right. He does not eat at the mountain shrines or look to the idols of the house of Israel. He does not defile his neighbor's wife or lie with a woman during her period. He does not oppress anyone but returns what he took in pledge for a loan. He does not commit robbery but gives his food to the hungry. and provides clothing for the naked. He does not lend at usury or take excessive interest. He withholds his hand from doing wrong and judges fairly between man and man. He follows my decrees and faithfully keeps my laws. That man is righteous. He will surely live, declares the Sovereign Lord. Suppose he is a violent son who sheds blood or does any of these other things, though the father has done none of them. He eats at the mountain shrines. He defiles his neighbor's wife. He oppresses the poor and needy. He commits robbery. He does not return what he took in pledge. He looks to the idols. He does detestable things. He lends at usury and takes excessive interest. Will such a man live? He will not. Because he has done all these detestable things, he will surely be put to death and his blood will be in his own head. But suppose this son has a son who sees all the sins his father commits. And though he sees them, he does not do such things. He does not eat at the mountain shrines or look to the idols of the house of Israel. He does not defile his neighbor's wife. He does not oppress anyone or require a pledge for a loan. He does not commit robbery, but gives his food to the hungry and provides clothing for the naked. He withholds his hand from sin and takes no usury or excessive interest. He keeps my laws and follows my decrees. He will not die for his father's sin. He will surely live. but his father will die for his own sin, because he practiced extortion, robbed his brother, and did what was wrong among his people. Yet you ask, why does the son not share the guilt of the father? Since the son has done what is just and right, and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him. But if a wicked man turns away from all the sins he has committed and keeps all my decrees, and does what is just and right, he will surely live. He will not die. None of the offenses he has committed will be remembered against him. Because of the righteous things he has done, he will live. Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the sovereign Lord? Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live? But if a righteous man turns from his righteousness, and commits sin and does the same detestable things the wicked man does, will he live? None of the righteous things he has done will be remembered. Because of the unfaithfulness he is guilty of and because of the sins he has committed, he will die. Yet you say the way of the Lord is not just. Here, O house of Israel, is my way unjust. Is it not your ways that are unjust? If a righteous man turns from his righteousness and commits sin, he will die for it. Because of the sin he has committed, he will die. But if a wicked man turns away from the wickedness he has committed and does what is just and right, he will save his life. Because he considers all the offenses he has committed and turns away from them, He will surely live. He will not die. Yet the house of Israel says, the way of the Lord is not just. Are my ways unjust, O house of Israel? Is it not your ways that are unjust? Therefore, O house of Israel, I will judge you, each one according to his ways, declares the sovereign Lord. Repent, Turn away from all your offenses, then sin will not be your downfall. Rid yourselves of all the offenses you have committed and get a new heart and a new spirit. Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the sovereign Lord. Repent and live. Amen. May God bless the reading of his word to our hearts. It may seem somewhat foolish to study Freudianism at the end of the 20th century, because although it has been one of the great idols of this century, many people would say that that idol is dead. The teachings of Sigmund Freud have been largely discredited, and very few people still practice psychoanalysis today. And yet Freudianism is not dead, because there are still those influential people who follow his teaching. Only last week, in the international news magazine Time, There was a letter from a Freudian commending his teaching to others. And what is more important, the pollution of Freud's ideas continues. Freudianism in the 1990s is rather like a factory situated on high ground beside a river, which for many years poured out poisonous chemicals into the water. That factory has now been shut down. The chemicals are not going into the water any longer. But miles further down the river, in the great towns and cities, people are still drinking poisoned water. Water poisoned long ago and far away. It's still coming downstream, and it's still doing damage. That is exactly what has happened with Freudianism. The factory has almost closed down. It's working on short time. But further down the river, in people's water tanks and cisterns and pipes, the poison is still to be found. He is a most influential figure. Many of his slogans have become part of our language. It was Freud who coined the term inferiority complex, guilt complex, was another of his terms. The ego, the death wish, the Freudian slip, all these are expressions that are used in English. It's one of the most poisonous systems of falsehood of the 20th century. And this evening, in the short time at our disposal, I want to just say a few words at the beginning about Sigmund Freud And then to look with you at three of the main errors of his system. Just for your interest and to round out the picture, who was this man? Well, he was born of Jewish parents in 1856 in Moravia, which at the moment is part of the nation of Czechoslovakia. And he moved with his parents to the Austrian capital of Vienna when he was four. and lived there for most of his life. He studied medicine as a young man and decided to specialise in nervous diseases. Most of his original work was completed by the end of the 19th century. His great book, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published in 1900 and he was well known in medical and psychiatric circles. but he didn't become popularly known until after the First World War. One of the unusual events which happened in the First World War was the number of very brave soldiers who were taken out of the front line suffering from severe mental disturbance. The popular term was shell shock. Many of the leading officers in the Austrian army suffered shell shock, and they were treated by the army with abominable cruelty, either by bullying or severe electric shocks to cure them and to get them back in the front line. The treatment was so terrible that many of these men committed suicide rather than face further cure. And it was only after the First World War that the details of this cruelty came out. There was an outburst of fury among their highly placed relatives, and the Austrian government was compelled to call in a commission, and at the head of this commission was Sigmund Freud, and he was given the charge of dealing with these shell-shock victims. This made him a public figure, it was his breakthrough, and he never looked back. And from then on he was an enormously influential figure in Western Europe and in its culture and civilization. He was the founder of the practice of psychoanalysis. Now what he taught was, of course, exactly what people wanted to hear. And he expressed it in very gripping and memorable language. It was fascinating, it was exciting, it was related to sex, which people always like, and it seemed to have relevance for many other spheres of human life. So you have Freudian artists, you have Freudian novelists, In 1919, the French writer Marcel Proust began publishing a big series of, I think unreadable, Freudian novels. And in 1922, James Joyce, the Irish writer, published his novel, if you call it a novel, Ulysses, which again is a Freudian book. Almost the whole intellectual world bowed down and worshipped Sigmund Freud. He continued to practice and write and lecture throughout the interwar years until the Nazis invaded Austria in 1938 and began to persecute the Jews. Freud was then in his eighties and he fled for refuge to London where he died in 1939. Let us come then to look at some of the errors of his system. As a system of treatment for mental problems it has been shown to be in the whole a gigantic and costly failure. One writer says it is more suited to cosset the unhappy than to cure the sick. So it's fine as long as there's nothing wrong with you. A survey showed that of Freudian patients who spent up to 350 hours on a psychiatrist's couch, two-thirds of them were improved by the treatment. Now you may think that's impressive. The only problem was that of those other people who received no treatment whatsoever from anybody, two-thirds also improved. Freud's system of treatment failed because of its falsehood. One writer describes it as isolated nuggets of truth in a general theory that is false. Now this evening I am certainly not going to try to deal with the strengths and weaknesses of psychoanalysis, you'll be relieved to hear. I'm not qualified to talk about that. I'm speaking rather as a pastor. What I want to do is to set before you three of Freud's ideas as simply as I can, so that you will recognize them when you meet them in the world. And you will meet them in the world. And that when you recognize them, you will know that they are false, that they are unscriptural, that they are damaging. and you will know where they come from. That's why we're studying these idols. When the children of Israel were surrounded by false gods, the great danger was that subconsciously, unconsciously, they would be influenced by these false gods. And the prophets had to describe these idols to them so that they could recognize them and fear them and avoid them. And our world is full of idols. We don't want to be influenced by them. in any way. So we want to be able to identify their false teachings. And of course I'm greatly oversimplifying, and please don't go away this evening thinking you know a great deal about Sigmund Freud, because I know very, very little, and many of you will know less. But it seems to me that Freud was seriously in error, from our perspective, in at least three crucial areas. In the first place he was wrong about conscience. He was wrong about conscience. Freud taught that conscience was not a gift from God. Freud taught that conscience was not a guide between right and wrong. In fact he taught that there was really no such thing as right are wrong. Freud said there are three parts in every one of us. The two basic parts are the I and the it. The I, I myself, and the it, he used the Latin words, the ego and the id. Now the it is the basic part of ourselves. our subconscious urges and drives and desires. Underneath the surface, we don't know it's there, but it's there, and it's driving us, and it's very powerful. And this it which we all have, this id, is aggressive, and above all it is sexually motivated. And it wants to be expressed, it wants to get out. The I is the conscious self. And I have to decide whether I'm going to let these things out or not. Whether I'm going to express my aggressive impulses and drives. Now Freud taught that as people lived together, everybody expressed themselves. They killed, they stole, They betrayed one another. And after centuries had passed, people said, we can't live like this. We have to have some laws so that human life is possible, so that people can live together. So human beings began to say, now you shouldn't kill. You shouldn't commit adultery. You shouldn't steal. These things make life unpleasant and difficult for everyone. And so they began to teach their children not to do these things. There's nothing wrong with these things, it's just that society decided that they were not useful. And they created a safety device called a conscience, or as Freud called it, a super ego. Something that is above the eye. Filled with a list of do's and don'ts. And the super ego's job was to be a jailer. to keep the door shut on the it. Don't let it out. Freud wrote in 1920, civilization obtains mastery over the individual's desire for aggression by setting up an agency within him to watch over it like a garrison in a conquered city. So you've got this horrible it inside you. Well, we don't really disagree with that. And the it keeps wanting to get out. And society has created a jailer to lock the door and hold the door, and to keep the it in. And whenever our conscience is disobeyed, we suffer pain, and the person feels guilty. Now Freud taught that they're not guilty. There's no such thing as being guilty. There's no divine law. There is no right and wrong. There are no commandments. There is no authoritative code. It's just something that has been developed by society. It's just something your parents taught you. And their parents taught them. It's just a tradition, a habit, a ritual. And what is needed today, Freud taught, was that people need their conscience weakened. Conscience needs to be exposed as the fraud that it is. The therapist has to say to people, let it all hang out. Express yourself. Whatever's in there, let it come out. It's bad for you to keep it in. If you keep it in, it'll twist you, it'll distort you, it'll come out in all sorts of peculiar ways. Self-expression is the great goal. And if everyone expresses themselves, then everyone will be mentally healthy. We should be living in an age of universal mental health and well-being. And the healthiest people should be the people who let it all come. If you don't like someone, Tell them you don't like it. The sort of thing you see in children and the sort of thing you see in old people. Some of their restraints are removed and they're quite happy to say what they want to say. This was Freud's teaching. Conscience is to be disregarded. We've got to be bold enough to disregard our conscience for the fraud that it is. and express what we want to express, whatever it is. And friends, I needn't take time to show how far removed this is from the biblical view of conscience, as that faculty by which we are made aware of sin, part of the image of God in us, speaking to every human being of a great, divine, unchangeable law, above ourselves and beyond ourselves, a law which we have broken and for which we are guilty. Freud was wrong about conscience. Those when I call him fraud, that's a Freudian slip. He was secondly wrong about true religion. Freud hated Christianity. When he was a little boy, some so-called Christians threw dirt at his father as a Jew. And the little boy felt ashamed that his father never retaliated. And he vowed that he would get revenge. Some people think that his whole life was a revenge. It's significant that he began to practice psychoanalysis on Easter Sunday. And for a man to whom every action was significant, I don't believe that date was any accident. He himself described himself, and I quote, as a completely godless Jew, a hopeless pagan. And he attacked religion in general and Christianity in particular. His great book against Christianity or religion was The Future of an Illusion, published in 1927. And in this he describes all religion, all religion, as a system based on human wishes. Freud says man was terrified by the world around him, by the thunderstorm, by the lightning, by the wind, by the earthquake, by the huge mountains, by the bottomless sea. He felt insecure, the animals in the jungle, the onset of disease or sickness. Man was lonely, insecure and frightened, faced with the challenges and puzzles of the natural world. So what did he do? What did he do to make himself feel happy and secure? He invented the idea of a God or Gods. He said to himself, there is someone up there, someone strong, someone great, someone who I can please, someone who will look after me. Freud said that God was a substitute father. I won't weary you with all his teaching about the so-called Oedipus Complex, the son in Greek tragedy who killed his father and married his mother. That was at the depth of Freud's teaching. But for him, religion was a projection of our relation with our earthly father onto a divine scale. Insecure, lonely people creating a God out of their whole imagination. He describes it as an interim neurosis. Here's what he writes. The attempt to secure protection against suffering through a delusion is made by a considerable number of people. The religions of mankind must be classed among such mass delusions. Needless to say, no one who shares a delusion ever recognises it as such. Freud teaches that religion is a delusion. It's a wish fulfilment. It is a crutch for helpless, inadequate, insecure people who can't cope without it. And you and I have met that. We have been told that. in our workplaces, in school, on the factory floor, visiting our neighbours. We hear it on the television. It is one of the staples of modern anti-Christian propaganda. There is no God, there is no revelation, there is no forgiveness, there is no salvation. Freud was wrong about religion. And then thirdly and lastly and Far and away, I believe most importantly, Freud was wrong about responsibility. This was his most damaging error, causing untold havoc in the world. One of the great elements of the Jewish-Christian inheritance which shaped Europe was the idea of the personal responsibility of the individual. You and I are accountable for the words we speak and the things we do and the thoughts we entertain, the lives we live and the people we are. Freud cut that thread. Freud taught that human beings are not responsible Man is not responsible for what he is. Man is not responsible for what he does. He is a victim. He's a victim. The problem with us is what other people have done to us. They have made us what we are. So we taught. Our parents the people who dealt with us in childhood, all those who've conditioned us in some way, they have shaped us. They have formed us. They have made us what we are. It's no use criticizing someone for wrongdoing. It's no use blaming him. He can't help it. Can't help it. Not his fault. There's no one who's bad. there are only people who are sick. And what needs to be done, Freud said, was that someone needs to take that person back into their past and to dig into their subconscious and to discover the damage which has been done. And so the dreams are analysed, the unhappy childhood experiences are brought to the surface, it's all explained, and then conscience is programmed in a new way. And they're told that they're not guilty, and that they're not to blame, but that they are to be and do whatever they want. And if they do that, it will lead to health and maturity. The slogan of Freud is, you are not responsible. And our society has gone for that hook, line, and sinker. It was expressed, I remember, in a folk song of the 60s. I went to my psychiatrist to be psychoanalyzed, to find out why I killed a cat and blacked my husband's eyes. He laid me on a downy couch to see what he could find. And here is what he dredged up from my subconscious mind. And then he gives a whole list of the things that have happened to this person. And the song ends. But I am happy. Now I've learned the lesson this has taught. That everything I do that's wrong is someone else's fault. Everything I do that's wrong is someone else's fault. The results are obvious. Parents are terrified of disciplining their children in case they inflict some long-lasting psychological damage which will bear terrible fruit in the future. They're afraid even of frustrating their children or saying no to their children or even giving their children any rules or any restrictions for fear they will damage them. The courts pay more attention to the criminal than to the person whom the criminal has robbed or injured or killed. The criminal is not to be punished, he is to be pitied, he is to be cured, he is to be rehabilitated, he is not to be held responsible. A gigantic welfare system has been built up in many of the Western democracies on Freudianism, that people cannot be expected to be responsible for their own lives and the state must be responsible for them, from the cradle to the grave. They are not responsible, they are victims. If people riot, It's bad housing. That's the problem. If a cabinet minister's children are disturbed, it's because the newspapers are writing about their father. It's the fault of the newspapers. The fact that their father has lied to and betrayed his wife and their mother He apparently doesn't feel responsible. Not a word of apology or sorrow of any kind. Just a hideous, arrogant indignation. No one is guilty. No one is to blame. No one is accountable. It's as old as Eden. The woman you gave to be with me, she gave to me, And I did eat, not my fault. Ah, the servant beguiled me, and I did eat. It's not my fault. I'm not responsible. And we could take time, but we haven't got time to look around in our world and see the havoc which this has wrought. My friends, as we conclude, what are we to say to this? And I know that for many of you, some of you, this is not theoretical. What makes Freud so dangerous is that he is saying things which are true. There are elements of truth in what he's teaching. A complete lie is never dangerous. A half-lie is very dangerous. We are deeply affected by other people. We are damaged by things which happen to us, especially in our childhood. Deeply and seriously damaged. Freud is not wrong in that. Too easy just to, as some Christians do, to just poo-poo the whole thing. That's wrong. We do have internal problems that we're not aware of, and they come out in very funny behavior. There's probably not one single person of us in this room who's so extremely well-balanced as to be free of things like that. We do have complexes. We do have shadows from the past. We do have hangovers that have shaped us and that do affect us today. And if we're going to help people, we do need to understand something of what is happening inside them. Too easy, too glib to dismiss the whole system lock, stock and barrel, yet we must say that it is cruelly, desperately, wrong. Because the Bible tells us, as we read in Ezekiel 18, that we are responsible for ourselves, for our actions, for our behavior, for our mistakes. If I do wrong, when I do wrong, I cannot blame anybody else. This illustration is not personal. Imagine a man married to the most difficult, disagreeable, awkward wife you could ever imagine. And eventually that man runs off with someone else. And in self-justification he says, well, look at my wife. Look at the way she's treated me. Look at the way she's behaved. That's my justification. We have to say as Christians, that is no justification. That is no justification. Your wife's behavior has nothing to do with your behavior. You have done wrong, you shouldn't have done wrong, and you're responsible for doing wrong, and you bear that responsibility. People want to blame shift. The scriptures don't allow us to blame shift. We are accountable. We will face God on the day of judgment and we won't then be able to say, but Lord, this happened to me or this happened to me or I was abused in this way or ill-treated in this way. We are responsible. And to tell people otherwise is a damning lie. Freudianism gives a false hope. But you see, here's the beautiful thing about this. In the real sense, Freudianism takes away hope. For if I'm only a victim, then I can't ever change. If what I am now is nothing to do with me, then what I will become has nothing to do with me. I'm just programmed And just at the mercy of events and people and forces, the gospel of Christ thunders a mighty negative. I'm speaking to people this evening, some of you have suffered Terrible. Terrible. And there isn't anything that I could say that could in any way mitigate the horror of that suffering. But I say to you, don't see yourself as a victim. You're not a victim. You're not a victim. We can look at our past and all that's difficult, all that's less than ideal, all that's unpleasant. We can look at our parents, our grandparents, our home situation, our early upbringing, all the traumas we have suffered, and they are a reality. But friends, there's a greater reality. and the greater reality is the Lord Jesus Christ. That mighty, kind, gracious, powerful Savior who has come to us and has put His arms around us and has said, I will never leave you. I am going to change you. I am going to make you perfect. I am going to stay with you and help you I'm going to set you free from the past. I'm going to break the chains of those injuries. I'm going to remake you and remould you into a glorious creature. It's easy for us to fall into a helpless, pessimistic, whining mentality. Oh, but it's my parents who are to blame. It's my upbringing to blame. It's my personalities to blame. It's all the experiences I've had that are to blame. We're not imprisoned in the past. Jesus Christ can break the chains of the past and bring us out of the dark jail of the past into the light of the present and the future. We're not programmed by our childhood influences. We can change. We can obey God. We can be what we are meant to be. A converted murderer once wrote, I can do all things through him who gives me strength. The most poisonous aspect of Freudianism is the way it seeps into our hearts and minds and gives us this helpless victim mentality that we spend our lives feeling sorry for ourselves and whinging and blaming others instead of looking. fixing our eyes and keeping looking on the person of Jesus Christ. Can he help me? Is he stronger than those influences? Yes, he's stronger than all the evil forces in the world. He's stronger than every disadvantage. He's stronger than every trauma and every wound. That's what Freud didn't know and couldn't know. The person of the Savior I can do all things through him who gives me strength. And perhaps tonight you're sitting in a state of defeat, defeated by some sin, defeated by some memory, defeated by some trauma. You're saying to yourself, it has got me beaten. It's too strong for me. Yes, it has got you beaten. but it hasn't got Christ beaten. It's not too strong for him. He's the strong one. Let us lift up our eyes to him and trust him, give ourselves to him and say, Lord, I am weak, but you're strong. By your help, I can do all things. Amen.