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Commenting that the study, Beethoven and His Nephew, by Richard and Editha Sterba, is a good example of pathography, the author detects a flavor of misanthropy in the psychoanalytic efforts expended to reveal that many who are revered in Western civilization were really voyeurs or sadists. This effort throws light on the philosophy, mechanics, and ultimate implications of psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis, the causes of symptoms, which may be religious, sociological,
vocational, or existential have little value. The psychoanalytic method takes for granted a concept of man that reflects the philosophical climate of nineteenth century Germany: Freud's concept of the unconscious is roughly equivalent to Schopenhauer's Unbewusster Wille. These various German concepts of an unconscious are integral parts of a pessimistic philosophical system. The psychoanalytic method is imbedded in a religio-philosophical system compounded of determinism, atheism, hedonism, mechanism, and fatalism.
The central problems of modern Western man are not psychosexual, but are rather religio-philosophical problems dealing with values. It is impossible to use the psychoanalytic method without introducing a system of values and a philosophy of life. It makes no difference whether a value system and world outlook are tied in with and corroborated by a psychological method of negative conditioning or whether they emanate from a supernatural, revealed religion. The problems of unhappiness are no longer brought to the religionist; today they are brought to the scientist the psychoanalyst purports to be.
The greater diagnostic precision of European psychiatry has shown that the problems of contemporary man are no longer the sex and hunger that relate him to the animal but are the varied existential anxieties which arise from the core of man as man. In European psychoanalysis these problems are recognized as existential anxiety and are treated with special techniques. We must look to Europe