Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (32 page)

BOOK: Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
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I believed (their) stories, and consequently supposed that I had discovered the roots of the subsequent neuroses in these experiences of sexual seduction in childhood ... If the reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame him.

In fact Freud went so far as to say that "... I was at last obliged to recognize that these scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up." In other words, his patients had lied to him, and he had been naive to believe them. Rather than having been victims of sexual advances from their parents, they had made up stories "to cover up the recollection of infantile sexual activity ..." He continues: "The grain of truth contained in this fantasy lies in the fact that the father, by way of his innocent caresses in earliest childhood, has actually awakened the little girl's sexuality (the same thing applies to the little boy and his mother)."

According to Masson, "giving up his 'erroneous' view allowed Freud to participate again in a medical society that had earlier ostracized him. In 1905 Freud publicly retracted the seduction theory. By 1908, respected physicians had joined Freud: Paul Federn, Isidor Sadger, Sandor Ferenczi, Max Eitingon, Karl Jung. . . . The psychoanalytic movement had been born but an important truth had been left behind."

When Masson went on to publish his beliefs about why Freud had abandoned the seduction theory, the psychoanalytic community did not at all take kindly to his indictment of the foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis. The Assault On Truth became itself the object of derision and pressure from the psychoanalytic community which refused to believe the evidence that Masson was publishing.

The first indication of trouble ahead came from Freud's daughter, Anna Freud, who voiced her displeasure when Masson began pressing her for the reasons why the letters quoted above had never been published. But the full fury of the psychoanalytic establishment was to come after the publication of preliminary papers divulging the author's discoveries, particularly those surrounding Freud's studies at the Paris Morgue in the 1880s. There he was likely to have witnessed autopsies performed on children who had been sexually mutilated and murdered by adults.

What Masson was doing in his research for The Assault On Truth was nothing less than uncovering evidence so damning that it called into question the whole foundation of psychoanalysis itself. Anna Freud virtually admitted that she had deleted her father's crucial letters dealing with the seduction theory and childhood rape. Masson wrote:

I began to notice what appeared to be a pattern in the omissions made by Anna Freud in the original, unabridged edition. In the letters written after September 1897 (when Freud was supposed to have "given up" his "seduction" theory), all the case histories dealing with sexual seduction of children were excised.

When Masson's book was finally published, he was already cast out, and the reason is obvious: He was accusing Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, of having sold out. Moreover,

I believe that Freud is largely responsible for. . . having given intellectual sophistication to a wrong view (that women invent rape) [and] for the perpetuation of a view that is comforting to male society.

He was also saying that the doctrines of modern psychoanalysis rest on a very shaky foundation indeed:

The psychoanalytic movement that grew out of Freud's accommodation to the views of his peers holds to the present position that Freud's earlier position was simply an aberration.

Masson was attacked, as he says, with more vitriol and personal "ad hominem" arguments than he was with anything substantive, and he wound up taking to court one reviewer, Jill Malcolm and her magazine, The New Yorker, in a famous libel suit—which he won. Robert Goldman, writing in The California Monthly, would probably have agreed with the decision when he wrote:

. . . Malcolm's account of Jeffrey Masson is a tendentious, dishonest, and malicious piece of character assassination, all the more pernicious because of its studied tone of mildly amused detachment. Had her articles (and now book) never appeared, the arguments of Masson's book surely would have been given a fairer and more dispassionate hearing than is now seemingly possible.

With Masson's study of Freud we find a very clear indication that the so-called intellectual community is as much a part of the suppression syndrome as any other, despite pretensions to considered rationality or intellectual stewardship. The roughing up that people like Masson receive only serves to indicate how fundamentally insecure is our existential human condition. Our hold on honesty is tenuous; we seem ready to sell out when push comes to shove.

This goes far to explain why we have come so little way from the witch burnings of Salem. Masson is a classic whistle-blower; the child who brings our attention to the nakedness of the emperor; the fire stealer who has his liver pecked out every day while chained to the proverbial rock.

Masson's arguments and evidence are certainly convincing, coming as they do from primary sources either suppressed or ignored. If he is right, we begin to see psychoanalysis itself as politically determined and fundamentally flawed. If he is wrong, a lot of people have spent a lot of time trying to defame him. To this day there have been no refutations that we have been able to locate.

The academics must open their minds and accept the truths presented. Histories of countless individuals have gone unheard because classic Freudian psychoanalysis has turned a deaf ear to them. Perhaps it is time to turn the tables, and disempower psychoanalysis.

The Burial
of Living
Technology

Jeane Manning

Threatening to hang the fifty-eight-year-old man and to harm his family if he did not cooperate, Adolf Hitler forced an Austrian inventor to build a flying craft which levitated without burning any fuel. The inventor had previously produced electrical power from a unique suction turbine by the same implosion principles, using air or water in creating the force. The Third Reich wanted these inventions developed quickly. But the inventor took his time; understandably he did not want to give Hitler a technological advantage.

The Austrian, Viktor Schauberger, was known in his time as the Water Wizard. The courageous inventor built prototype examples of beneficial technology, in his effort to turn humanity away from deathdealing technologies. He defended Earth's water, air and soil, but at the end he was out-manoeuvred by people with lesser motives.

Schauberger was a big full-bearded man and could be ferociously gruff; he had no patience with greed-motivated fools. But he was untiringly patient when learning from his teacher—the natural world. In Alpine forests, along rivers and in the fields of wise old traditional farmers, the forester/scientist learned about a life-enhancing energy which enters a substance such as water or air through inward-spiralling movements of the substance. During his lifetime of persevering study he copied nature's motions in his own engineering.

"Prevailing technology uses the wrong forms of motion. It is based on entropy—on motions which nature uses to break down and scatter materials. Nature uses a different type of motion for creating order and new growth," he admonished in a voice stern with conviction.

The prevailing explosion based technology—fuel-burning and atomsplitting—fills the world with expanding, heat-generating centrifugal motion, he warned. On the other hand, energy production and other technologies could instead use inward-moving, cold-generating centripetal motion, w h i c h nature employs to build and enliven substances.

191

Even hydroelectric power plants use destructive motion, he said; they pressure water and chop it through turbines. The result is dead water. His suction turbine, on the other hand, invigorated water. The result, he said, was clean healthy water.

His stubborn certainty angered academics who assumed superiority over a largely self-educated man. It is not surprising that he was sometimes abrasive; the Schauberger heritage included defiant courage. His ancestors were privileged Bavarian aristocracy with a manor named Schauburg, and in the thirteenth century this ancient family lost its royal privileges by publicly defying a powerful Bishop.

IN TUNE WITH NATURE

A few centuries later, about 1650
A
.
D
., a family member moved to Austria and began a branch of the Schaubergers which specialized in caring for forest and wildlife. Breathing the scent of sun-warmed pines, generations of Schaubergers then lived their family motto of fidus in silvis silentibus— faithful to the silent forests. Viktor's father was master woodsman in Holzschlag at Lake Plockenstein, and Viktor absorbed accumulated wisdom of generations of forest wardens. His mother also taught him to tune in to nature—to listen to its singing in a mountain stream as well as its whispering through the treetops, and to learn its cycles and rhythms.

The family's closeness to their environment was not only on a spiritual or poetic level; it was based on practical observations. For example, Viktor's elder relatives respected a certain vigour which they found in cool unpolluted water. So, instead of irrigating meadows in warm sunlight when the water was sluggish, they spent moonlit nights lifting gates on their irrigation canals so that the liveliest [most life-giving] water would flow onto their land. It grew noticeably more grain and grasses than did the neighbouring lands.

From childhood Viktor aspired to be a forest warden like his father, grandfather and a line of great-grandfathers. As a boy he explored nearby woods and then roamed farther. He came to know the rumbling rivers and the musical streams which feed them, just as other young people know streets and hallways and sounds of their childhood. However, he noticed that natural waterways rarely flowed in straight corridors. Instead, a river undulates through the landscape, swerving to one side and then to the other. Within the larger meandering caused by Earth's turning, water coils around a twisting central axis as it sweeps downstream. Keeping in mind this inward-spiralling motion, Schauberger later developed the basis for a technology in tune with nature.

When Viktor reached university age, his father wanted him to t r a i n as an arboriculturist. The young man resisted the pressure to limit his outlook to the academic viewpoint. He quit university, but later did graduate from forest school with state certification as a forest warden, and then apprenticed under an older warden. Throughout his life he continued to learn, from books and wise observers as well as directly from nature.

ROYAL GAMEKEEPER

Schauberger had the opportunity—rare in this century—of living for years in a vast unspoiled forest. After the First World War ended, Prince Adolf von Schaumburg-Lippe hired him to guard 21,000 hectares [51,870 acres] of mostly virgin forest in a remote district. As he patiently observed rhythms of life in this huge watershed, Schauberger saw phenomena which may be impossible to find today. One terrifying example, which in the end impressed him with the self-regulation of nature, was a landlocked lake which rejuvenated itself before his eyes. One warm day he was about to strip and swim in the isolated lake, when it roared with sudden movement. Whorls appeared on the surface and half-submerged logs started to move. The debris circled, faster and faster while a massive whirlpool formed in the middle of the lake. Then the huge logs sucked into the centre upended and disappeared into the whirlpool. After the waters stilled momentarily, a gigantic waterspout startled Schauberger even more. Turning as it rose, the spout reached as high as a house then settled back, and the waters began to rise on the shore. The young gamekeeper ran; he had seen enough. But the incident added to the mystery of this substance which fascinated him—water. Schauberger was well-placed for developing his unique understanding of water; his workplace was big enough for interconnected life processes to mesh without hindrance there. Life forms interacted in balance; it was still an unbroken web of life.

Six foot tall Viktor at that time of his life was said to be a picture of contentment—muscular good health from hiking the high country, and alert intelligence described in his facial features—farseeing eyes, the slight curve of his nose reminiscent of an eagle's beak, and the determined but good-humoured set to his mouth. He wrote that this was a happy time, while he watched the larger animals migrate with the seasons and observed salmon and trout in cold mountain streams. Countless hours of studying the fish in motion gave him insights which later led to one of his inventions, called the trout turbine. Picture him at rest on a summer afternoon, his long frame stretched on a grassy riverbank. Sunlight filters through a canopy of leafy branches overhanging the river. Deep in this pristine mountain setting, the combination of his sharply observant eyes and his i n t u i t i o n was synthesizing new knowledge.

LEARNING FROM THE SOURCE

He learned that water swirling over rocks in a tree-shaded natural setting carries a vitality which is real as an electric current carried by wires. And minerals carried along on that vitalized inward-curling water enrich the trees whose rootlets seek the mud. Trees and water, water and trees. Each needs to have the other growing in a natural state.

The young forest warden once hiked up a mountain with some hunters, old men who were familiar with the area. High on the mountain they found a heap of rocks which had been part of a stone hut which had arched over a mountain spring for as long as anyone could remember. Hikers traditionally would duck into the cool interior of the hut and ladle a drink of refreshing water. Now, however, someone had dismantled the hut and exposed the spring to sunlight. To the surprise of the old hunters who came there seasonally, the now exposed water shrank back into the earth; the spring dried up for the first time, and it stayed dry. After months and much head-scratching, they decided to rebuild the stone hut. Eventually the spring returned and continued to flow, season after season.

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