Freud’s World Has Become a Tough and Lonely Place for Mothers
This mothers day give your mother the best gift ever. Start by letting her off ‘Freud’s hook.’
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Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernaise pretended to champion women’s rights. But were they genuinely interested in inequality? And what impact has Freud’s work had on mothers specifically?
Let’s look at their legacy…
Liberty or Slavery to Addiction
During the suffragette movement in the early 1900’s—when women fought for the vote—the high profile pair were heavily involved in high exposure publicity events.
Women were taught that being liberated meant to act like men. Fly aeroplanes, drive fast cars, be less inhibited about sex and first and foremost fight for your right to smoke and drink.
Eddy and Siggy appeared to be engaged in promoting women’s liberty but were, in fact, actively employed marketing two of the most addictive substances that can be sold legally to the public; alcohol and cigarettes.1
To women.
And this was just the start of the bad deal women would get. . .
Child-Led Spending
The marketing focus groups Freud and Bernaise established went on to usurp a mother’s executive authority in her home for household purchases.1
Many strategies were developed and applied to shift the decision making power for purchases in households to children. $15-17 billion a year is now spent by companies advertising to children in the US. Over $4 billion was spent in 2009 by the fast-food industry alone. Children now wield enormous purchasing power, both directly and indirectly (indirectly in the sense that they can persuade and influence parents on what to buy). 2
This social engineering which stripped parents of a most critical executive function in their homes undermines fathers as well. Mother and father no longer discuss spending as an executive function; instead, they have been left, like servants, trying to keep up with their children’s demands.
If that is not enough, Freud’s biggest legacy—in the end—is a world that now blames any mental health issues we might have on our mothers.
Evil Mothers
No matter what emotional problems we might suffer, we have been taught to blame the very person who has probably loved and given us more than anyone else in the world.
Why find the courage to take responsibility for our own vices and failings when mothers are such an easy and convenient scapegoat for us all?
Meanwhile, older women have lost their position as matriarchs of their family dynasty and have—in Australia and perhaps other countries in the world—become the fastest-growing demographic of homeless people.
Mothers are just humans who have usually done their best under increasingly difficult circumstances. They are not the evil villains that Freud and close to a hundred years of Disney movies and so much other marketing propaganda have led us to believe.
For mother’s day, this year give your mother what she really wants
1. Take responsibility back for your own emotional problems. Doing so will let your mother off the hook but also put the power to improve your situation back in your own hands.
2. Give your mother authority where authority is due. Let her hold a position of pride in your family hierarchy.
3. Tell Freud and his nephew and the millions of marketers they have inspired to get out of your head.
Corporations have become our mothers in an increasingly dangerous and shallow world. More than any time in history, mothers need love, compassion, respect and authority re-established in their homes.
1 – The Century of the Self BBC – https://youtu.be/eJ3RzGoQC4s
2 – https://www.globalissues.org/article/237/children-as-consumers#Advertisingtochildrenisbigbusiness
Not sure how corporations figure into this ? Please clarify.
Hi Karen, Sure I will do my best. Corporations have financed the child-led marketing, producing advertising and product placement that now influences most children more than their parents. Mothers, for instance, were once the person who decided what we should eat. Now children tell their parents what they want that they saw in an ad. The fast and nasty food promoted is everywhere you look, it is at child height right through the supermarket. Corporations develop brand loyalty in children from the time they are babies, often encouraging us to feel bad about ourselves (so we need their solution). They have become the new parents or even gods. Families need to stick together and fight back. We need to help and support each other. More than ever we need to make wise decisions about spending. I could go on and on!!! 🙂
Just been watching Century of the Self and love your post here Kim. Thank you.
Love this article. Very truthful.
Excellent ! My mother said , after I read it to her ” I want Kim to call them Eddy and Siggy !” Finally , Kim , a really really clear explanation of what we have been all up against – and you did not even mention Nestle Corp , separating babies from the breast milk they deserve . Sure , I had all this done to me , my life is at the lowest place ever , now that I am just the wrapping paper on the McDonald’s burger , to be thrown away , but I don’t feel that way . I am staring at it all and know the emptyness it
leaves in the hearts of others , plus , the disconnect from the magic of the maternal energy . I actually am friends with Terry Lamb , the artist who drew Joe Camel , for Camel cigarettes , which got the law changed that they were no longer allowed to target children in cigarette advertising . That character was a long nosed camel cartoon in a black leather jacket and a game plan in his eyes . They knew what they were doing when they hired a cartoonist to draw it , and it was so obvious that even the law makers had to protest . So if anyone questions your logic here , believe me, you are spot ON . So where to from here ? I am all ears .
Tell your mother I added that for her! Good call 🙂
In Australia, women have reached a point where they are starting to see that change must be forced at some intrinsic level. How and when that will happen is up to us all. Learning to assert our needs calmly and say no is more powerful than it might first appear. Mothers cannot allow themselves to be discarded by society.
For those who are curious look into the Tavistock Institute as well as Bernays’s writings.
Thanks Kim for the first nudge to understand the darker side of this organization.
Nice to hear from you MFRS 🙂 Piecing together the bad deal we have been dealt has taken me many years. It is hard to understand the motivations behind much of what Bernay’s and Tavistock have pushed on the world. A higher level of understanding is difficult when confronting such cunning and evil.
You make some excellent observations, Kim. We need to be opening our eyes to this sort of dynamic and power-play affecting our families. To be aware is to be armed. We need to start taking the power back.
Hey Anna, great to hear from you! You are 100% correct. Awareness of the bad deal and taking our power back is essential.
We now have a group of adult students at meals most nights in our home. Last night we had a young woman from Hong Kong a young man from Taiwan and another young man from Siberia along with our Australian adult children and students. Talking politics, health care or just about anything these days is always tricky with people everywhere so divided in their opinions. Steve had the brilliant idea of introducing George Orwell into the conversation. Most Australian students study 1984 in their final year of high school in Australia. It was a productive conversation starter that got the students that hadn’t read that book very interested. I asked if they remembered what “Double Think” meant in that story. None did but all got it immediately when I explained the concept.