Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [374]
The Foundation was equally supportive of selected projects in the realm of the physical sciences. Lee A. Dubridge, President of the California Institute of Technology, wrote: “The sciences of physics and astronomy could hardly have emerged from the primitive state in which they found themselves in America in the first two decades of the twentieth century had it not been for the generosity of the great private foundations” (W. Weaver 1967, p. 252). As we have seen, the Carnegie Foundation built the Mt. Wilson Observatory. The Rockefeller Foundation built the Mt. Palomar Observatory, where much of the work on the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe took place. The Foundation also gave funds to Ernest O. Lawrence for building the world’s first particle accelerators.
If the Big Bang and biochemical evolution represent the Godless and soulless cosmology of the scientific world view, psychiatry and psychology represent its secular moral code and guidelines for practical behavior. In the early 1930s, around the time the Choukoutien excavations were in full swing, the medical division of the Rockefeller Foundation chose psychiatry as its principal focus, establishing schools of psychiatry at major medical colleges. Later the Foundation would fund the famous Kinsey reports on sexual behavior.
During the 1930s, psychiatry was fairly well dominated by the figure of Sigmund Freud, who had encountered ideas about human evolution as a youth and later wrote: “The theories of Darwin, which were then of topical interest, strongly attracted me, for they held out hopes of an extraordinary advance in our understanding of the world” (Jones 1953, pp. 27–28).
In Totem and Tabu, Freud explained Christianity and all organized religion in terms of his Oedipus complex. According to one of his biographers, Freud “took into account, too, the work of Charles Darwin. He recalled Darwin’s conjecture that originally men had lived in hordes, each horde dominated by a single, powerful, violent, suspicious man” ( Puner 1947, p. 167). In his autobiography, Freud wrote: “The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their ideal. . . . the primal father, at once feared and hated, honored and envied, became the prototype of God himself. . . . This view of religion throws a particularly clear light upon the psychological basis of Christianity” ( Puner 1947, pp. 167–168). If one takes seriously the theory of evolution, one must explain the origin of God and religion as an historical occurrence within the mind of evolving man, though perhaps not in the exact manner suggested by Freud.
The Rockefeller Foundation saw in psychiatry a way to influence human social behavior. Dr. Alan Gregg, head of the Medical Sciences Division of the Foundation, wrote: “I should not be satisfied with the definition of psychiatry as that specialty in medicine which deals with mental disorders.” He believed its “province is the conduct of man, his reactions, his behavior as an indivisible sentient being with other such beings” (Fosdick 1952, p. 130). During the Second World War, Gregg served as an Army consultant and wrote of “the possibility that through psychiatric understanding our successors may be able to govern human politics and relationships more sagely” (Fosdick 1952, p. 133). The desire to bring about better human relations is certainly laudable. But our main point is that the Rockefeller Foundation