The Dirt About Sigmund, and Why Kids are OK After All!

The propaganda of Sigmund Freud and his cohorts has been tragically effective: Everyone these days believes kids are obsessed with sex. A New York Times survey reveals that fewer people than ever hold and pet their children, wary perhaps of the storied lustfulness of the little ones' subconscious minds. The moral standing of children, I'm afraid, is at an all time low.

Take, for instance, the last post on this blog. It was intended to illustrate one of my pet theories about human relationships. The point of writing it with children was not only to make the reader suspend harsh judgement, but also to take sex out of the picture, as much as possible. However, all three readers of this popular blog thought the damn thing was a love story. (They also thought I should stick to fart jokes, the damn barbarians!) Kids, it is assumed, are just too lewd to be just friends.

This perversion of the public opinion greatly saddens me. I confess I'm very fond of children, as long as they are other people's children. After much personal interaction with them, I've come to the conclusion that they are not evil monsters or lustful devils. No! Au contraire, they are general dudes, only a little cuter and a lot smellier.

Like all honest writers, I wish to elevate the public morals and fight false propaganda. To that end, I'll now relate the true story of old Sigmund's hypocrisy, his son's perceived peccadillos, and how the combination of the two led to the establishment of two schools of psycho-analysis and, more tragically, the untimely death of Sigmund Junior.

Sigmund, as is well known, had a chela called Jung. It is less well known that Sigmund had a son, and Jung had a daughter, and they were friendly. In fact, the two never had fights to the death with home-made hand grenades, and this, naturally, led to some suspicion about their normalcy. Rumours, unproved to this day, were heard that their mamma-pappa game involved more than just mock-cooking by Freud junior and TV-watching by the young Jungess. For a surprisingly long time, the vile whispers didn't reach the ears of the doting fathers. Many a time, Sigmund and Jung used to discuss the suspected debaucheries of other people's kids, smiling indulgently at their angelic offspring at play.

The idyll was rudely ruptured. On a fine spring morning, Sigmund had the following conversation with the missus. (Let not the story-teller be blamed for the silly lines that follow. They merely reproduce the flowery language that is common in psychoanalytic households.)

S :
Oh! Flower of the Far East!
On you my eyes daily feast!
Oh! stunning sultry Frau mine,
For you every moment I pine!
Oh! Lady lovely and luscious,
The passion of my Unconscious,
Star that doth my sky adorn,
How are your bowels this morn?

Mrs. S :
Oh! Handsome daadi!
My sweet sugar daddy!
Master of the Hidden Mind,
Whose equal none can find!
Emperor of the id and th' ego,
Smoothly did my motions go.
Oh! Hero whom I love a lot,
How was your session at the pot?

S : [anguished]
Out it flowed like a stream.
But wait, I had a strange dream.
Our son, heavenly little lad,
In my dream, was sex-mad.
My unconscious grows senile,
Our angel so unfairly to revile.

Mrs. S:
Oh, precious husband mine,
You drink too much wine.
It isn't a dream, for Chrissake,
You saw it while wide awake.
How can you fail to notice,
What a vile beast the boy is?
And why, oh why, did he pick,
That Jung's horny little chick?
If he had to be such a little pig,
Why not our neighbour Hedwig?

S:
I see! My damn unconscious,
Finding the truth too odious.
Through its usual sly scheming
Made me think I was dreaming.

Mrs. S:
You of all people fooled, honey!
If it weren't sad, it'd be funny.
Weren't you, dear, first to find,
Every baby has a filthy mind?

S:
About other children, I was sure.
But our boy, I thought was pure.
"Boys are beasts," I boldly said,
Thinking our boy was well-bred.

But surely, he isn't the one to blame.
The fool can barely spell his name.
Even if he had desire in his veins,
He just doesn't have the brains.
It's that girl's doing, thatI know.
She asked, and he couldn't say 'no'.
The vixen! Gotterdamerung! [note: Gotterdamerung = God-damn in Deutsch]
I will take this up with Jung.

So saying, Sigmund stormed right out of his house, and right into the Jung's. Now Jung had had a similar revelation from his Frau and was all aboil. An argument ensued that cannot be reproduced in this PG-rated blog. Finally, Freud walked out in a huff. Poor Jung had to find other means to relieve the pressure.

The two great minds worked furiously to rationalize this new, painful piece of information into their Map of the Mind. So it is that Sigmund proposed the superego, which essentially says, "My son's subconscious is a pig, but deeper down, he is a saint." Jung came up with the theory of the Collective Unconscious, which says, "My daughter is a sex maniac, but so, my friend, are you!"

It would have been tragic enough if it had ended here. But both men were closet Republicans, and couldn't take this slur on the family lying down.

Jung sent his daughter to Alabama, thinking she'll acquire Christian values by association. It was a mistake. They noticed that she was European, and had even looser morals than Bill Clinton. Naturally, they concluded she was the Devil. Her death by stoning, it is reported, was slow and painful.

Freud, hearing this, smiled to himself, and sent his son instead to Gujarat, India. Lack of morals, he reasoned, wasn't likely to be a problem there. It was a grevious miscalculation. The Gujaratis noted that the boy was white, and more virtuous even than their home-grown divinity, Lord Krishna. Naturally, they concluded he was a missionary, and burned him. Old timers in Ahmedabad still say that there is nothing quite like fried Freud to go with a well-aged pot of bhang.