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So what you’re saying is that the collective field of Psychology wants to kill its father? Sounds pretty Oedipal to me… XD
STOP lol
The important thing to remember about Freud is that while his ideas may seem spooky to us, you have to consider the ideas he was overturning. Mental issues were seen as everything from the divine spark to a fugitive uterus. He was the first person to examine the psyche with anything resembling rigor and methodology.
Side note: Fugitive Uterus would be a good all women punk band name.
Oh yes. People forget that all the time.
Freud is a quack when you consider modern psychology research.
Freud was revolutionary back then because he, gods forbid, actually talked to his patients and tried to figure out what the fuck was going on instead of immediately going “Your uterus is making you do bad things, here, I’ll stab into your brain with a knife and that’ll make you okay”
Maybe his stuff on eel genitals was better but in psychology… no, neither rigor nor methodology are things I’d attest him. Nor getting things meaningfully right despite this. Nor to be the first, given that the psychophysics people were already doing work that’s both scientifically sound and still a solid basis for contemporary work.
I wish I could get past ch 2 in madness & civ
Just like the Internet, one of the best ways to get an answer is to confidently state the wrong answer
No one said he was a good father.
That’s why psychologists have such repressed feelings toward him
Freud being the father of psychology is one Freudian slip from calling him daddy
Explaination needed
A Freudian Slip is when you say what you say something that you did not to intend to come out the way it did, typically caused by context or distraction
For example: consider you are hanging out with a busty friend of yours you say, I think you are the breast vs I think you are the best.
That is a Freudian Slip.
In the context of the top level post.
Father and Daddy are interchangable but “daddy” can be used sexually. Freud is well known for his fixation with sex which pins the joke down. Calling Freud - “Daddy” - has quite a few overlaps of humor in the slip.
Edit: Almost any edit is grammar or typo related for me.
Thanks. The last part is what I asked for.
proving someone wrong. specially loud mouths that sustain themselves by not being peer reviewed, has advanced human kind more than any kind of grudge or something. the problem freud didn’t have peer review because at the time there were very psicologists
Sure he had peer reviews, both Adler and Jung broke with him. Reading either of those, though, without sticking to what they didn’t disagree about with Freud probably leads you more astray than ignoring them in favour of Freud. Roughly speaking Freud’s issue is that he reduces everything to base drives, a very animalistic view, with Adler social relations come into play, the desire to be an individual agent, and with Jung everything meta. If you read Jung without understanding, not just intellectually but viscerally, the instinctual you’re going to drift off into fantasy playing symbolic games that have no relationship to what’s actually going on, sticking to Adler while ignoring Freud makes you, erm… a radfem? They love to deny the personal in favour of the social, sure there’s other groups doing that those just came to mind first. Oh boy and Freud would’ve had a field day with political lesbianism.
Sure you can make fun of takes such as “if women would relax properly they could get vaginal orgasms instead of only clitoral” but, well, considering what other takes were in vogue back in the days that’s kind of endearingly wrong. The accusation of having been unscientific is right-out unfair: He was quite methodological and data-driven indeed, and the people who started the whole trend of dissing him for that, behaviourists (Skinner on the forefront) have produced little of value. Figures that if you want to do psychology you can’t ignore the subjective, say “the mind is a black box, conscious experience is irrelevant and that’s it”. The field is messy, that’s for sure, but so is the psyche so that’s to be expected. We shouldn’t make things simpler than they are.
Main things you should be critical about with Freud is his symbolic determinism, “this kind of image means that”, the mind is way too flexible, symbols to much nurture instead of nature, for that to be a viable approach. Or, differently put: Patients of Freud had Freudian dreams, Patiens of Adler had Adlerian dreams. Another sore point the other two mentioned about him is that he was quite selective when it came to his patients – somehow they were largely attractive women, Jung and Adler had a way broader span (though Jung worked for a long time largely with schizophrenics due to, well, being a psychiatrist). Oh and Freud was a cokehead.
Not much bad to say about Adler short of his incompleteness wrt. Jung, and make sure to not read him as a sociologist, as to Jung, again: Take him by his word when he says you need to understand the others to understand him. And when he says stuff like “I’m glad to be Jung, and not a Jungian”: Avoid to be dazzled, or think that the Red Book is about you or truth or society or metaphysics or whatnot, it’s about Jung’s own personal shit. Read his actual theories not his secret diary.
Oh and just to tie everything together: When Jung says that Archetypes are the self-portraits of instincts, that’s exactly the connection to Freud: Instincts e.g. anticipate the presence of and need to relate to mate material, and in that interaction between “relating” and “opposite sex” you have the anima/animus as a psychological phenomenon. And first you (probably) related to your mother (instinct to relate to caregiver), and then you might have failed to grow up, failed to affirm independence (for whatever internal or external reason, not entirely unlikely Adlerian), and now you mix up the actual mother of your actual kids (anima) with the old image of your own mother (caregiver) and that, anon, is why you want to fuck your mother. Doesn’t work like that for women because their mothers aren’t the opposite sex. Yes that’s all cishetnormal once you get other stuff involved it gets even more messy. Take those things more as a guide: By learning how the statistically common cases can be pieced together sensically you develop an understanding of the involved pieces and thus are able to make sense of different arrangements, or differently shaped pieces. In the end the exception is the norm.
Spite and laziness are the driving factors behind lifting humanity out of the stoneage
This feels like a way to encourage funding for any scientific gap. The odious theory gambit.
The thing is, you need a take that philanthropists would find repugnant, and then principled researchers unwilling to just tell benefactors what they want to here, otherwise you get populist evolutionary psychology and scientific racism.
There is no greater force in the universe than the feeling of “Fuck that guy in particular”
daddy issues, but make it academic
I thought that is what daddy Jordan B. Peterson is for, telling me to clean my room and whatnot. He is now a climate denialists apparently. Damn, didn’t think I could even loathe him any more.
Reading this thread, I found myself quite surprised that Freud seems to be so disliked. I had no idea that him being a nutjob was the consensus, though this niche forum might not be the greatest sample size.
He’s a nutjob to evidence based researchers when it comes to theories of the mind. Psychoanalytic theories, especially Freud’s, are often unfalsifiable, meaning they aren’t effective science because no observation can disprove them. Successful scientific theories must predict better than alternatives, and must make testable predictions. There’s also simplicity, but that’s a more informal rule.
However, this doesn’t mean everything he did was worthless. His theory of the mind is similar to Plato’s theory of the soul, and Socratic philosophers have had a significant impact on modern clinical psychology separate from Freud. Psychoanalytic and psychodynamic talk therapy are still measurably effective. Large issues like generating false memories exist in Freud’s methods, but many therapists now use an eclectic approach. They take what works best about different approaches to best meet their patients’ needs. Certain methods work best for some people with some conditions, but aren’t effective on other people or with other conditions.
Understanding unconscious trauma, motivations, and emotions still have their place in clinical psychology, even if his conception of the mind is outdated.
even if his conception of the mind is outdated.
On a certain level it’s physicists complaining that musicians talk about F# and Cb instead of waves at a certain frequency. Or physicists complaining that artists use Goethe’s colour wheel – don’t you know Goethe was wrong and Newton was right? Figures that Goethe is more right about perception, though. As the map is not the territory so it follows that there’s multiple sensible maps for the same territory.
Artists communicate their subjective experience, while science tries to be as objective as possible. This is why psychoanalysis has therapeutic value. Objectively, it is very effective at treating some disorders and maximizing happiness, as those results can be empirically measured. At the same time, therapists can adjust their practice to minimize known dangers with the theories. Some of Freud’s ideas can give people the language to express themselves and heal, even if it’s not totally accurate. Improving mental health is the important metric.
Pretty sure I remember a study that eclectic psychotherapy has lower efficacy than manual based psychotherapy, buts it been a few years…
“However, this doesn’t mean everything he did was worthless.”
Agreed - its popularity actively set back our collective understanding of the mind.
That’s interesting. If accurate, it might be because manual based methods are designed to work as a whole, while fragments of certain methods only work in the context of the rest of the manual. I’d want more independent confirmation to trust the result myself though.
i mean the directions were in the OP
;)
I’d say that finding value in Freud is controversial, and criticizing him is the norm. Much like Descartes.
Every single therapist I worked with shared the “Fuck Freud” opinion.
Freud was a crock.
Same idea as the person who asks a programming question and replies from another account with a terribly wrong answer.
If only people did that to Aristotle…
they do /did.
Also it depends what parts of Freud you want to discredit. Is Lacan discredited because of Freud? Is Anna Freud discredited because of Sigmund? Jung, Adler, Fromm all departed from Freud but started with him.
It’s like saying because HTTPS succeeded HTTP then HTTP is wrong - yes its wrong now but we had to go through it to get to where we are.
Without Freud popularizing the idea of subconsciousness and ego - well, we can’t even imagine what that’s like. It’s so ingrained in our, uh, subconsciousnesss, we wouldn’t understand what it’s like for our society to not be aware that subconscious thought exists.
Even the idea of comforting someone by talking about what happened, on the most casual level, was popularized by Freuds work.
Without Freud popularizing the idea of subconsciousness and ego
You might even say that he brought it out of the collective shadow.
Even the idea of comforting someone by talking about what happened, on the most casual level, was popularized by Freuds work.
Here I have to disagree, that stuff existed as a practice since basically time immemorial. It’s what confessionals are about. The framing as more of a medicinal practice than spiritual one was certainly novel, though we don’t really know how practitioners in pre-Christian times saw it. E.g. when you had martial issues in Rome you might go to the appropriate temple (Juno) and you’d state your troubles, then they’d perform some ritual and you’d be given rites to perform yourself and I can totally see the priestesses going “yeah he’s got his head up his arse let’s trick him into realising that he should hug his wife once in a while”, then select specific rites that make that outcome likely. Is that not serving the goddess of marriage?
Less religious, the Stoics (and generally philosophy but especially the Stoics) had a tradition of advise letters, while those were often generic and not at all always prompted by actual questions from actual people you wouldn’t have such a format if people didn’t go to philosophers to be given advise about all kinds of stuff, much of it psychological: They would have written straight-up monologues instead. Random example, Seneca’s De Ira: “You have demanded of me, Novatus, that I should write how anger may be soothed, and it appears to me that you are right in feeling especial fear of this passion, which is above all others hideous and wild […]” (cue a dissertation).
Lastly… talk therapy is also kinda overrated. You can psychoanalyse yourself to understanding, but not to health, that needs some kind of action-impulse – which can become more likely with psychoanalysis, but that doesn’t make it a necessity. All those clinically depressed men in WWII who were suddenly “magically” healed and drove ambulances didn’t need to understand anything about the mechanics of their psyche, realising “oh there’s actually a way I can be useful” itself did it.
Perhaps I should’ve said “brought it round to popularity.” Of course there’s a lot of folk psychiatry, medicine etc that has existed since antiquity - but I’d argue the path for Freud was set by WW1 shell-shock being treated as a failure on behalf of the victim, rather than an ailment, which also coincided with the rise of treating the common working man as heroic (e.g. James Joyce, Dadaism…) and the aristocrat as a person rather than a God-appointed rightful space.
It also coincided with the birth of atomic physics and the idea of surrealism: that under reality is another reality.
The folk-psychiatry you mention wasn’t rooted in the idea that they was an underneath to one’s thoughts that we can’t directly access consciously.
Finally, yes his work is rather sexually obsessed, a bit too much. But why does this particular doctor have to get everything correct when Einstein, Darwin, Newton… all had errors too? I wonder if it’s still some nascent belief about work about sex being bad and work about “untainted” science like rocks, atoms, bugs… being good.
Just thinking out loud.
The folk-psychiatry you mention wasn’t rooted in the idea that they was an underneath to one’s thoughts that we can’t directly access consciously.
The idea of “other realm” is practically universal, it’s shared by religions and psychology. It may very well be innate. Of course the atheists back then weren’t like the atheists now, more of the “our images of the gods are just images we made and who knows how they actually look like” kind, presumably because science wasn’t advanced enough for people to bet on materialism, as well as the gods back then still very much functioning as Archetypes not caught up in “can god create a stone too heavy for him to lift” type of bullshit. I mean we’re a (mostly) serially monogamous species, of course Juno exists, duh, she’s the goddess of that how can you deny the existence of marriage: Juno is the self-portrait of a specific instinct of ours (and yes of course she’s married to sky-daddy (Jupiter)). And the gods are our ancestors because those instincts are from the genome… brought to you by The Ancestors which once were revered collectively before people learned to better distinguish different instincts. The structural similarity between paganism and the modern narrative is striking, isn’t it?
Circling around: If you read De Ira what should jump out at you is that Seneca is spot-on about just about everything in there. Certainly better than the majority of contemporary self-help authors: The differing framework didn’t hinder him, it’s ultimately a detail that doesn’t matter given the subject matter. Unlike middle-age authors, he doesn’t get lost in arcane demonology (exceedingly fuzzy portraits of maladaptive complexes) but lays it out plainly. As such I’m more inclined to attribute to Freud the re-popularisation of a thing that was lost (the other-realm filled with archetypes), in a different dress, after the double-whammy of monotheism just doesn’t making a lick of archetypal sense (there’s structural psychological sense, though) and progressing science and materialist attitudes killing off its credibility for good. That is, yes, psychology is our new religion we just don’t call it that and many like to deny it. How can you even be a Christian, with a personal god, if your mind also has the idea of subconsciousness firmly embedded in it? Subconsciousness evicted Jesus, now people often consider him to be everywhere or outside of physical reality or whatnot but not with them.
Oh I agree, Freud’s work was important. As was Aristotle’s. But if Aristotle had suffered much of the scrutiny that Freud has, science would have advanced a lot faster. Obviously extremely unlikely though, given that Aristotle kinda predated science.
Why does Aristotle deserve the same treatment?
A lot of what he said was just plain wrong, and without the existence of the scientific method back then, no one really questioned him. For example, he basically made the only argument justifying slavery in ancient times, and he notably also got a lot of physics wrong that took until Galileo’s time to get resolved, such as with gravity and the elements.
“While Frasier is a Freudian, I am a Jungian. So there’ll be no blaming mother today!”
