“I have found little that is ‘good’ about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publically subscribe to this or to that ethical doctrine or none at all.. If we are to talk of ethics, I subscribe to a high ideal from which most of the human beings I have come across depart most lamentably” [pp 61-62, ‘Psychoanalysis and Faith’, 1963].

Given what we today know about Freud’s trashy deeds on so many fronts, this statement is the projection of his shadow, his own trash, on the rest of humanity. Freud’s denigration of ‘most human beings’ masks itself as ‘realism’, as ‘critical reason’, as ‘sober assessment.’ The “great stoic Freud” [Ernest Becker, p 276] is just another believer in – like any fundamentalist — ‘man, the miserable sinner.’