More cynically, some folks say he had a choice between believing that there was an epidemic of child sexual abuse for which the perpetrators were the powerful & monied family members engaging him to “fix their kids”, or believing that these were fantasies and that the folks who had chosen or otherwise permitted his services were benign folks.
It seems totally appropriate here to suggest that he may have been unaware of allowing that consideration to determine his conclusions.
I don’t know how common true Freudian analysts are now, but the mother of an old GF was one. She’s long retired and perhaps actual analysis is on the way out too, I don’t know.
She was an intensely annoying woman, who, if you spilled some water while pouring a glass, would ask “what did you mean by that?”
I also used to know slightly a woman who was in honest to goodness four days a week analysis, but again this was decades ago.
One major proponent of that idea is Jeffrey Masson. He was running the Freud Archives until he published the idea that Freud knew the traumatized patients he was seeing were victims of childhood sexual abuse; which he initially claimed. But, accusing the upper crust of Viennese society (who could afford his services) of being child sex abusers was what could be described as a “Career Limiting Move”. So Masson’s theory, which sounds logical, is that after his initial publications Freud changed his tune and said these childhood traumas were actually “fantasies” from the subconscious mind.
So basically Freud’s theory, like many “scientific” “theories” about how the human mind operated put forward in the 1800’s and early 1900’s and some cults today, were pure bullshit pulled out of the great thinkers’ minds/rectums.
So there’s the 64,000-dollar question - did Freud honestly believe this crap or did he knowingly promulgate a lie to forward his own line of BS? We’ll never know for sure. Freud’s problem (or society’s) is that he put psychology on a 100-year wrong turn from which some have yet to recover.
The problem with Freud is not that psychology has yet to recover but pop psychology has yet to recover. The vast majority of practicing psychologists are not doing analysis but many people continue to blame their problems and personalities on their parents and childhoods.
Riemann, if I may, are you a shrink of the analyst persuasion? You had a “we” upthread that I initially read as “we shrinks agree” but perhaps you meant “we [you poster and I] agree”
A shrink who’s into math, my guess. Or the other way around.
Not a good comparison
You can show me the earth moves, it’s a physical thing, it simply does it.
It can be watched and measured etc, it’s demonstrable.
Telling me ive some bloody repressed urge to boink my own mum is no theory, that’s some ludicrous demented nonsense, So what is my motivation here exactly?
How demented or ludicrous something seems has no bearing on whether it is or isn’t reality. Is the idea that there are giant rocks billions of miles away from us spinning around and floating through nothingness any less silly than the idea that there are other people living on top of the clouds, observing and interacting with us through weather powers? Via science, we’ve determined that the former is reasonable and the latter isn’t, but minus any knowledge but what a person can see growing up and living in a jungle, with no tools or contact with others, probably the latter hypothesis would seem more plausible of the two.
If Freud’s hypotheses could be tested in some way, and confirmed, then they would be true regardless of how demented you might find it.
Fortunately, they aren’t. But, to your average person, Freud’s theories seemed more reasonable than the theory that parents were molesting their own children. I think it’s fair to say that this theory is just as demented.
That was the point of “Freudian Slips.” They actually do reveal the hidden parts of the mind.
The psychoanalytic technique also has some (mild) scientific value: by asking questions and watching the response, you can begin to map out unseen structures.
(I compare it to probing for a broken bone. “Does this hurt?” “No.” “Does this hurt?” “No.” "Does this – " “HOLY JESUS!” It works roughly the same way with cognitive questions and dialogue.)
Freud got so revered in part to his clientele was full of people who suffered from various conversion disorders and hysteria which were indeed helped by his methods.
Seems?
No, is.
One thing you can actually show me, the other you can only lie to me about and hope if you keep doing it i will eventually buy into it.
I can show you anything which is real, via the scientific method. I can make no guarantee that it will be reasonable and friendly. And I can guarantee you that if you insist that every hypothesis is nice and friendly, you are going to fail to investigate some realities.
To answer this strictly factually, no, he isn’t.
You’re mistaken, Niles is a Jungian.
My statement is still factually correct: even if Frasier isn’t in any way a Freudian, he is “Not the last psychiatrist on earth who hasn’t abandoned Freud’s theories.” He isn’t a valid counterexample…but there are other psychiatrists who have not abandoned Freud’s theories, so Frasier can not be “the last” of them.
(ETA: My statement is also satisfied by Frasier not being a Freudian at all.)
The logic of language is weird.
From “The Writer’s Almanac” by Garrison Keiller
Actually, quite a lot of Freud is still valid and a lot of the rest is highly thought-provoking at least, and knowledgeable thinkers on the mind either view it as such directly, or have absorbed the ideas into the mainstream body of psychological thinking.
See The Scientific Legacy of Sigmund Freud
Therapies based on psychoanalysis actually are just as effective in many cases – and may be more effective in the long-term – than other therapies:
The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy
Psychoanalytic Therapy Wins Backing
Though really the bigger issues are that a) Freudian theories have evolved quite a bit beyond Freud: he has a whole legacy of very intelligent thinkers who have taken his theories and developed and changed them, b) that what counts as scientific in one field (e.g. physics) cannot be the standard of what counts as scientific in other, far more ambiguous contexts (e.g. the mind), and c) that the humanities/literature have just as much if not more to say about the mind than “scientific” psychology and that psychoanalysis situates itself somewhere between the humanities and, say, neuroscience.
The bottom line is that Freudian theories are highly sophisticated offshoots of the humanities, and the vast majority of the people who disparage it don’t actually understand the issues at stake and the complexity of the domain. The truth is that neuroscience and non-psychoanalytic psychology don’t hold a candle to psychoanalysis in its bold ambitions and insight. A great part of the way we talk and think about human nature today is derived from psychoanalysis. The dark sides of the emotions, the subterranean side of human nature, the paradoxical, incredibly strange, utterly perplexing part of the mind and emotions: only psychoanalysis among the sciences dares to go there, and it cannot be faulted for being mysterious and strange itself as a result.
Bumped, because this kinda sorta fits here, I couldn’t find a better thread for it, and I suspect it’s not worth a whole thread of its own.
Is this an accurate thumbnail description of how psychotherapy works? From Alex Michaelides’s recent British thriller The Silent Patient:
“A patient delegates his unacceptable feelings to his therapist, and she holds everything he is afraid to feel, and she feels it for him. Then, ever so slowly, she feeds his feelings back to him.”
That sounds like it would place a staggering burden on the therapist, esp. one who (as I presume most do) has multiple patients.
That describes how some therapy is done but you are making too much of this part: “…she holds everything he is afraid to feel, and she feels it for him”. She holds it by writing it down in a notebook, and feels it for him by using her experience and training to understand what he feels, it isn’t necessary for a therapist to relive the feelings of a patient. I don’t think that’s really possible.
Jung is hardly anything like Freud, except in being concerned with the mind’s workings. He went off down a whole different river, in an attempt to meld mythology, spirituality, and his own inner world into a single whole vision of consciousness. His ideas have permeated western culture in quite different way – dreams as spiritual guide posts, the idea of the ‘shadow’ (the part of you that you do not admit to having, which gives it power), introversion and extraversion, all kinds of stuff like that started with Jung. Rather than an ‘unconscious’ he believed in a ‘subconscious’, which he conceived of as underlying all consciousness, like a vast mycelium under the earth. Basically he was a mystic.
When I was 20 and going to art school I lived in a flat with a guy with three PhD’s who thought Jung, along with the array of his followers – Mircea Eliade, Fraser, I can’t remember them all – were really on to something. We would discuss our dreams for hours. His were always way more interesting and fantastical than mine. He’s long dead now, and I still miss him.
I think Jung has fallen out of favor in the sense that his theories owed nothing to science, but then he never claimed they did. He would have said that modern psychology is reductionistic and shallow, and that people crave deeper meaning and deeper understanding, not simple fixes to problems. Probably he was wrong about that …