Dive into the fascinating origins of psychology and Freud's pivotal role in shaping our understanding of mental health. Discover how his Hasidic background may have intertwined with Sufi mysticism, and explore the profound connection between self-knowledge and spiritual awakening. Musa contrasts secular therapy with Sufi principles, emphasizing the importance of surrender and guidance from a teacher. Learn about the deeper meaning of dignity, empathy, and how giving elevates our humanity, all while navigating life's challenges with inner peace.
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insights INSIGHT
Freud’s Roots And The Loss Of God
Freud adapted mystical Hasidic/Sufi ideas into Western psychology and removed God from the framework.
Musa Muhaiyaddeen argues this scientification shifted focus away from a Creator-centered view of the psyche.
insights INSIGHT
Self-Knowledge Leads To Knowing God
Sufism frames self-knowledge as the path to knowing God, making its psychology inherently teleological.
Knowing yourself in Sufism aims to transform you into a true human being (insan kamil).
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Use Rituals To Train Surrender
Practice rituals while observing your inner state and attention rather than only performing outwardly.
Prioritize prescribed prayer as a form of surrender even if you don't fully understand it yet.
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Freud is generally considered the father of psychology. What is psychology? Well, when Freud came along, all of a sudden people in the medical circles began to think about the psychological makeup of their patients and what they could do to help people who had no apparent physical ailments but had really difficult psychological ailments. They locked a lot of these people up. Of course, in the beginning a lot of this dealt with people on the severe end of these psychological problems. But as time progressed and as psychology progressed, they found that they could work with people to try and resolve some of their own internal conflicts and to make them more normal within the definition of normal that the society had. And now we have analysts and psychologists and all kinds of people for people to go to in order to get some kind of help with their own personal problems and situations.
I did a little looking into Freud because I was interested…I had an inkling of where he got his basic information from, but I wanted to dig a little deeper and verify what I had thought. And what I found was that his parents were Hasidic, which means, for those of you who don’t know, they belonged to a Jewish mystical sect. And there is literature that Hasidism joined with Sufism some time in the eleventh century in Spain when the Jews and the Arabs lived in Spain together. And the Hasidic thought came out of a milieu of mystical Sufistic thought. So, if he came from a Hasidic background, that meant that he had access to Hasidic ideas and Hasidic philosophy. He also was in touch with some other people who gave him some of this insight and some of this philosophy. What’s the point?
What he did was he took what had been existent for a long time and known for a long time and turned it into a Western science. And what happens when you turn things into science? You take God out of them. Now let’s go back to what is Sufism about. And this is really what’s interesting. One of the major understandings in Sufism is that to know your Lord, you must know yourself. Psychology is trying to get you to know yourself. But what’s the end of knowing yourself? To know yourself! What’s the end of knowing yourself in Sufism? To know God. So, what’s going on in Sufism is really a kind of psychology or an understanding of your own psychological makeup in order that you can go from the state that you are in now to the state of insan kamil or true human being.
The Witness Within