"Notes" #40

Fake Commute

The headline read, "Fake commuting is a real alternative" (Sylvain Charlebois, Free Press) and I got a kick out of it.

COVID has kept us cooped up and away from our daily routines, so going for a short ride and a coffee, breaks the tedium and feels like a real treat.

I love the title of Dr. Charlebois's article because any reference to the word "fake" is a reminder that the person who made the word famous is now completely out of touch with reality, 45 is the real "fake".

We go on a "fake commute" because we really are not commuting anywhere, just escaping for a few minutes from this COVID imposed existence and want a reminder of what normal feels like.

So let's make it ok to just drive around pretending that things are normal before we go back to our bubble of safety. Perhaps denial has some psychologically healthy benefits.

I find myself stating this activity to clients as something they can do, along with exercise, eating better, phoning/Zooming/texting friends and family, watching more comedy, puzzles/hobbies and other stuf to offset the effects of COVID boredom.
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Sigmund Freud, father of psychology, with his alarming and outrageously original concepts--Oedipus complex, penis envy, castration complex, repression, neuroses, psychoses, and the unconscious-- "was a fraud and con man", so says Frederick Crews in his book, Freud-The Making Of An Illusion.

Crews illustrates, brick by brick and plank by plank, how Freud perpetrated a grand swindle that has absolutely no basis in science or in any empirical observations.

All the successful cases that Freud boasts about in his writings are lies. Freud never cured anyone, and most of his patients ended up worse off as a result of his care. Freud was a charlatan, a fraud and a swindler.

Freud was a believer in the magic of cocaine. He was convinced that it was a totally harmless elixir that could cure any ailment. He prescribed it to his patients and used it himself with his migraines, crippling depression, black moods, and social inadequacy.

Freud, whose ruthless quest for fame, wealth, and success was achieved at the cost of his patients, friends, colleagues, and his long-suffering wife, Martha Bernays. Crews reveals him to be a calculating, egotistical liar- a sex-intoxicated man who blamed his mother for her sexualized care of him in childhood and who had a sexual affair with his sister-in-law.

Wow! That sure paints a picture of Freud that I never imagined, if it's true? As far as I knew, from my limited studies of him and his theories, he kind of started the whole investigation into the human mind and the beginning of the psychological movement. His body of work has certainly been challenged and has become outdated, but he undoubtedly got the ball rolling. Last I heard there was something like 254 different therapies to treat the human condition.

Hard to believe that Siggy got called out like this!

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The Presbyterian church called a meeting to decide what to do about their squirrels. After much prayer and consideration, they concluded the squirrels were predestined to be there and they shouldn't interfere with God's divine will.

At the Baptist church the squirrels had taken an interest in the baptistery The deacons met and decided to put a water slide on the baptistery and let the squirrels drown themselves. The squirrels liked the slide and, unfortunately, knew instinctively how to swim so twice as many squirrels showed up the following week.

The Methodist church decided that they were not in a position to harm any of God's creatures. So, they humanely trapped their squirrels and set them free near the Baptist Church. Two weeks later the squirrels were back when the Baptists took down the water slide.

But the Catholic Church came up with a very creative strategy. They baptized all the squirrels and consecrated them as members of the church. Now they only see them on Christmas and Easter.

Not much was heard from the Jewish synagogue; they took the first squirrel and circumcised him. They haven't seen a squirrel since.