One of the most bitter and subtle triumphs of immanentist modernity has been to replace, slowly but relentlessly, the confessor with the couch, and the spiritual director with the secular therapist. Psychoanalysis, from its Freudian origins and in its contemporary clinical ramifications, is based on an anthropological premise that is not only alien, but also radically hostile to the realist worldview and empirical neuroscience itself.
By reducing the transcendent longings of the soul and the motions of the intellect to mere mechanistic and repressed impulses - the blind struggle between the instincts of life and death, or the absolute reign of the materialistic libido - this pseudoscience de facto denies free will, annulling the formal and final causality of the human being. It represents the pinnacle of materialist reductionism: man, under this deterministic perspective, loses his moral agency. He no longer sins, he has no imputable ethical failures. He only suffers from "traumas", "complexes" or "neurosis", redefining moral transgression as a mere failure of neuronal or social adaptation, exempting the individual from his ontological responsibility.
The Freudian scaffolding turns man into a perpetual prisoner of his childhood past and a dark, mythological and unverifiable subconscious. This psychological determinism clashes head-on with the intrinsic freedom of the children of God defended by Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, which recognizes the intellect and will as the governing powers of the human soul. Even more serious is the clinical exaltation of "instinctive emancipation" as a therapeutic route; an aberration that inverts the natural order, subjecting reason to concupiscible passions.
On an empirical and sociological level, this misnamed "emancipation" it has not produced healthier minds or more integrated brain architectures. On the contrary, by dissolving the notion of objective guilt - which is nothing more than the rational warning of the departure from the Good - and by establishing the tyranny of subjectivist relativism, we have engendered a collective neurosis. Modern clinical psychology frequently operates as a tautological and narcissistic labyrinth that never points towards the Supreme Good, but rather infinitely justifies its own weaknesses.
In the face of this therapeutic tyranny, scientific rigor and Tradition urge us to return to a truly realistic psychology. The human being is a substantial unity (hyleomorphism of body and rational soul); His superior faculties must govern over sensitive desires, always sustained by divine grace. True psychic and integral healing is not found by digging in the darkness of primary instincts, but by elevating the intellect towards the contemplation of objective Truth and ordering the will towards absolute Good.
Dr. María Victoria Ibáñez-Soto Doctor in Aristotelian-Thomistic Metaphysics. Specialist in Neuroscience, Quantum Physics and Ecclesiastical Philosophy.
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