Even though he was fumbling in the dark, at least he was attempting to systematize behavioral phenomena instead of blindly keep on accepting any medieval concepts of “spiritual possession” or a vague catch-all vague term of “madness” that preceded him.
This all had to start somewhere, and any science isn’t born in any sort of perfect final form.Another good example is how astronomy had to arise from astrology… which by the way was also used as part of the ancient, rusty toolkit to try and make sense of the mind.
Even astronomy post-Copernicus and Newton has gone through its’ false starts and dead ends:
Canals on Mars.
The Milky Way as the entire universe.
The Steady State Universe.
The list goes on…Even now, we are fumbling to make sense of the data captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, because what is being seen does not fit predictions made by carefully crafted cosmology theories of galaxy formation and maybe the age of the universe.
Psychology is no different. Limited tools and data sets give limited snapshots of reality, but that also doesn’t mean they are useless, and the good thing is that we have moved away from pointing the finger at astrology, witchcraft, “God’s will” and all that.
This
The only real problem with Freud is people treating his theories like gospel, which thankfully seems to have diminished quite a lot at this point, but it does sometimes feel like the importance of those theories on the pathway to our current understanding gets dismissed or ignored
Yeah many people did that too and were killed or obscured
You can’t prove Freud’s ideas of Projection, Transference, Displacement and Narcissism, but that doesn’t mean he had no idea what he was talking about (with these specific ideas), its not all entirely bullshit.
Yeah, I never understand when people say his ideas are “discredited” but there’s never any further information as to when that supposedly happened or who was involved.
It’s because they haven’t been, and can’t be. How do you discredit the idea that the subconscious is made up of the “sublime oceanic” that reveals its self in dreams? Or that inversions of black and white in dreams has a specific meaning?
It’s like saying the Mona Lisa was discredited as good art, it’s subjective.
Well the scientific study of a subject should discard subjective ideas if they cannot be scientifically confirmed.
Lots of the sciences came out of subjective philosophies or just plain hokum.
Freud didn’t scientifically test his theories. He just started treating people.
He led others to study the specialism, but in reality he was a famous person during the leeches and drilling holes period of Psychiatry.
If you look at his life he’s closer to a snake oil salesman than a doctor sometimes.
Ultimately he believed what he told people, and believed he was helping people. But what he sold was untested and unproven. No different to the old wives tales about cures there’s probably something in some of it, but I wouldn’t go near a Victorian book to find the remedy for anything.
He started modern psychiatry in line with the level of science that existed in that period. There is no “science of what dreams mean” there can be no scientific study of the patterns of types of dreams and their correlation to what a valid interpretation might be BECAUSE its an interpretation.
You’re writing like someone who has no idea about earlier psychoanalysis or the development of modern psychology which almost always is taught as having started with Jung and Freud because they started it as we conceive of it today.
That’s not a sign of having been “discredited”.
Relying on the rationalist lens of scientific positivism as an authority for an area of study focused on the irrational, is a ridiculous approach.
“Well Kevin we did some tests on your father and the body of your pet chicken that died last week, and found no connection between the two that would explain why the chicken spoke with his voice in your dream”
No shit. No shit "Freud hasn’t been tested or found to be credible by science"
…and ergo, claims to his, or his case studies having been discredited aren’t actually substantiated by literature.
That’s why the term “discredited” is being used rather than debunked, because there’s no claims of physical fact being made that can be “scientifically disproven”. Science not having proven something isn’t the same as science having discredited it.
That’s the point. It’s the analysis of the meaning of dreams and the mechanisms of persona and identification. They not physical or objective phenomena.
You can’t open a person and find their persona or id, or subconscious and test them with the scientific method so all I get from that being the standard of your response is that you’re uninformed on either the nature of early psychoanalysis, the nature of science, or both.
It also hints at the idea that Freud’s writing “have been discredited” as being an off hand dismissal on the basis of “I don’t like what I’ve heard about it” rather than anything more substantial than that.
Eg. It’s a subjective opinion rather than some set moment in intellectual history that has a wrong and right outcome.
So I’m going with the idea that Freud’s views are subjective but impactful enough to have defined an entirely new field of the study of the mind. I’m going with this as that’s what’s taught in most psychology courses, they don’t teach that he was discredited, in fact you usually read his case studies (eg. The rat man and others), and some of his essays as the starting point to learning about psychology.
I’m going instead with the idea that he and Jung were early. In the same sense that Aristotle or Lister were early.
here can be no scientific study of the patterns of types of dreams and their correlation to what a valid interpretation might be BECAUSE its an interpretation.
It’s called semiotics.
Well the scientific study of a subject should discard subjective ideas if they cannot be scientifically confirmed.
Psychoanalysis is not about the scientific study of a subject, but of the subjective. And yes maybe none of it can ever be confirmed to fifty sigmas but many things can’t, doesn’t mean that you can’t apply the scientific method, doesn’t mean that it’s not worth investigating, doesn’t mean that you should discard the subjective, and doesn’t mean that it’s not natural for different areas of science to have different methods of investigation and different standards of proof.
Science, in the end, even encompasses art: Art is the science of human choice. If your definition is less broad I suggest you take your head out of that physics textbook it’s giving you tunnel vision, thorough scrutiny can be applied to so much more than that.
That’s exactly the point psychoanalysis is largely discredited by Psychiatry.
Seeing a psychoanalyst is like seeing a chiropractor.
Seeing a psychiatrist is like seeing a physiotherapist.
That’s exactly the point psychoanalysis is largely discredited by Psychiatry.
Nothing that I wrote supports that conclusion.
Plenty of psychiatrists out there trained in, and using, psychoanalytic methods. E.g. MBT and CFP have been proven effective for BPD, and are psychoanalytic psychotherapies. Not to mention that most psychotherapists aren’t psychiatrists, different disciplines.
Freud was a neurophysiologist, Adler a GP, Jung a psychiatrist, working with schizophrenic folks before the invention of haloperidol. They all have seen shit, likely a gazillion times more than you, they weren’t esoteric tea-bag swingers but did plenty of hard science, if you actually had a look at their actual writings you’d see that they very much were interested in figuring out correspondences between the subjective and more reliably measurable data. Stuff we now have way better data on, Jung hat to make do with skin resistance measurements hardly comparable to an fMRI. Doesn’t mean his data is invalid, that he pulled it out of his arse.
“Psychoanalysis is not about the scientific study of a subject”
We agree.
Now either you discredit pseudoscience or you don’t.
Don’t go to a psychoanalysts, go to psychiatrists.
Don’t go to barbers, go so surgeons.
What you call “psychoanalytic methods” used by modern psychiatrists are long distanced from Freud’s ideas. To the point where reputable psychiatrists are avoiding the term psychoanalysis.
We don’t treat respiratory issues with “taking the air” by the seaside anymore.
Anyone recommending psychoanalysis and still calling it psychoanalysis is either someone who graduated 50 years ago and failed to keep up recently or a quack.
“Psychoanalysis is not about the scientific study of a subject”
We agree.
No. It’s about the study of the subjective. Which is part of the subject. Which is part of the material world, of society. Just because things are in your head doesn’t mean they’re not real: They’re models, very much influenced by the rest of reality, and they get acted upon, very much influencing the rest of reality.
Seeing them as apart is a quirk of European thought introduced back when the Church, faced with having to retreat from its explanations of the physical world by progressing science, said “ok you do the physical world, we’ll do the soul”. That’s why to this day you see this idea floating around that things in your head aren’t real because that’s where religion and faith is and we all know that isn’t real, don’t we? So we can safely ignore it? Tell that to the people burned at the stake by faithful: That stuff very much has an influence on the world, is part of it. I say fuck the church the soul, psyche, whatever you call it, is our field now.
We don’t treat respiratory issues with “taking the air” by the seaside anymore.
Yes we do. Stop talking out of your arse, please. What’s true though is that that kind of stuff doesn’t have long-lasting effects, at least not on the physiological level, if you want something long-lasting you need to move to a place with air that your respiratory system likes but that goes for a lot of things, say eating healthy, or talking walks. Needs to become a habit or results will at best be temporary. What you will never hear is a doctor saying “nah cancel that vacation, stay here in the city, the smog is fine”.
Pretty sure the part that we’ve moved way beyond was his somewhat central ideas that everything was sexual, relating to the penis or the lack thereof. Things like if you have a skat fetish you are into the idea of a phallic thing (poop) coming from the anus which then represents a reverse vagina, or oral sex is a man’s attempt to feed their partner with the penis acting as a sort of perverse breast- crazy coked out ideas like that.
He went much further saying everything’s a penis and women want to have them and thats why they’re so angry, (not because society has made life 10 times more difficult for women than it has been for men since the dawn of time). So one could see why a lot of poeple really don’t like him and toss his good ideas in with the terrible ones.
In my experience most of his ideas about the psychological processes (sub-consious motives, transference, displacement, projection etc.) that I mentioned and that you also touched on as well are still seen as valid and foundational to understanding psychological functioning.
He went much further saying everything’s a penis and women want to have them and thats why they’re so angry, (not because society has made life 10 times more difficult for women than it has been for men since the dawn of time)
Women back in his time wanted something that men had, the symbol that he used for that was the phallus. Much of the issue with understanding psychoanalytical lingo is to try to understand it on a level that is insufficiently symbolic. On that symbolic level, women getting the right to vote is literally them growing dicks. Magical wands that can make things happen. Don’t look for logic in that it’s pattern matching and association before getting filtered through logic, or notions of propriety.
I agree though that Jung was way better with that kind of stuff. Not Jungians, though, who by and large like to ignore that archetypes are the self-portrait of instincts, again, symbols, instead of things in themselves. As the man himself said: “I’m glad I’m Jung and not a Jungian”. That even goes for things like the shadow. It’s important to understand “the map is not the territory” not on the level of the map, but on the level of the territory. Yet another caveat, though: The reason so many Jungians don’t get that is because they neglect Freud and Adler. They all had their own foci, and trying to understand the symbolic (Jung) without the social (Adler) and individual instinctual (Freud) is bound to lead to mixups. Also kinda curious btw that when it comes to dissing those founding fathers people always forget Adler.
If you’re trying to say that he was using the English language in an intentionally misleading way, I don’t think it improves his credibility in the eyes of the average person. Responsible scientists know that words have meanings and if they’re going to use them in unusual ways, probably they shouldn’t, and if they’re still going to, they should damn well make sure they clarify everything in the preface.
The language comes directly from observed dream images. It would be dishonest to report dreams about phalli in a way that doesn’t involve phalli.
What the larger population did is essentially saying “nah that’s uncough we’ll pretend that none of that makes sense and that we never have any dreams like that”.
Things like say the Oedipus complex are indeed better conveyed to a general audience in terms of developmental psychology, a bit removed from raw instinctual images, but that doesn’t mean that those images are false or misleading. Humans have searched for non-icky ways to express that kind of stuff for aeons, to wit, the original Oedipus story, don’t blame Freud for saying “let’s cut that BS crap for a second and admit that there’s something here that noone is daring to talk about without layers of metaphor”. A patient’s interpersonal conflict won’t surface in sanitised images, sanitised language, you gotta allow the nasty and icky or all you’re doing is forcing the patient to repress.
thats a good point. why does he get a pass?
speaking of disses though, that quote from old Carl is pretty brutal
Less ick around the will to power and things like overcompensation are just easy to spot in people, I’d say, the concept even entered everyday language without getting mangled up. Contemporary humans are attuned to the social sphere of things (alienation nonwithstanding) while the instinctual and symbolic are scary and foreign in their own ways.
But it’s mostly bullshit, and he’s still seen as this master figure when in reality he was mostly wrong. He should be a footnote, not a central focus
Can you name something he was wrong about? As far as I can tell he was instead subjective.
Psychology still uses most of his concepts, such as id, super ego, subconscious, persona, death drive, polymorphous perversity, ect…
see thats the thing, you view it all as bullshit and many people do not, and it can’t be quantified either way. So if a Freudian or Jungian lens helps a person understand situation in a way thats healthy and useful to them, then there you go. If they don’t see things that way that’s fine also.
I wouldn’t describe the person who essentially invented talking therapy from scratch a footnote when learning about psychology related to talking therapy.
Do you think William James or Lecan should also just be considered footnotes because we’ve learned so much since then?
Anyway, a Freudian analyist would have a field day with your user name, just to say
Those psychalysts should be treated the same way ancient natural philosophers are when it comes to physics and medicine. Like yeah, sure, they paved the way to modern discoveries, but their teachings are ancient and destructive when actually applied. For example psychoanalysis is widely considered pseudoscience, or even a cult
you’re projecting!!
Solid proof that psychology is not a science
psychoanalysis isn’t anywhere near the whole of psychology. there is plenty of solid research in psychology thats undeniably scientifically as sound as any test in physics- the thing is counfounding variables are challenging to control in human populations, so you need absolutely massive samples and multiple double blind studies followed up with meta analysis to try to remove them, including researcher bias and plenty of other variables.
One thing to consider is there is rarely, if ever, proifit in helping people be psychologicall healthy on an individual basis. So, chem and physics gets funded because you can make things and sell the results.
Its not chemestry! but there is a lot of science happening in psychology, but it’s woefully underfunded because you can’t sell the product in a clear way, and no one wants to talk about how a healthy society has less crime, health problems, addiction, etc.
Lol, what? There absolutely is profit in psychology, as most psych majors find out when they start looking for jobs. It’s called “advertising” and it’s terrible.
Removed by mod
He just needs to do lines until he comes up with a new and better theory.
With blackjack and hookers!
Fuck the blackjack I just need the blow and hours to uselessly try to push rope into an escort.
Not fun fact: 8 out of 10 shrinks in France use psychoanalysis
Only 1 university in the country excludes it from their care curriculum (history modules non-withstanding)
Only country in the world that hasn’t booted that practice off along with argentina
There are more places/countries that use psychoanalysis, having it their curriculum. I study psychology and there is a main difference in psychoanalysis/humanistic psychology and behaviourist psychology. The latter is a actual science, because it studies behavior, and you can observe it. The other two, mainly focus on consciousness, thinking, individual meaning and a particular person’s world. I get that psychoanalysis has a lot of strange ideas, but there is neo psychoanalysis, and as a whole, the school tries to constantly renew itself, as it’s made in the the actual therapy process. The point is psychology is a vast field, behaviourist based theories are actual sciences doesn’t make the other options available bad. Depending on the case, one is better than the other. Jeffrey Young saw what I am describing and combined elements from these and some other theories.
No I strongly disagree on giving psychoanalysis that much consideration
Besides the fact that psychoanalysis, new wave or not ; jung, freud, lacan, has only been demonstrated to work better than leaving the patient alone on a handful of illnesses and it’s still unclear whether simply letting patients talk and air out their problems could be the main driver of that.
It is fundamentally a discipline that is impermeable to science
I’ve never heard a student tell me they’ve read Watson or Rayner or any of the founders of CBT because scientific disciplines are centered around historical results and not authors. They know about Rayner’s results and it is enough, and if something better comes along later they’ll switch. No one is a Raynerist.
Psychoanalysis has gurus, and the beliefs themselves are built to be unverifiable
I’m tired of lecturers who tell you that if you treat someone with it, it’s proof that it works. And if the patient doesn’t respond to treatment it’s either the patient’s fault or they just need more time, and nothing is ever proof that it doesn’t work. And who are you to question <authority figure> anyway?
If they suddenly start publishing reproduced results in reputable journals that do anything other than being less effective than the current state of the art, then sure, let’s have them beyond history classes. Right now though? It’s a load of bullshit
Freud and Jung are taught as part of most courses on psychology.
And for that reason in france a lot of therapists suck and you have to try multiple before finding one that doesn’t do psychoanalysis
Edward bernays is the more important person to study if we are to break the stranglehold the 1%er mainstream media has over the working class.
I do not trust the entire mental Healthcare industry. They said gay people are crazy, and failed to call out the 1%'s hoarding mental illness.
Why weren’t the robber Barron’s institutionalized against their will like so many were back in the day in those abusive insane asylums? Cowards.
Bernays shaped the modern world perhaps more than anyone. Century of the Self was a revelation.
[off topic]
Nicholas Meyer [director of ‘The Wrath Of Khan’] wrote a novel and directed a movie both called ‘The 7% Solution.’
It’s about the meeting between Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud.
Ok that one was pun gent
deleted by creator
