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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
Do they also want to have sex with him? 🤔
No it’s an Oedipal complex. They want to kill him, and have sex with his wife. Or something
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.
There is no greater force in the universe than the feeling of “Fuck that guy in particular”
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.
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…
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!”
So what you’re saying is that the collective field of Psychology wants to kill its father? Sounds pretty Oedipal to me… XD
