Was Freud Scientific?

Great Debates
21

He did have the tools, and he never tried.

For example, he never tried to use the same analysis techniques but point them in another direction to see if he got the same results.

He got the results he did by pointing his patients in the direction of seduction and parental lust. A basic test to see whether this was effective at diving the truth would have been to use the same analysis techniques, but directed towards finding evidence of childhood encounters with something ludicrous: fairies for example. If a substantial number of patients started to describe encounters with fairies he could reasonably have concluded that the techniques he used were not useful in diving the truth. Similarly, rather than analysing his patients for parental lust he could have analysed them for, say, necrophilia. Once again, if a substantial number of his patients started to report feelings necrophilia, he could conclude that his analysis techniques were faulty. This sort of testing doesn’t require any tools that Freud wasn’t already suing. Indeed, the best scientific testing uses precisely the same methodology that one wants to test, and changes just one variable.

The ironic part is that the tests I proposed were done, by other, within Freud’s own lifetime. And the falsified Freud’s ideas. However by that time Freud had become such a celebrity, because of his work with celebrities, that he had become *the *authority on psychiatry. Any theory that Freud did not endorse was almost certain to be pilloried. And Freud himself, being unscientific, clung to his theory despite knowing that it had been serious shortcomings.

That is the biggest reason for saying that Freud was unscientific. Not because his theory was based on flawed evidence, but becuase he insisted it was right regardless of the evidence.

Kinda hard to reconcile that with the fact that psychiatry has recognised repressed memory syndrome for over 25 years now, and there is no evidence at all that it is even possible, let alone that it exists.

22

That is really all I need to say.

You are simply wrong in everything you have said in this thread. I have provided references to prove that you are wrong, and after this claim I don’t believe anybody is going to believe that you are posting in good faith either. So you have neither facts nor logic nor reputation to support you position.

If anyone wants to believe you after this little display, good luck to them.

23

Theres a whole separate discussion (seduction theory, IIRC). Im of the same belief as Jeffrey Masson, a scholar who worked in the Freud archives for several years. He said that Freud was a fraud - that early on he recognized the hysteria he was treating was most often due to childhood sexual molestation. Not long after, he quickly figured out that accusing some of the prominent Viennese families of child molesting was a Career Limiting Move; so he made up the whole crap and caboodle about Oedipus and Electra and subconscious and spent the rest of his career in misguided self-justification… and took the field of psychiatry (or psychology) on a 100-year wrong turn.

24

If you say so.

If you insist that there is no distinction between the practice of medicine and the practice of psychiatry, I see no point in continuing either. Good day sir.

25

Ah! Okay, fair enough. I concede defeat.

Here, I’m not quite so sure… I don’t know exactly what the definition is of repressed memory syndrome…but I do know that I, myself, have “repressed memories.” Things my whole family remember me doing, but which I have absolutely no memory of at all. (Um…significant events, too, not trivia like breaking a lamp, but really meaningful events, like pulling a pistol on my father!)

What is the difference, technically speaking, between r.m.s. and what I’m describing, lost memories? (It’s the sort of event I can understand why the mind would repress it! Sheesh! I would have been about fifteen years old at the time, too, so it isn’t a juvenile memory…)

Trinopus (also, of course, one anecdote doesn’t carry much weight…)

26

The difference is that your memories are gone and irrecoverable. Nobody disputes that memories are lost for all sorts of reasons. It may be because of brain damage or the effect of drugs, most commonly memories are forgotten because the brain at the time never realised they were significant, so they never left short term memory. None of this is controversial.

RMS is very different. It hinges on the fact that the memory still exists intact within the brain, and that it has been suppressed so it isn’t accessible by the conscious brain. According to RMS your brain still contains every singlel detail of the events you describe. You just can;t get access to that information because your subconsciuous mind is preventing it. According to RMS you will be able to remember every detail of those events in therapy sessions, despite having no conscious memory of it at all.

That hypothesis is, as far as we can tell, a load of horseshit. If a memory exists in the brain we have access it if we want it. There is a certainly a short window during which unused details that are transitioning to being dumped where we can’t get access them fast, such as a word being “on the tip of one’s tongue”. But the point is that the information is still available if it still exists.

There is no evidence at all that a memory can exist in recoverable form and yet be inaccessible to the conscious mind. Rather what *all *the evidence points to is false memories being implanted by psychiatrists.

Once again, all this has been tested to destruction, but not by the psychiatrists who invented it. People have been questioned about verified childhood trauma under controlled conditions, and without exception they either have been able to remember it or they haven’t been able to remember it in therapy either. There is simply no evidence of a person repressing memories of a real event.

What we do have incontrovertible evidence of is that it is very easy to implant false memories during therapy sessions. We also have incontrovertible evidence that many “recovered memories” are false. We have examples of women “remembering” to have been raped dozens of times, who turn out to be intact virgins. We have people “remembering” watching dozens of bodies being buried, in a spot where the rock is just inches below the surface and has been undisturbed for millions of years.

And this list just goes on and on. There is no evidence that repressed memories exist. There is no evidence that repressed memories can exist. There is ample evidence that the techniques used to recover memories produce false memories. There is ample evidence that many repressed memories can not have been real.

In a real science, the hypothesis would have been discarded at least 20 years in light of all that. Yet it remains currently accepted in psychiatry and didn’t even hit its peak until about 18 year ago in the mid 90s.

Hence the reason why I say that psychiatry isn’t operating under scientific rules and protocols. Some psychiatrists are, but many clearly are not, and psychiatry as an *organisation *is not.

27

Once again, he tries to debate the difference between urology and medicine.

28

A psychiatrist might be interested in your obsession with urology.

29

Greetings, old friend! What a pleasant surprise to offset the disappointment I feel upon learning of the loss of one of the better posters around here. I hope to see more of you. Well, not in that way. I mean, you know what I mean.

30

Fear Itself, you should realize that your agenda confuses Freudian psychoanalysis with present day psychiatry. The two are about as far apart as you could imagine. Modern psychiatrists spend about 15 minutes with patients, and in very large measure, do nothing more than prescribe medications. A small proportion involve themselves in psychotherapy (by which I mean cognitive and behavioral intervention strategies to address mental health problems). A very small proportion of all mental health practitioners involve themselves in psychoanalysis (by which I mean involved efforts to understand the conflicts among the id, ego and superego driven towards making the nature of these conflicts aware to the patient and in so doing resolve the problem underlying the manifest mental health problem).

Believe me, Fear Itself, you really, really don’t want general practitioners to be your go-to folks for diagnosing mental health disorders. They just aren’t trained, and their abilities to properly do so are slightly better than the lay person’s would be. That’s why I brought up the comparison with urology. If you’ve got a problem with your junk, you probably are ultimately going to want the diagnosis and treatment to come from a specialist, aren’t you? Someone who spends their time understand in depth the various conditions that can affect your bits and pieces, being able to sufficiently tell one of those conditions from another so that you don’t spend your time receiving treatment that isn’t appropriate for the particular condition you have?

Sedatives, by the way, would really not be a preferred treatment strategy for many disorders. There are many specific classes and types of medications for specific mental disorders, so it is important to have some specialization in diagnosing and treating them. The appropriate treatment strategy depends a great deal on whether someone is experiencing ADHD, major depressive disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, and so on, and often times general practitioners do not know how to sufficiently diagnose these conditions.

Psychiatry is a branch of medicine. Most practitioners are not scientists, just like any other branch of medicine. The science involved in the study of mental health disorders is as rigorous as any other discipline, but is complicated by the very nature of the subject under study.

Much of the scientific work that psychiatrists rely on is performed by psychologists, who are typically much better trained as a matter of course to conduct research. There are, of course, exceptions to this, and some high quality research is led by psychiatrists.

(Psychology is not a branch of medicine. Psychologists are much better trained in providing non-pharmacological intervention, and in most cases psychologists cannot be licensed to prescribe medication. In my opinion, practicing psychologists tend to be much better at diagnosis than psychiatrists.)

31

I have no dog in the fight, and I admit that psychiatry lends itself to more woo than most other medical disciplines, but modern psychiatry is definitely scientific. Treatment techniques are tested in case control studies and rejected if they are found to be ineffective. Take a look at a few issues of the American Journal of Psychiatry. The scientific method is alive and well.

32

Some modern psychiatry is scientific. Some of it clearly is not.

I’m not going to hazard a guess on how much is woo and how much is science, but to this day people are still being sent to jail based on the expert testimony of psychiatrists touting RMS, a syndrome that is untestable, unquantifiable, unsupported by evidence and as far as we can tell physically impossible.

So modern psychiatry is still pushing a belief that almost all psychiatrists believe to be without any scientific merit. 20 years ago most psychiatrists touted this piece of woo-woo, and it had no scientific validity then either. It was accepted by the psychiatric community without even the most basic attempts at scientific validation.

Clearly modern psychiatry isn’t scientific. Parts of it, sure, but the edifice as a whole, no.

33

Modern psychiatry adheres to scientific principles. Its fundamental problem is that many of its diagnoses are not as strongly determined by the evidence as, for example, the diagnoses of a pathologist typically are.

By this I mean that 5 psychiatrists can interview a person and plausibly come up with 5 different diagnoses. That is not to say that pathologists have no issues with diagnosis at all - they earn the big bickies because of the borderline cases that will always exist at the margin of detection, no matter where that margin may be- but you understand the point. Psychiatrists tend to have much weaker test-retest reliability.

That said, Blake’s observation above - "“That is the biggest reason for saying that Freud was unscientific. Not because his theory was based on flawed evidence, but becuase he insisted it was right regardless of the evidence.” - is apposite.

We all understand repression, in the lay sense. People try to forget unpleasant experiences, and are often pretty successful. We can drive to work and, if pre-occupied, coompletely forget any of the details of achieving that task. And gamblers have a distorted recollection of their past successes compared with their failures which can drive them to continue destructive behaviours. But Freud took this commonplace observation way beyond what it would bear and turned it into an essential centrepiece of his theory, seeing it everywhere.

I would slightly modify Blake’s comment above - Freud did not really insist that he was right regardless of the evidence, he created a metasystem in which everything was evidence of his theory. It was a bit like modern conspiracists, who, when it is pointed out that there is no evidence to support their theory, touch their nose and say “Aha! That just goes to prove how good the conspirators are in covering their tracks!”

Thus, if Freud asked you if you wanted to sleep with your mother and you said yes, that supported his theory. If you said no, that proved how deep in repression and denial you were, again supporting his theory.

In fairness to him, IIRC the rise of falsifiability in the Popperian sense was still some distance away when he was writing his most important work. But it is true, I think, that the detection of child abuse suffered a century long wrong turn as a result of his work.

Freud led us to scientific psychiatry, even if he was not the posterboy practitioner of it himself for the above reasons. Whether this outweighs the errors we were saddled with is a matter for the judgment of history.

34

To me, Freud’s theories lent themselves more towards the empirical method as opposed to our more contemporary scienctific method, given the time in which he lived… As such, his observations were colored by personal bias.

Still, he was a pioneer in the field of psychology. For example, isn’t his concept of the ego defense mechanisms still in wide use today…denial, repression, rationalization, et al?

35

Freud was a psychiatrist and forerunner of psychiatry. Pioneers in psychology were the behaviorists and those involved in efforts at measurement (e.g. intelligence testing). The concepts of denial, repression and rationalization may still have meaning, but only in as much as people naturally engage in them. The concept of them as mechanisms engaged in by the ego (they are ego defense mechanisms more specifically) in order to protect against the id or superego is not widely used today.

36

In what way is any of the stuff mentioned psychiatry? Psychiatry is the use of medicine to deal with psychological problems. Sure, Freud did practice medicine in that he experimented with some drugs and treated what were thought to be physical ailments that doctors weren’t able to treat (that pesky pseudoparalysis.) But his theories on how the mind work are all psychoanalyical, and psychoanalysis is a type of psychology, albeit a mostly discredited one.

I’m aware that psychiatry directly links itself from Freud, but what he did could hardly be called psychiatry in the modern sense (other than the medical tests mentioned above).

Also, whether RMS is scientific depends on whether it has been tested and whether those tests are used to inform the practice or are just ignored. (My guess is that there are studies that show their therapies are not useful.) The fact that it is based on a nonmainstream theory about how the brain processes information would not be important at all if the therapy itself was shown to be effective.

Finally, if Psychiatry contains medicine, and medicine is scientific, how can anyone argue that psychiatry is completely unscientific? That’s like saying that you added Welch’s to your fruit coctail, and yet somehow Welch’s is 100% juice but your cocktail contains 0% juice. WTF?

37

**BigT[b/], don’t confuse medicine with Medicine, or put more clearly, medication with Medicine. For instance, any surgery belongs within the discipline of Medicine, does it not? Yet, surgeries are not medications.

The point is that whether or not an intervention is pharmacological or not is not what determines which discipline it is affiliated with.

Freudian psychoanalysis belongs entirely within the province of Psychiatry, and Psychiatry is a discipline within Medicine. Psychoanalysis is not a common practice today (relative to other types of interventions for mental health), within psychiatry or anywhere else.

It was never part of Psychology, as a discipline. Psychology arose from very scientific origins, and for a time, treatment efforts were a primary distinction between Psychiatry and Psychology, with the latter seen as involved in measurement and testing (particularly intelligence) and in basic research into behavior (Pavlov, Watson etc). The right of psychologists to provide treatment for patients was one of the largest early conflicts between Psychology and Psychiatry.

One thing that Psychology has not done a great job with is the need to actively fight against woo, against professional activities that are not empirically supported. So…

The idea that memories that are recovered after being lost is quite dubious, and in fact a great deal of research shows us that memories that we feel pretty confident about can actually be quite mistaken. In treatment, it’s a fools errand to go hunting for memories, and if you should encounter one, the best thing to do is treat it as a possibility and evaluate its meaning in terms of present and future functioning.

38

I think that is a pretty loose definition of psychiatry, but let’s go with it for a bit. What differentiates a psychiatrist prescribing Prozac from a general practitionaer prescribing Prozac?

39

Not directed at me, I realize, but the difference is the same as a general practitioner prescribing Flomax.

40

Sounds like you are arguing there is no such thing as psychiatry, since what they do is indistinguishable from what a GP does.