This may be how a patient imagines it happens but in reality, therapists have to have extremely strong professional boundaries in order to not become swamped with their patients’ emotions. They’re only human.
When I hear the term " subconscious mind " I always translate it to my idea of the deeper multilayered mind. In some ways Freud’s ideas do align with my completely amateur, self imagined ideas of some of the minds workings. But I think he was too rigidly categorizing them. I think that we combine the factual data of what we experience and learn with the various chemical brain reactions that accompany those situations. Especially when young. More instinctual reactions combining with the installation of the experiences in our minds/memories. Early on the experiences are more readily installed into very basic, crude, fight/flight/pleasure/pain categories. Lack of experience to better understand the experiences can install them incorrectly. Misinterpreting cause and effect is common throughout life. Add in some accidental or intentional reinforcements to those base mistakes and things can get built on faulty, skewed foundations. Later experiences and data can be skewed through intake of a faulty basic filter. Behavior, actions, choices can be negative. Even if the basic brain function is normal. A current experience may trigger an incorrect response both chemically and in behavior because it is being processed through a complex filter that has an incorrect foundation. Mis learned behavior? I think successful therapy may be due to revealing the incorrect ways that things are being interpreted. And relearning how to interpret data and experiences. Even reassessing how past experience was installed.
This idea can be ridiculously complex, and subtle. But our minds are that. Every single thing is experienced by sensory input, then recreated and presented to our minds by electrochemical reactions. Reality is how we perceive it to be. Perceived by what we built with previous perceptions to filter and categorize it.
Just my perception of it.
Anecdote is not data disclaimer, but when I was 16 I had Jung’s dream of the “Maneater”–100 years later and 100 miles north of where he had it in Switzerland-we were on vacation in Germany and the jet lag let this…thing…into my dream world. It was exactly as he described it-a massive living phallus in an underground cavern. I was as terrified as fuck as he was–can’t imagine dreaming of it at age 4. Note I only found out about his dream years later-at that time I had only heard of Jung when he was name-dropped in Woody Allen movies.
Best thing about that clip is when Woody asks if there isn’t anything faster, Fraiser replies, “Yes, but nothing quite as lucrative.”
Sounds about right.
Thanks, TriPolar and Ulfreida.
The Freudian method of analysis is guaranteed to generate false memories. It’s more of a side effect than a design intention – it’s not nearly as bad a some other interview methods – but I wasn’t present at Freud’s sessions. It’s possible that he was really bad at it.
That’s a method of doing therapy. It sounds like a reasonable method that a counselor might invent, perhaps by mixing and matching other ideas. When my friends were starting clinical practice, they were required to identify which therapeutic model they were using, which would have prevented them from inventing their own model, and I don’t remember an accepted therapeutic model that was like that (???). But the therapeutic models they had to select from covered such a wide range of ideas that is was ridiculous, and perhaps that was one of them.
I think (my opinion) that the restriction on using an accepted therapeutic model came from the idea that psychotherapy done incorrectly could be dangerous. That is a Freudian idea, and part of the historic fight between the psychiatrists and Scientology. I don’t have any recent information on what psychiatrists or psychologists think about that now.
Thanks to you, as well, Melbourne.
Strange that it’s so hard to believe in God, and so easy to believe in the Devil.
Humans have invented so many deities and demons that it’s hard to know which to believe in. Carving your own is safest. But back to Freud. Like Marx, he was a great novelist. Taking their writings seriously is like seeing Indiana Jones dramas as documentaries. Observable reality spins in a different direction than our fantasies.
I’ve collected a few mystical “dream interpretation” books. They’re livelier than Freud but essentially the same stuff, oriented toward gambling. Dream X means reader should pick certain lottery numbers. Why wasn’t Freud that practical?
I’m highly skeptical of the notion that any of these things are revolutionary concepts pioneered by Freud.
The interpretation of dreams (as deriving from a person’s desires) goes back at least as far as the bible (Joseph’s brothers interpreted his dream as an indication that he had designs to rule over them), and the idea of the unconscious mind seems to be the basis of the notion of bias which was always widely accepted AFAICT.
What Freud did was 1) to put a whole lot more emphasis on the unconscious mind as being a much bigger factor than had previously been assumed, and 2) to assign all sorts of strange and outlandish feelings to the unconscious mind. But the concept itself was not revolutionary, and what he did add is not widely accepted.
ISTM that the main lasting influence of Freud was the growth of mental health treatment as a professional field. This was due to the prominence he achieved at the time, even though the basis for this prominence has largely dissipated.
Remember, Freud was a darn good tennis player.
And he did OK by Sherlock Holmes, I’d say.
Is the dream I don’t remember like the dog that didn’t bark?
Sometimes a shot of cocaine is just a shot of cocaine.
Freud’s understanding of psychology is analogous to, say, Archimedes’s understanding of physics. Archimedes (and various other Greek thinkers) knew less about science than pretty much any literate human alive today, and what they incorrectly believed was largely just as absurd as what Freud incorrectly believed. The reason Archimedes is a great scientist, though, is that he advanced it. Of course he didn’t know much by our standards; he didn’t live now. He moved science and mathematics forward, and that’s what defines greatness.
Freud started psychoanalysis from basically nothing. Of course most of what he believed was nonsense. The fact he came up with anything at all, though, is a testament to his greatness as a thinker. Measuring his knowledge by today’s knowledge is ludicrous; it was an entirely new field of study (though contrary to popular belief he wasn’t the first person to start in on it. He wasn’t far behind though.)
He could be a damn good writer. We studied Three Case Histories in a fascinating university literature course.
This is a bit OT for this thread, but you are very very wrong about Archimedes. What Archimedes knew was far greater than the average literate, well-educated person knows in our times. It’s not more than a person who is educated in those specific fields, obviously since that education would cover anything Archimedes came up with. But your average random guy would be unable to even understand much of what Archimedes came up with, let alone what he knew.
I guess it would depend on the defintion of “literate”. If we’re talking just being able to read, yeah, absolutely not.
The average person with a High School deploma would forget nearly everything they learned about mathematics other than basic kitchen-table arithmatic within a matter of years. Physics they probably know almost nothing (that doesn’t start to get hardcore until university). Same with astronomy and engineering.
A university student could approach him if they specialized in STEM. A small subset of humanity.
You’re really underestimating, or taking for granted, what people know now. Archimedes certainly was a remarkable mathematician and yes, you’re right that people know shamefully little math (though most of what Archimedes came up with really SHOULD be known to a person with a high school diploma.) He also didn’t know about a hundred thousand things than a guy like me, with no education in the natural sciences past Grade 11, knows. I could cite things all day - I know what hydrogen is, about continental drift, about evolution. I know what a kidney does. I know how the Sun shines. I know what a virus is. Archimedes knew none of those things - but he could not have. It would be madness for me to think he wasn’t a great scientist because he didn’t know the universe has four fundamental forces and I do. I know that only because someone else figured it out for me. The measure of a great scientist is that they figured out something for the rest of us.
In no way does that change that he was a genius. You can only stand on the shoulders of who came before you. Archimedes, if I recall correctly, figured out the volume of a sphere. (If it was someone else, insert their name. I know it wasn’t Pythagoras.) My daughter just had to learn that, as I learned it decades ago. But the fact I know that formula is one gazillionth as impressive as Archimedes figuring it out - to be honest, I think EVERYTHING I know, literally the total sum of all the things I know, is less intellectually impressive that Archimedes figuring that one thing out. If he literally had spent all his life drooling but for that one accomplishment, he’d be a greater thinker than me by a wide margin.
Your post that I responded to compared Freud to “Archimedes’s understanding of physics”, and I assumed the following sentences were also about physics.
He was like Columbus. No one would set sail today using the same technology he did. People found out new things about the world that needed to be incorporated into the paradigm. The fact that between 1880 and 1930 this man had an archaic or incomplete paradigm of humanity is not something that we havent known about for a long time, even Freudians.
All serious pros in this field know that he was a pioneer and that he was flawed and caught in his own psychohistorical moment. Like we all are. So if the concepts are pointing towards stuff that gets written about later by his descendants, more fully and with more human perspective, then I count Freud to be the inspiration of that “wiser” psychology.
The Denial of Death, by the late Ernest Becker, 1974, is a modern interpretation of Freuds meaning to human psychology.
Others who have written about this have been R. D. Laing, and Norman O. Brown.