He was practically worshiped as I was growing up. But does anyone take any of his theories about repressed incestual sexuality and dreams seriously anymore?
Or is he just sort of honored for being the first to try to ameliorate the sufferings of the mentally ill, instead of just locking them away, or accusing them of being weak or cursed by God or something?
Yes and no, respectively. Freud did establish the treatment of mental illness through talk therapy and psychopharmacological intervention (as well as the occasional ill-advised surgical procedure) but his actual theories about the mind are now widely regarded as complete bunk, as is the notion that all neuroses are the result of childhood sexual molestation (though he was one of the first to establish that children do have nascent sexual feelings and desires even though they are neither physically or emotionally mature to act on them). The science of psychology really had to wait until the middle of the Twentieth century when the behavioral-focused work of John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner entered the mainstream, and the medicalization approach of psychiatry was melded into a somewhat more evidence-based scheme of diagnosis and treatment. I would argue that psychology still isn’t a very rigorous science, and that the success of treatment depends far more on the innate talent and empathy of the therapist than on following any particular scheme or protocol of treatment, but at least we aren’t coking up neurotic patients to the gills or treating psychosis with ice pick lobotomies. So…baby steps.
Stranger
Freud’s vital contribution was to recognize the importance of the unconscious mind. For advancing that general principle he certainly deserves continued respect.
However, he was a poor scientist. His detailed ideas about how the mind works were inventions, largely unsupported by evidence, and have since been discredited. There is equally little evidence to support the therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalysis (of any kind, Freud’s or any subsequent version).
Well… behaviorists (who have a much larger body of data-driven, truly scientific research on their side) don’t think much of the notion of an unconscious, and pretty much despise all that Freud represents. And yes, he was a truly terrible scientist, allowing his judgments to cloud almost everything he discovered or postulated.
But along with Stranger, I think he deserves credit for bringing order and rigor to the treatment of mental illness and other mental/psychological issues. Think of him as psychology’s master alchemist.
Well, first of all, let’s be clear that the next sentence I wrote, which you cut off when quoting me, was:
So far as I’m aware, nobody except a few die-hard psychoanalysts adhere to Freud’s ideas of how the unconscious mind operates. We are certainly not in disagreement about that.
However, I’d like a cite for the idea that behaviorists reject the notion of an unconscious mind at all. I’m not aware that any behaviorists hold that view, and if they do, it’s ridiculous. Are you suggesting that there is a body of research supporting the idea that the only mental processes are conscious ones?
The issue isn’t so much that there aren’t thought processes below conscious volition but that there is no clear deliniation between the conscious and unconscious processes of the mind, and that many of the decisions that you make (or think you make) are part and parcel of processes below the level of conscious deliberation, but are not some kind of seperate decision-making processes of the “unconscious mind”. The notion of distinct conscious and unconscious was taken to its logical(?) extreme in Jaynes’ bicameral mind, a hypothesis that has been essentially universally dismissed by neuroscientists and neuropsychologists as being both excessively reductionist and factually unsupported. Freud’s earlier structural model of id, ego, and superego–still taught in basic psychology classes, by the way–does not represent how we know the brain to perform cognitive functions or otherwise useful beyond pop psychology approaches to the theory of mind.
Stranger
I agree this was a major advance. But I don’t think Freud deserves as much credit for it as he’s commonly given. A lot of Freud’s ideas were based on previous work by Pierre Janet.
Freud deserves credit for widely disseminating the idea of the subconscious. But that credit has to be balanced with his attempts to diminish the credit given to Janet and others and to the bad ideas Freud mixed in with the good ones.
I know nothing about psychology/psychiatry
But i always had an aversion to someone that was going to try to tell me i had a repressed urge to mate with my own mother.
Kind of made me wonder if he was the doctor or the patient?
I think most of Freud’s ideas are untenable. But knee-jerk aversions to ideas are not the way to evaluate scientific theories. People generally have had aversions to the idea that the earth moves, that humans are distant cousins of chimpanzees and that thoughts and ideas are the result of the electrical activity of billions of brain cells. But such aversion doesn’t provide evidence one way or the other on the validity of those theories.
My former girlfriend’s 30-something therapist seemed to think nothing of recommending psychology books that were founded on Freudian ideas, and those books seemed to be of recent provenance.
At first, it was rather disturbing, but on a closer look it seemed like the actual recommendations and etc. were reasonable, it was just using Freudian terminology and interpretations of the original work that had been taken so far from the source material as to make your average religious apologist a happy duck. From reading a couple of the books, I got the feeling that the issue was that while Freud might have been discredited, there’s been nothing to really replace him with on the therapy side of things. Skinner might be interesting for scientists, but not terribly relevant to someone who simply sits and talks with people and tries to encourage them to work through their issues - effectively being something closer to the brain equivalent of a personal trainer at a gym than a scientist or doctor, but handicapped by the need to have a doctor-esque degree. They need a professional sounding lingo to use and Freud is still the only game in town.
Now, granted, it sounded like there’s something called Cognitive Behavioral Theory that is being used by modern therapists, which might be competing for the space now, and possibly my girl friend was just in a strange eddy of remnant Freudian influence. This is just a single anecdotal piece of data.
I think the real influence of Freud today is not so much in academic psychology or psychotherapy (although I think there is an unquestionable influence there, too), but in our view of ourselves: the idea that one could have hidden motives opaque to introspection is a revolutionary one, but has become completely commonplace since, to the point that we don’t even notice it anymore (think about how common talk about a ‘Freudian slip’ is). Eric Kandel discusses this in The Age of Insight.
To a die-hard behaviorist, there’s not really a distinction between ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ mental processes, as the idea is basically to reduce the subject matter of psychology to observable phenomena, i.e. behaviors and their immediate or distant causes, such as conditioning, reflexes, and so on. So a behaviorist wouldn’t hold that all mental processes are conscious, but that mental processes and the like aren’t the sort of entities to feature in the analysis, prediction, and influence of behavior, stemming from the positivist idea that only observable quantities should feature into a respectable scientific theory.
Yes, this is the point I was trying to make - you said it better.
Indeed, and I’m not sure there are any die-hard pure behaviorists in that sense any more. Behaviorism was subsumed into cognitive psychology in the mid-20th century, with the recognition that it is a worthwhile endeavor to develop evidence-based models of mental processes.
Since the Libet experiments it is the nature of the conscious mind that has come into question, with growing evidence that our sense of conscious deliberation and decision-making may to some extent be a post hoc illusion constructed after an unconscious decision-making process is complete.
What about Jung? I know he influenced the Meyers-Briggs personality test, and that’s still widely used (though pointless). Wasn’t Jung kind of Freud 2.0? Making weird theories based on unsupported ideas that are nevertheless still influential today? If not influential on the actual practice of psychology, influential on pop culture at least?
I am proud to be a part of this board. In many many other venues, this thread would have been chock-full of assertions that Freudian psychoanalysis was supplanted by the medical model of mental illness with its chemical imbalances and whatnot, along with the implication that institutional psychiatry before the advent of Thorazine consisted of patients chained to the wall except when taken down and escorted to their couches for their hour-long sessions with their psychoanalyst.
Freud is still revered by Freudians. As has been pointed out behaviorism took over academic psychology very quickly after Freud. However, he was still very influential in practicing psychology for decades after that. That started dying out in the fifties and was replaced by client centered psychology and then cognitive and behavioral therapies. There are still people practicing analysis but it seems to me they are a small minority.
His influence on pop culture was huge and long lasting and dwarfs his reputation in actual psychology.
As to Freud, he is seriously hated on by those who treat the victims of sexual abuse. Freudian theories about children’s alleged ubiquitous fantasies of sexual activity with parents, etc, blinded professionals to the reality of the occurrence of sexual abuse and the rate at which it was occurring for decades, and also the damage done. The damage was assumed to come from “unresolved Oedipal impulses” and the like, not from real abuse. This entrenched the power of abusers, and blamed the victim.
As to Libet, one keeps hearing about “growing” support for what might be called the “strong” interpretation of his experiments (that free will is an illusion), except that there doesn’t seem to be much follow up work going on, or any great intellectual school based on his ideas popping up, and his ideas are getting long in the tooth now. They have a high wow-factor with undergraduates, but don’t seem to be going much further.
The canonical experiment is having someone neurologically wired up, and putting them in front of a button and a clock. The subject is told to hit the button whenever they feel like it, but note the moment on the second hand of the clock when they made the decision to do it. The results typically show that the neurological recordings appear to indicate that the decision was actually made very slightly before the subject reports it’s being made.
For my part, I am willing to accept that something neurologically odd happens in rapid decision-making, and that we have all experienced it, from the tennis player who hits the ball before she thinks about it (indeed, the game is unplayable if you consciously thought about every stroke) to the martial artist who tries to exploit the principle, in mysteriously “striking before you decide to strike.”
But that doesn’t prove free will is illusion. Again for my part, Libet must exclude that the result is not simply a neurological artefact of the rapid interphasing of processes going on when a a subject is obliged, in a very short time frame, both to make a decision and simultaneously mentally record the decision. That might be something we are not good at.
Moreover, the tennis player had to decide what she was going to wear, how she was going to get to the court, even that she was going to play tennis that day at all. None of these decisions are demonstrated to be illusory by Libet. Demonstrating that there may be a place for unconscious processes, muscle memory, etc in very short time frame decisions is a long way from demonstrating that free will is illusory.
It may be that free will is illusory. There are physics theories that suggest it might be. But Libet’s experiments don’t show it.
And Ayn Rand is still revered by Randites, which doesn’t make her self-promotional obtuse asshole philosophy any more workable in the real world or negate her startling hypocrisy. Freud’s most enduring popular culture memes have been to apply the word “anal” to deliberate, precise behavior and to deny that sticking a big tube of tobacco in your mouth and sucking on it is an act with distinct sexual undertones.
Stranger
I completely agree. It think that the conscious/unconscious question is almost orthogonal to the free will question. (I linked to a description of the experiments inside a Wiki article about neuroscience and free will only because that’s the best summary I could find.)
Yes, it’s fair to say that Libet’s work is long in the tooth now. Although that Wiki does describe several recent similar experiments that seem to close some of the timing loopholes.
But in any event, it’s not as though we’re really any closer to understanding the nature of consciousness from any avenue of research.
I read that at first, Freud took his patients’ word that the sexual abuse had actually happened, but as more and more patients he analysed made abuse claims, he and other researchers he discussed his work with came to the conclusion that incidents of sexual abuse couldn’t possibly be happening that much. So Freud decided that what his patients were describing were fantasies of repressed childhood sexuality.
Do you think this historical anecdote is true? Because it sounds an awful lot like what I’ve heard guys (even on this Board) say about the rate of sexual harassment claims. That they’ve never seen it happen, so it isn’t happening.
Scientific American had an article titled (link is to .pdf) Freud Returns, which observed that Freud’s theories about how memory is formed seem to be borne out by modern neurology.