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.
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
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.
The small part that he was correct about was completely revolutionary, though. He and his work indirectly proved that animals, including humans, were capable of subtle manipulation via suggestion and association.
That spits in the face of the mainstream thinking from the time which asserted humans were logical perfect beings made in god’s image.
Plus, he did it without even performing brain surgery on any dogs. Truly beyond his peers.
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
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 "Freudhasn’t been testedor 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.
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.
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”.
It is the study of the subjective. That does not mean that the study is subjective.
You’re discrediting conversation by getting this shit wrong ten times in a row.
Pop quiz: Are you conscious? Next question: Can you prove it objectively? Or is it sufficient that we come to an intersubjective agreement about it to have established a baseline of subjective human experience?
"Pop quiz: Are you conscious? Next question: Can you prove it objectively? Or is it sufficient that we come to an intersubjective agreement about it to have established a baseline of subjective human experience?
Descartes was a philosopher. Freud tried to be a doctor.
Freud has been discredited as a bad philosopher and a bad psychiatrist.
The idea that he was trying the “study of the subjective” is false.
The reason he is known as the father of psychiatry is he tried to make objective observations about consciousness.
He largely got it wrong, so his ideas are now hokum. But he gets some credit for trying.
Much like Hippocrates. We disregard the stuff he got wrong. His ideas are discredited. We happily ignore the stuff he didn’t prove scientifically.
Then we get on with medicine with actual evidence.
Saying Freud only studied the subjective would be discrediting him even more than I’m doing.
Saying Freud only studied the subjective would be discrediting him even more than I’m doing.
I never said that. I said that’s what psychoanalysis is about.
Freud was a neurophysiologist by training. He was always more of an academic than a physician, doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a doctor in both senses before opening his own practice. Maybe read a biography or such.
Lots of strong opinions you have there, not much to back it up and on top of that you seem to be incapable of understanding very clear and simple sentences of mine, interpreting into them whatever you want. No, I won’t psychoanalyse you over that I’m just giving notice that you’re to stop that shit or land on my blocklist: I’m not your therapist.
He studied (among other things) psychiatry in university (this was his prof), and worked in psychiatry before opening his solo practice. His doctoral thesis and main focus in studies was neurophysiology, though, it’s Jung who was a full-blown psychiatrist. Adler was first ophthalmologist, then GP, getting into the psyche way later in his career.
Psychiatry as in the western discipline is way older, dates back to the enlightenment when people started to consider other possibilities for things like epilepsy and schizophrenia than people getting punished by god. The name itself is a bit older but the turn towards an at least half-way modern approach started with William Battie. 80 years dead when Freud was born.
So the ideas we all know him for are discredited, like the post says. On top of that you’re diminishing the role he’s traditionally ascribed in the history of the subject.
Pick a lane because you’re going further than I am.
You call his ideas “subjective” like I do. That discredits them. Using subjective or unprovable medical treatments is the definition of quakery.
You also deny his historical impact on the things we do today that matter, psychiatry.
So we seem to be in agreement on Freud.
You seem to want to defend quakery in general in order to defend Freud.
So the ideas we all know him for are discredited, like the post says.
The ideas have been widely worked into all kinds of theories. Some verbatim, some changed, some completely reformulated.
Are you aware that you can’t use the word “unconscious” without referring to Freud? There’s no more and no less objective proof of it than for consciousness. Call it quackery all you want all you’re saying with that is that you’d rather be unaware of it, would prefer those ideas to never have seen the light of day so that today, you wouldn’t have to face them.
…and this is where I feared we’d end: With me starting to psychoanalyse you. There’s no way out of this without that because to understand, you’d first have to understand a bit or two about yourself. Which is why I’m out because I have better things to do. There’s resources out there, use them, or not, not my business.
The idea that consciousness is a Freudian invention is patiently false.
“The earliest known use of the word unconscious is in the late 1600s.
OED’s earliest evidence for unconscious is from 1678, in T. Hobbes’ De Mirabilibus Pecci.”
You’re just making stuff up now. Which I suppose someone defending quackery will do.
You can try to psychoanalyse me all you like, but you’d probably be better off using a psychic to help. A psychic will be able to tell you more things.
As you don’t care if the things you make up about me are right or not you might as well go for volume.
Of Infants unregenerate it flyes. (Unconscious of its fault which tortur’d cryes)
“unconscious of” is not the same idea, concept, as “the unconscious”. If you do ad-hoc research please at least do it properly that took like two seconds to find.
The rough concept existed before Freud, yes, you can trace it back to the likes of Schopenhauer, but our current understanding very much is exactly Freudian. In particular, of the conscious as something that’s structured, which distinguishes it e.g. from the Buddhist (much older) formless.
You are a fish in water, unaware of swimming in it.
So now the person back-tracking on their “facts” is claiming others should do better research.
I’m not back-tracking. If you say “unconscious”, obviously in the sense of “the unconscious”, you’re referring to Freud.
Same as when you say “Vulcan” you’re referring to Gene Roddenberry, not Urbain Le Verrier.
Your first instinct was to attack the messenger, not the message.
My brother or sister in Discord I’ve been attacking the message for literally at least ten comments before I went personal. I can’t even make sense of it as you can’t even tell me what you think is actually bunk about Freud. All I’m seeing is “has been discredited”, without elaboration, and that reeks of “no I don’t want to look there”: You’re not even bothering to figure out what you disagree with.
Fine, don’t, for all I care. But if you don’t want to, why are you so invested in this thread. Is that a question you can answer?
Can you expand on what you mean by “a lot of stuff”? Anything particular come to mind?
Or are you expecting me to defend everything he said whole-sale? Which I wouldn’t, because there’s aspects which he got wrong, heck I agree with e.g. all of Adler’s and Jung’s critiques of Freud. I disagree with all of them on Hypnosis.
Why?
In a nutshell? Because it’s nonsensical. If you throw out all of Freud modern psychiatry, psychology, psycho-anything, loses very core theoretical aspects. If you throw out all his therapeutic approaches, you’re throwing out evidence-based treatments.
You don’t have to throw out anything. Everything that’s right has now been through peer reviewed studies authored by other people.
The problem is most of what Freud said is wrong, you can be a psychoanalyst without a medical degree because it isn’t a medical field.
Modern psychiatry is a separate subject and you’re happy to defend psychoanalysis and conflate it with psychiatry.
Which would be no different to conflating nutritionists and dietitians, chiropractors and physiotherapists, or, to quote Dara O’Brien, dentists and toothologists.
Psychiatry and psychology, all of it, are different subjects (though psychiatrists have at least a basic acquaintance with psychology). Also plenty of Freud in modern psychiatry.
Are you sure you’re not the one conflating psychiatry and psychology, here. An why would psychology be a medical degree it has plenty of applications outside of medicine. There’s psychologists working in market analysis.
dentists and toothologists.
that would be dentology, not dentistry. Applied vs. academic.
If you’re practicing medicine and are not medically trained or supervised by someone medically trained you’re in the same bracket as quacks.
Quacks who read Freud and implement his Victorian ideas when we know them to be false are a problem.
That’s why it’s important to discredit old ideas, whoever they’re from.
Old mistaken ideas in science are the most credible and often the most harmful pseudoscience.
Freud shouldn’t be studied outside of a history class these days.
Ideas of his which have survived scrutiny will still exist. He may get passing mentions. But he really needs to be out of focus in the academic and public perception of the subject.
In general an unsupervised psychologist is not a good thing. Those capable of becoming or having their practice enforced by a psychiatrist have a place.
Those still practicing psychoanalysis with no medical training do not. Especially if they don’t recognise that Freud was more often wrong than right.
Psychologists who are academic only are the ones discrediting Freud, or they’re peer reviewed and told their wrong themselves.
Mental health has a huge problem with lack of professionalism and regulation in practice.
Urban design is health, yet urban designers aren’t practising medicine.
Quacks who read Freud and implement his Victorian ideas when we know them to be false are a problem.
Yes? That doesn’t mean that there’s not plenty of non-Quack applications of Freud out there. False dichotomy and everything. As to “Victorian”: Freud was quite progressive for his time, e.g. refusing to attempt conversion therapy for a gay man who came to him to be converted, quoth, more or less “There’s nothing wrong with you it’s society which is fucked”. He was influenced by his times, sure, but within that time was far from someone who swam with the flow, that kind of stance on homosexuality back then was absolutely radical.
Mental health has a huge problem with lack of professionalism and regulation in practice.
Then regulate better, wherever you are. “Freud shall not be taught” is not a thing that should be put into any regulation that aspires to be scientific, though. As said: You’d be throwing out evidence-based medicine. Most of the psychoanalysis out there today is called psychodynamic therapy: Still same theory, but practice changed by lessons learned over the decades. For people unacquainted with details this stuff looks exactly like what Freud did. And it’s just as generally effective as CBT (which btw has its root in Stoicism. Capital S, the antique philosophy).
You’re just being silly now. Urban designers do not have patients.
Victorian is a description of the time period. It is factually accurate. If you want to infer something else from the word Victorian then I can’t stop you but you’ll be wrong.
“Victorian engineering”, “Victorian Science” and “Victorian medicine” will definitely have different connotations.
“Victorian science” has the connotation that, unlike say Darwin, it’s not considered part of the modern consensus.
You should not learn Victorian science or medicine in the modern day outside of a history class.
Evidence based medicine that relies on evidence even 50 years old should be re-examined. Let alone 130.
From the article you posted.
“For example, meta-analyses in 2012 and 2013 came to the conclusion that there is little support or evidence for the efficacy of psychoanalytic therapy, thus further research is needed”
“In 2017, a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials found psychodynamic therapy to be as efficacious as other therapies, including cognitive behavioral therapy”
So low to no effectiveness, trying to reach a low bar of another “treatment” which is in question.
You’re just being silly now. Urban designers do not have patients.
Indeed not, they’re not practising medicine. And I never claimed they did. Market analysts or social workers aren’t practising medicine, either, yet both have plenty of use for psychology. You’ll see plenty of psychology in off-beat fields such as criminal geography. Plenty of urban design in that one.
“Victorian science” has the connotation that, unlike say Darwin, it’s not considered part of the modern consensus.
So Darwin isn’t from that age? Newton was even earlier. Yes, Newton was fundamentally wrong about physics but yes, we do still use his theories. Whether something is current consensus or not has nothing to do with its age. At best that kind of connotation is completely silly. Taking that kind of connotation as a basis for argument (“he’s from that time but not Darwin thus he’s bunk”) is right-out puerile.
So low to no effectiveness,
Learn to read, please, that’s not what the quotes say.
trying to reach a low bar of another “treatment” which is in question.
We have better treatments for some specific stuff, say histrionic personality disorders, but for general therapy CBT is very much considered a benchmark. If you come across someone who considers it a panacea though you’ve come across a cultist, that’s true for all therapeutic approaches. There’s no silver bullet.
Two things about psychotherapies in general, which drastically impedes any attempt to compare them, is a) diagnosis is usually insufficiently precise to actually compare things. “Depression” is a mightily fuzzy word, and depending on the patient’s temperament different approaches might work better or worse for the same ailment. Then, b) that patient outcomes are better correlated with the person of the therapist than with the method employed. That is, a shitty therapist with a hypothetically perfect method very well can have worse results than a talented therapist throwing their raw intuition at the patient.
You know what’s the kicker, though? That’s very much in line with Freud: The importance of rapport was recognised by early hypnotists, going all the way back to Mesmer, Freud carried it into the wider psychotherapeutic community, making it a cornerstone of his patient-therapist interaction theory. Behaviourists pretty much threw all of that out, CBT isn’t as extreme any more but one of the criticisms people have about CBT is precisely along those lines, that it considers humans as input-output machines, ignoring subjective experience. Still, if the patient just needs some tips and tricks to deal with their behaviour, CBT can be very helpful. If you want a therapy that addresses the subjective yet doesn’t rely on rapport there’s stuff like the Method of Levels which doesn’t even require therapist and patient to share a common frame of reference, understanding of reality.
The point is is anyone has a use for psychology they should pick someone alive to listen to instead of Freud.
Because it doesn’t matter if he got some things right when he got lost things wrong.
But I’m glad we at least agree no one should be using what he says as medicine.
Please read the articles on Wikipedia yourself, they’ll be a good starting point for you as they’re usually very balanced. Unlike the other material you’ve read.
The point is is anyone has a use for psychology they should pick someone alive to listen to instead of Freud.
Those people are likely to cite Freud in one way or the other.
But I’m glad we at least agree no one should be using what he says as medicine.
We don’t agree there. I absolutely think that people should have the option of using psychodynamic psychotherapy (among others). Both as patients and therapists. Where we’ll likely agree is that priming patients towards an analytical framework is highly problematic, see the whole “Freudian patients have Freudian dreams, Adlerian patients have Adlerian dreams” thing. But that’s recognised and worked into modern practice. Noone, literally noone, takes Freud to be an infallible prophet. That’s more of a thing Jungians do, much to Jung’s chagrin (quoth: “I’m glad I’m Jung, and not a Jungian”).
they’ll be a good starting point for you as they’re usually very balanced.
They’re a good starting point but they generally slant heavily American, if not that then Anglo. The US isn’t exactly a role model to follow when it comes to psychology.
If they cite one of the few things Freud is right about, it might not be awful. But better to cite the person who actually has a peer reviewed paper and proved it. Probably a red flag they they haven’t studied properly I’d it’s not buried under copious other citation.
Anyone with a main citation from Freud these days is a century behind.
People have the option of bashing their head against a wall as a patient. Someone should probably try to stop them doing that. Therapists especially. Quacks won’t and that’s the problem.
It’s amazing you’re concerned about a country with decent peer reviewed journals “biasing” articles and not the quacks who still cite Freud
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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