You have a valid point. I often wonder that western culture has become too self-involved and “over-intelectualized.” I can see how freud’s impact has definitely helped us “ponder too deeply at our own navels” but he is not the only henchman. Western culture as a whole had been quickly moving towards that direction. Further with increased technology and individual wealth, we have much more free time to think about our personal problems and accentuate & focus on our own issues. You can see this from several writings during the mid to late 19th century and early 20th century.
You cannot blame Freud for the misrepresentation, misunderstanding and watering down of his theories by others for popular culture.
This is a common misunderstanding; it’s not completely wrong, but it’s not completely right, either, IMHO.
To begin with, although it is true that Freud mainly treated the well-off middle-class of Vienna, they were far from his only patients. The subject of the last case in Studies in Hysteria, for example, was a serving girl at an inn where he often vacationed. The Rat Man was an army officer from a relatively modest background.
In addition, Freud didn’t necessarily derive all his theories from his clinical practice. Many of them were taken from normal, everyday observations of the behavior of people around him, and even from his often conflict-ridden personal relationships. The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, for example, is full of example of slips of the tongue, instances of forgetfulness, and so on, that Freud thought revealed the working of the unconscious mind in daily life. Freud got the idea that paranoia was the result of poorly repressed homosexual impulses after the end of his extremely close friendship with Wilhelm Fliese (he thought Fliese became increasingly paranoid after their estrangement).
Finally, Freud actually argued that the “working classes” suffered less from neuroses, neurasthenia, hysteria, obsessive-compulsive behaviors and the like precisely because they were more open and up front about matters involving sexuality. He drops a comment about that in the case from Studies mentioned above, for example, noting that his “patient” showed little reservation talking about matters that a society dame of Vienna would never dream of discussing openly; he also writes, I believe, that his success in that particular case came with relative ease, because his patient was so comfortable with issues of sexuality.
Personally, I think there are couple of reasons behind Freud’s fixation with sex. To begin with, from a purely theoretical angle, Freud is profoundly reductionist: he seeks to explain all human behavior in terms of drives/instincts. He has writes quite unequivocally, for example, that in order for an explanation of a given behavior/neurosis/syndrome to be considered “psychoanalytic,” it must provide an account of the drive dynamics that underlie that particular behavior/neurosis/syndrome.
In this regard I think Freud was heavily influenced by positivism, mechanism, thermodynamics, and, in particular, Darwinism. For him, a “scientific” explanation of human behavior necessarily started from some form of theory of the instincts. He struggled over the course of his entire career with this question, and in particular with a dual set of drives that express themselves outwardly in terms of sex, on the one hand, and aggression, on the other.
As for why he emphasized sex, rather than aggression, I tend to agree with Sulloway, and with Breuer (one of Freud’s first colleagues), who thought that Freud was the sort of person who wanted to “shake the old fogies up.” He chose to emphasize sex because it was such a taboo-laden subject, and because he was, at heart, a provocateur. That’s not to say that he was alone, by the way, in his “fixation” on sex, since there was a massive production of sexological literature during the period; but he was significantly more open about it than most.
For what it’s worth, at the end of his life Freud admitted that he might have focussed too much on sexuality, and that aggression needed more theoretical elaboration than he had given it.
By the way, the Skeptics cite is hatchet job, and a good example of how misunderstood Freud is these days. Take it with a grain of salt.
Calling Freud a quack now is like comparing “citizen kane” and “the matrix” for special effects and calling orson welles a lousy filmmaker.
Freud was wrong about many things. Any strict Freudian therapist today would be considered (at least by myself) a quack certainly.
But Freud started the ball rolling. He was the best there was at the time. We think about psychology in a modern way (ok, well we thought in a modern way till the 60’s) because of him.
And YourOldBuddy:
I had a woman in my office today who’s currently dealing with the following: Her mother has custody of her two teens, one of whom recently hit her and often verbally abuses her. Her mother was a victim of child abuse, domestic violence for years, because of that she’s Incredibly controlling, shames people and treats them like either perpetrators or victims, neither of which leads to healthy relationships. My client from early in life (never had a choice of mothers mind you) has been treated like a victim, and because of her mother’s inability to recognize that this was happening, was sexually abused repeatedly by mom’s abusive husband, and her step brother. She would love to be a good parent, but she lost custody of her kids when she was arrested for being the roommate of a drug dealer 8 years ago. Her first task is to learn to refrain from being judgmental. This way she can learn when she judges herself so harshly that she is paralyzed into inaction by her own guilt. Then, maybe she’ll be able to make better decisions about how to react when her son calls her a worthless bitch for not getting him to football practice. Actually this is a way abreviated version, and without all the tears and pain.
So you think pacific princess, or royal caribbean?
Read the works of Thomas S. Szasz, such as "The Maufactue of Madness, “The Myth of Mental Illness” and several other titles.
Szasz points out that unlike brain the mind is not a physical entity, hence mental illness is a myth. Freud did not distinguish the two and hence confused actions and symptoms of real illness.
Show me a psychiatrist/psychologist and I will show you a person that needs one!
Yeah, some of us our familiar with Schrodinger’s cat. You apparently aren’t, however.
“Schrodinger’s cat” refers to a particularly famous gedanken experiment (“thought experiment”) that explores the meaning of the wave function in quantum mechanics. It is not, I repeat NOT a theory.
Sounds like somebodies first task ought to be being honest with themselves and taking a bit of responsibility for their own actions. She makes bad decisions. The first step in making better decisions is taking responsibility for making the bad ones.
Freud’s a “quack”, but Hippocrates is the “Father of Medicine”.
This amuses me to no end. Fortunately for Freud, we’ll probably forgive his ignorance in a few hundred years or so as long as we still find value in some of his original ideas.
I don’t; we’re debating my wife’s ideas here. I believe her specific problem with Dr Freud is with his success. His theories became well enough known outside his field to get misunderstood and watered down, a problem Jung, Adler, etc didn’t have.
Whenever people start talking about Freud they usually only write about his writings concerning the psychology of the individual. Some of his most important work is most certianly that which he engaged in toward the end of his career. This work tends to be directed at society in general.
One of his magnum opus works is ‘Civilization and its Discontents’. To use a cute term, Freud moves from ‘the couch to the culture’. For example, Freud argues that it is easy to bind together masses of people in a state of intense, ecstatic, brotherly love-just so long as their are people left over to recieve all the detritus of our emotions., like our anger, intolerance and hatred. Great leaders can pool our collective anger toward a common enemy for their own ends.
Freud noticed that religion has sometimes worked along these lines. Brotherly love for the devout but extreme intolerance for the outsiders. And he must have had no trouble understanding the zealous nationalistic spirit of Nazi germany, with its hatred of Jews and other supposedly inferior people.
Some of the ideas were new, some were not. But they were all elegantly fleshed out with a clear and powerful purpose in mind.
Also, Freud’s contention that religion, for example, is pathetic and silly has angered many people. Likewise his bitter pessimism about mankind in general.
Freud is a titan of a thinker, coming at the end of the Romantic era and helping to explain the brutality of the modern world. To dismiss him as a quack is just pure arrogance and ignorance.
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Oh, please. I’ve made the point in another thread and I’ll make it here. Freud was a great thinker, but he was not a scientist, he was a philosopher in the Greek tradition. He was not a “charlatan” in that he was sincere in his beliefs. However, this is not necessarily to his credit. Had he been slightly less arrogant and a slightly better scientist, he would have recognized the serious flaws in his method.
Look, Aristotle was a “titan of a thinker” as well, but that doesn’t make him a great physicist. I, for one, am certainly not convinced that Freud really “invented” psychology. There were many intellectual currents that came together in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and contributed to the field. Freud certainly put his stamp on it, but psychology would have developed anyway. Who knows? It might have developed better and progressed farther without his influence.
I’m not a psychologist, but doesn’t Szasz espouse that mental illness is merely a cultural construct (much as with race) and schizophrenia, for instance, is is a modus vivendi that someone chooses?
If so, we can start a whole new thread of who’s a quack.
Isn’t it? Schizophrenia has fundamentally different characteristics in other countries – in fact, it’s questionable as to whether it can actually be considered “schizophrenia”.
Schizophrenics in Africa, for example, have different characteristic behavior patterns and significantly different recovery rates.