Belief as an Antidote to Nihilism

Eddie Ejjbair
8 min readSep 3, 2022

Freud was right. Science has humbled man.

In his General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud speaks about the ‘great outrages’ upon man’s naïve narcissism:

Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries. But man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ‘ego’ of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. We psychoanalysts were neither the first nor the only…

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Eddie Ejjbair
Eddie Ejjbair

Written by Eddie Ejjbair

My essay collection, 'Extractions', is now available in paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DC216BXG

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