Some things are valid only if we look at the world though certain glasses. Change the glasses, the world will look different.
Have you ever heard people stating, with a philosophical demeanour, that “everything happens for a reason”? By that, many refer to the cause of something happening. Oh, but can that statement stand up to scrutiny? What are we? What is the world? Is it a game of puppets with millions of billions of strings on which God pulls every second? I think it cannot be more unconvincing. We all get to learn about the cause and effect paradigm of our existence. The fact that we walk into this paradigm blindfolded is another matter. However it is somehow inevitable, for memories compel us to develop the concept of time as we start to learn about the world and gain experience. And then any related events in the past are explained using the cause and effect paradigm because that’s what everybody around us does and it gets under our skulls stealthily.
This is a well-documented fallacy. Any event that has happened in the past could be the result of a multitude of other events, which in turn exercise various degrees of influence on the event in question. However, simplistically, when we find one (I repeat and stress, one) plausible explanation (usually the first one we find) we take it as gospel and we even throw conviction and vehemence behind it when we pass a judgement. It cannot be more self-blinding and self-deceiving.
This is pretty much the case with the, once upon a time, revolutionary and ground-breaking Freudian method of psychoanalysis. However, there is something else. What goes on can just as well be explained differently. Then the two fundamentally different explanations side by side can be judged on their merit. The second one is much more subtle and more elusive to discover and to accept. Obviously I don’t claim any merit for it. My only personal merit is that the second paradigm came as an inspiration to me while reading a book by C G Jung. I don’t even remember which one because I read a few, but I think it was the very first one I ever read by him. I vaguely knew about the Freud, Jung rivalry and disagreements and I must have been half looking for it. I must admit that I never read any of Freud’s books although I bought a few with the intention of reading them. I guess what I already knew, or my perception of what I knew, was not very appealing in the first place. I might be completely wrong and may even be giving an inaccurate representations of the chief beliefs in Freud’s vision of the world and of individuals in it, but again for me is valid, this is what I know of it.