Chapter 1.                            Part E 

                                                                Sigmund Freud 

            Now all of this seems bad enough, but it gets worse. The third big shock came when Science began to understand the workings of the human brain. Human beings had long felt that there are many things in this world that cannot be explained in physical terms because they had long known that inside the privacy of their minds, they had dreams and feelings, and outside in physical reality, they sometimes even saw or did things, that – by logic alone – made no sense. Cruel or lustful acts and thoughts were bad enough. But at least they seemed somewhat predictable, given humans’ “sinful” nature. From long experience, we've come to know our human drives, so we can accept intermittent thoughts of fornication, theft, violence, and murder as “natural”. But people also have much weirder dreams and even see weird things when they’re wide awake, that are, by the laws of Physics, and even common sense, not possible. 

         Why do people have dreams, and a few even have waking visions, of angels or of demons, hovering in the air, or of talking cats on mountain tops, bathed in orange light and standing on their back feet? Night after night, we dream not just cruel or lustful dreams, but also many more that are simply absurd. Furthermore, even some people wide awake see angels, demons, and miracles. For centuries, if a person saw or did something that afterward he himself could not make sense of, the widely accepted explanation was that God (or Satan) had caused the event or had made him do the deed. "The devil made me do it." Much of normal human experience, apparently, lies beyond Science and even common sense.

         When Freud came along, his big contribution to human knowledge was simply the proposition that all of these perceptions come from inside the brain of the person having the dream or vision. Thus, visions and miracles can be easily explained. They come from stored up memories being combined and re-combined, to form symbolic narratives that are driven by deep, unconscious needs, needs that the visionary isn’t aware of because they are buried so deeply that he can’t consciously access them, no matter how he tries. Under stress, his brain can transmit images into his optic nerves, which is the opposite of what usually happens. Even wide awake, we can see what in physical reality is not there.

         Most of our memories may not be recallable at will, but they are all in there. Unless a person has had some brain-destroying injury or disease, his brain holds all he has ever experienced, all of the sense data that have ever been fed into it via eyes, ears, etc. How they will affect his moment-by-moment flow of consciousness can’t be exactly predicted in advance. But the patterns in these "paranormal" experiences coincide too often and too closely with the subject’s personal issues for us to believe that those experiences are somehow independent of the mental states that preceded them. The sciences of the mind have shown us convincingly that we can literally see what we want to see.

         While at first, Freud and his followers were considered to be sex-obsessed crackpots, they soon began to gain credibility and command respect, mainly because they could get results. Their model could explain all of human behavior, they could make good probability predictions about how individuals with certain backgrounds would act in specific future situations, and they began to cure people of neuroses and psychoses that, in earlier times, would have been pronounced hopeless.

         Then, as research on the human brain advanced, other researchers showed that the model which portrays all of a person’s experiences as being stored in his brain, even though he can’t recall the experiences at will, is literally true. Patients willing to stay conscious during neurosurgery, and to let researchers place tiny electrodes on their brains, are able, when a milliamp current is turned on, to recall all kinds of memories in detail, memories of which they ordinarily have no conscious awareness. (6.)

         Freud went much further with his psycho-sexual explanations of all or nearly all of the motives that drive human behavior. Much of what he had to say has today been discredited; the vast majority of little girls are not consumed with a desire to grow a penis. But the big impact of what he had to say remains. Those parts of human experience that for so long had seemed to defy logic and common sense turned out to have a rational explanation. The dreams and visions were, and are, figments of overactive human imaginations; they never actually took place at all. No more miracles.