Freud’s Mistake
The mistake that Freud appears to have made is his emphasis on instinct. He thought the emotion is inborn, and therefore it starts within and seeks an outlet. Because the emotion is inborn, Freud thought, it cannot be eliminated; he thought it has to be gratified in some way or another. The Buddha did not see the emotion as instinctual. He saw it as something started by an external stimulus. He saw the emotion as a part of a chain reaction, where the intellectual activity of interpretation preceded the emotional activity. Stating the Buddha’s position in Freudian terminology, the ego activity precedes the id activity. Freud, however, saw it the other way. He thought that the id activity preceded the ego activity, and that the purpose of the ego was mainly to cater to the id. This is a serious mistake that Freud made, from the Buddhist stand point.
The other mistake of Freud was his breaking up the mind into parts that come in conflict. The ego and the id should have been seen as parts of a continuous process of activity, one leading to the other, instead of being independent activities opposed to each other. He did attempt this at the beginning, when he took up the functional approach comparing the mind to a telescope. It was the structural hypothesis that created the confusion although it did help understand the conflict in the mind of the neurotic. The conflict displayed by the structural hypothesis comes about due to the ignorance of the neurotic patient about how the emotional arousal gets started. The problem created by the neurotic is like pressing the accelerator and the break at the same time, while driving a motor vehicle. It is the ego that arouses the emotion; for example the boy appreciating the beauty of the girl is the work of the ego. This arouses the passionate desire for the girl, which is the id. Now the conscience, which is the superego, comes to block this arousal and tells the ego to stop it, and the ego holds the break, while continuing to appreciate the girl. That is like holding the break and pressing the accelerator at the same time. This creates the conflict between the id and the ego.
The solution of the Buddha was to look at the mind from a functional stand point. That is, to see the mind as a reaction of an organism to sensory stimulation. The reaction being in four stages: perception (viññana), cognition (mano), emotion (citta), and action (kamma). This reaction is what creates all the trouble, as the sutra quoted above indicates. The Buddha called this reaction a compulsive thirst (tanha). A thirst is not something that we do. It is something that happens to us. It is almost a mechanical process. Freud recognized this when he called it the id, the Latin form of “it,” the neuter gender. The trouble created by this thirst, the Buddha called pain (dukkha). The solution that the Buddha suggested was not sublimation but eradication, which was to take it off by the root. The way to uproot it is to stop the incorrect thinking, which arouses the emotion, and that in Freudian terms is to correct the ego activity. This is also the method of modern cognitive therapy.