Friedrich Hayek's Fascinating Take on Sigmund Freud

 Sigmund Freud

In 1978 a group of economists and other scholars were brought together to interview the Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek as part of the UCLA Oral History Program.

They were Earlene Graver, Axel Leijonhufvud, Leo Rosten Jack High, James Buchanan, Robert Bork Thomas Hazlett, Armen A. Alchian and Robert Chitester.

The interviews in total went on for 15.25 hours.

I have long been aware of the youtube videos of the interviews but just recently became aware of an online transcript.

This has provided me with the opportunity to poke around in the transcript in more detail about different themes in the oral history which I had listened to some years ago.

One theme I found fascinating was Hayek's take on Sigmund Freud. Hayek seems to think Freud was in a way anti-civilization for his attempts at attempting to remove repression.

There is a lot to discuss with regard to Hayek's view on the subject, but for now, I am just going to drop the Hayek comments on Freud here. But do note Hayek's mention of Erich Fromm who was part of the Frankfurt School of critical theory that still haunts us to this day. Hayek spotted the trouble early on with Fromm and traced it back to Freud.

Below is Hayek's mentions of Freud in the transcripts. There is some overlap on topics because different questioners sometimes asked similar questions.

The exchange with Graver:

HAYEK: Karl Popper is four or five years my junior; so we did not belong to
the same academic generation. But our environment in
which we formed our ideas was very much the same. It was

very largely dominated by discussion, on the one hand,

with Marxists and, on the other hand, with Freudians.

Both these groups had one very irritating attribute:

they insisted that their theories were, in principle,

irrefutable. Their system was so built up that there

was no possibility-- I remember particularly one occasion

when I suddenly began to see how ridiculous it all was

when I was arguing with Freudians, and they explained,

"Oh, well, this is due to the death instinct." And I said,

"But this can't be due to the [death instinct]." "Oh,

then this is due to the life instinct." [laughter] Well,

if you have these two alternatives, of course there's no

way of checking whether the theory is true or not. And

that led me, already, to the understanding of what became

Popper's main systematic point: that the test of empirical

science was that it could be refuted, and that any system

which claimed that it was irrefutable was by definition not

scientific. I was not a trained philosopher; I didn't

elaborate this. It was sufficient for me to have recognized

this, but when I found this thing explicitly argued and

justified in Popper, I just accepted the Popperian phi

losophy for spelling out what I had always felt.

---

The Exchange with  Leijonhufvud:

 HAYEK: In a way, you see, I am arguing against Freud, but the problem is the same

as in Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. I only

don't believe that you can remove these discontents by

protecting-

LEIJONHUFVUD: --becoming uncivilized. [laughter]

HAYEK: You can only become civilized by these repres

sions which Freud so much dislikes.

---

The Exchange with  Rosten

HAYEK : Well, you see, I spent my university days already

arguing with these Marxists--my opponents were Marxists

and Freudians. We had endless discussions, and it was

really what I thought was the poverty of the argxaments of

the Marxists which turned me against socialism. Inci

dentally, I'll let you in on another thing: both the

Marxists and the Freudians had the dreadful habit of

insisting that their theories were irrefutable--logically,

absolutely cogent. That led me to see that a theory which

cannot be refuted is not scientific, and that made me later

praise [Karl] Popper when he spelled the same idea out,

which he had gained in the same experience. He was a few

years younger; so we didn't know each other. But we both

went through this experience, arguing all the time with

Marxists and Freudians.

ROSTEN: They were both ideologists of a very strong sort.

HAYEK: Oh, very strong; all very good arguers, and very

anxious to discuss...

You may be amused that a few days ago, when I was returning

the last volume of Law, Legislation and Liberty for being

printed, I inserted one sentence into it: "Man was

civilized very much against his wishes." It's really the

innate instincts which are coming out. [laughter]

ROSTEN: That's a very Freudian statement.

HAYEK: In a way. Well, it's Freudian and anti-Freudian,

because Freud, of course, wanted to relieve us of these

repressions, and my argument is that by these repressions

we became civilized....

ROSTEN : So Freud did influence you, in the sense that he

exposed the enormous power of the not-rational, or of

the rationalizing mechanisms, for the expression of self

interest in the psychological sense.

HAYEK: It may be; I'm certainly not aware of it. My

reaction to Freud was always a negative one from the

very beginning. I grew up in an atmosphere which was

governed by a very great psychiatrist who was absolutely

anti-Freudian: [Julius] Wagner- Jauregg , the man who

invented the treatment of syphilis by malaria and so on,

a Nobel Prize man. In Vienna, Freud was never-- But,

of course, that leads to a very complicated issue: the

division of Viennese society [into] the Jewish society,

the non- Jewish society. I grew up in the non- Jewish

society, which was wholly opposed to Freudianism; so I was

prejudiced to begin with and then was so irritated by the

manner in which the psychoanalysts argued--their insistence

that they have a theory which could not be refuted--that

my attitude was really anti-Freudian from the beginning.

But to the extent that he drew my attention to certain

problems, I have no doi±it that you are right.

---

HAYEK: No, in the forties. The height of the influence of

the modern psychoanalysis of "uneducation" was in the

forties and fifties. And it was in the sixties that we

got the products of that education.

ROSTEN: Yes. It was more, I think, the vulgarization of

psychoanalysis--I want to put in a word of defense there-

and the silliness of the people who were the practitioners

and the counselors. I doubt very much that Freud would ever

have approved of this, because certainly his work is not lacking

in severe moral strictures.

HAYEK: Freud himself, probably not. Certainly not

[Carl] Jung, but nearly all the next generation of well

known psychoanalysts were working in that direction.

And if you take people like Erich Fromm and such people,

or that man who became the first secretary of that

international health service--that Canadian psychoanalyst-

ROSTEN: Oh, yes, yes. His name will come [Brock

Chisholm--ed. ] . The World Health Organization.

HAYEK: Yes.

Exchange with Buchanan:

BUCHANAN: Professor Hayek, a few minutes ago you were

saying that the two influences to be countered in your

younger days in Vienna were Marxism and psychoanalysis.

I know in the Hobhouse Lecture you also spent a good

deal of time talking about the baneful influence of Freud

and his ideas. Perhaps you'd develop that a little bit.

HAYEK: It's so difficult to generalize about Freud. He

was undoubtedly a very intelligent and observant man

But I think his basic idea of the harmful effect of repres

sions just disregards that our civilization is based on

repressions. While he himself, as I point out in the

lecture, became later rather alarmed by the exaggeration

of these ideas by his pupils, I think he is ultimately

responsible for the modern trend in education, which

amounts to an attempt to completely free people from

habitual restraints.

After all, our whole moral world consists of restraints

of this sort, and [Freud], in that way, represents what

I like to call the scientific destruction of values, which

are indispensable for civilization but the function of

which we do not understand. We have observed them merely

because they were tradition. And that creates a new task,

which should be unnecessary, to explain why these values are

good...

[T]here was a very small circle where everybody knew everybody else.

It so happened the other day that somebody was asking

me about the famous people from Vienna from the period,

beginning with [Erwin] Schrodinger--of course, I knew him

as a young man--and [Karl von] Frisch, the man [who

studied] the bees, he was an old friend of my father, and

so it went on all through the list, till it came to Freud.

No, that was a different circle. I had never met him,

and that is because it was a Jewish circle as distinct from

the non- Jewish one. Although I moved a good deal later on the margin of the two groups—there was a sort of inter

mediate group--the purely Jewish circle in which Freud

moved was a different world from ours.

Exchange with Chitester

CHITESTER: Now, obviously you are referring to Freud and

the whole Austrian psychologists and the school there,

which clearly, as a fellow countryman, you would have

direct feelings about.

HAYEK: In my recent lecture, I have a final paragraph

in which I admit that while apart from many good things,

some not so good came from Austria; much the worst of it

was psychoanalysis. [laughter]

CHITESTER: Why do you feel that? Why do you feel

psychoanalysis suffers from that?

HAYEK: Well, there are two different reasons. I think

that it has no scientific standing, but I won't enter into

this. It becomes a most destructive force in destroying

traditional morals, and that is the reason I think it is

worthwhile to fight it. I'm not really competent to fight

it on the purely scientific count, although as you know

I've also written a book on psychology, which perhaps

partly explains my scientific objections. But it is

largely the actual effect of the Freudian teaching that

you are to cure people's discontent by relieving them of

what he calls inhibitions. These inhibitions have

created our civilization...

 [T]he way I put it now is that good is not the

scime thing as natural. What is good is largely a cultural

acquisition based on restraining natural instincts. And

Freud has become the main source of a much older error

that the natural is good. What he would call the artificial

restraints are bad. For our society it's the cultural

restraints on which all depends, and the natural is

frequently the bad...

The great society, in which we live in peace with

people whom we do not know, has only become necessary

because we have learned, to some extent, to suppress the

natural instinct that it's better to work for a common

goal with the people with whom we live and to work for the

needs of people whom we know. This we had to overcome to

build the great society. But it's still culturally strange

to our natural instincts, and if anybody like Freud then

comes out with, "The natural instincts are the good ones;

free them from artificial restraints," it becomes the

destroyer of civilization.

 I stress that the confusion

in this field is largely due to the dichotomy, which

derives from the ancient Greeks, between the natural and

the artificial. Between the natural and the artificial

is the cultural, which is neither natural nor artificial,

but is the outcome of a process of selection. This was

not a deliberate process but is due to the fact that certain

ways of behaving have proved more successful than others,

without anybody understanding why they were more successful.

Now that, of course, is neither natural nor artificial;

I think the only word we have for it is cultural . The

cultural is between the natural, or innate, and the

artificial, which ought to be confined to the deliberately

designed. The way in which we can describe it is the

cultural.

CHITESTER: The use of artificial by proponents of directed

change, it seems to me, is that kind of distortion. To

use it as a rhetorical weapon; to say to someone, "Why,

that's artificial; you shouldn't be doing that." Again,

the Freudian thing: remove your inhibitions and you're

going to be a wonderful person and enjoy life. The

argument, then, is that these inhibitions are artificial,

and they clearly are not. You're saying that, to the degree

that they are voluntarily agreed to--even subconsciously-

that they certainly-- Would you call that artificial or

not? Is that a midground?

HAYEK: I think this is intermediate ground for which

we have no other word but culture, which people confuse

with artificial. But the cultural is not artificial,

because culture has never been designed by anybody. It's

not a human invention; in fact, I go so far as to say that

it's not the mind which has produced culture but culture

that has produced the mind. This would need a great deal

of examination.

-RW