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Unfortunately for Freud, most of his best ideas/creations became so widely accepted people forgot he was the one who had them in the first place.
The unconscious mind, dream interpretation, importance of early childhood, psychosexual development, talk therapy as we know it today, transference, etc.
What do we remember him for? Oedipus complex. Poor guy. It's like if all we remembered about Newton was alchemy.
Yes, he's the water we're swimming in. Here's an example I've been wondering about for years:
Freud taught that early childhood experience has a profound impact on adult life. Did anyone have this perspective before Freud? Was there a precedent? If I think of literary depictions of childhood in the 19th century, for example in Dickens, there can be great pathos, but not a psychological awareness of the consequences.
This emphasis on early childhood experience is tectonic in Western culture and we still haven't caught up to it in practice. If it really was Freud's contribution, that alone makes him great.
Another dimension of Freud is that he was a taboo-breaker, and in that sense a heroic figure. Some of the steps he dared to take are still so out-there that they can't be openly discussed. That's pretty remarkable after a hundred years.
Societies have gone through waves of considering children. Proverbs 22:6 is a good example of how the Judeo-Christian worldview contrasted with those around, including regarding children: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”
> Some of the steps he dared to take are still so out-there that they can't be openly discussed.
Such as?
Most children didn't survive early childhood until very recently. Times were closer to Freud than we are to him now.
I thought psychiatry is a branch of medicine. And medicine should be based on science. None of Freuds ideas seems to be based on science.
> I thought psychiatry is a branch of medicine. And medicine should be based on science. None of Freuds ideas seems to be based on science.
Psychiatry is a branch of medicine. Psychology isn't.
On one hand, society always had some puritan reflex reaction when talking about early childhood and psychosexual theories... Mixing sexuality and childhood feels wrong even on the most honest educational environments.
On the other hand, Pavlov became famous for the positive reinforcement study he developed to optimize a brutal methodo to extract dog drool, but somehow the animal abuse part was mostly ignored for a long time.
You can't choose what part of your work will become more popular or the most common association with your name...
> It's like if all we remembered about Newton was alchemy.
It’s ironic you say this. Like Freud, and unlike Newton, alchemists did not use scientific methodology. Also like Freud, alchemists get an unfair treatment by modern society, being remembered only for their mistakes. Medieval alchemists developed and refined distillation and crystallization, discovered acids and minerals, and developed metallurgy through the extraction of metals from ore. Just like psychology after Freud, the scientific field of chemistry grew rather naturally out of the advances made in alchemy.
Considering the fact that he lifted the concept of the unconscious mind from Eduard von Hartmann, I’d say it’s just desserts. Maybe this time around the actual originator of the idea will get credit, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
If Freud is coming back, how about Jung? He was equally unfalsifiable. While his ideas of the collective unconscious and archetypes may be very Eurocentric, and his talk about spiritual alchemy ahistorical hooey, they are entertaining and perhaps even useful to some. At the very least, it feels like therapy, while CBT feels like homework, complete with xeroxed worksheets.
I haven't experienced CBT but it sounds like what you're talking about is the relational aspect of therapy, which is certainly something that Freud and Jung were deeply aware of, and which the cognitive schools perhaps emphasize less.
the falsifiability criterion is equally unfalsifiable
Popper recognizes that on any knowledge, there may be an unfalsified basis. After all, science is not the basis of our assumptions, science must begin from philosophical assumptions (like materialism, empirism, none of them can be falsified). If not mistaken, he calls these things metaphisics.
How is it not unfalsifiable? It’s a logical framework. You can argue it isn’t a good model but I’m confused how it is unfalsifiable as that doesn’t really seem to fit. However I don’t know much about it beyond the basic concept.
What do you mean? It sounds perfectly falsifiable to me: you just need to show a well accepted scientific theory that cannot be falsified even in principle.
Having been a psychotherapists for 25 years I have heard all the negatives about Freud.
I was once told by my supervisor that the only way to fully understand Freud was to read his works in German.
For me he is an absolute genius. Who else could have discovered the unconscious mind?
For those non-psychotherapeutic people, your negative views and naive understandings are like me being negative about Timothy Berners-Lee when I dont know the first thing about coding or the difference between Python and Rust. Of course I know about aliases and small python scripts that make using linux easier but someone else has taken the time to write them. Does this alone make me qualified to question his work or claim I know more than him?
You are of course entitiled to your negative views and that is all they are, a view.
Every form, method and modality of psychotherapy in use today, from CBT to Psychosynthesis, begun with Freud.
The old man's back again! what a rubbish headline!
what should we make of his return? WHAT? He has not even left the building!
The use of the word "should" says it all. Parental, introject, super-ego.
Freud definitely didn't discover the unconscious mind - that idea was in the air in the late 19th century, with many people writing about it. There's a great book about this—I think it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discovery_of_the_Unconscio.... What Freud did do was create the most influential theory about it.
It's similar to how the idea of evolution was in the air before Darwin (whose grandfather even had written a book about it), but Darwin's theory became so influential that we now identify the idea of evolution with him.
I agree with your other points!
And every form of modern physics began (more or less) with Galileo.
But if physicists suddenly decided Galileo was back because Galilean physics was somehow an ideal to aspire to, many brows would be furrowed with scepticism.
Leave the corpse alone. There's enough death drive around for everyone at the moment without adding yet more ancestor worship.
Fuck Freud.
I say this every year, and as a PhD in Psychology and research professor.
Freud is not making a resurgence among scientists because Freud didn't conduct science. He wrote stories that sounded interesting. Literature majors, reporters, etc tend to love Freud. He wrote well, created vivid titillating accounts, but he did not empirically test these accounts. So Fuck Freud. He isn't relevant, and he isn't making a resurgence...not with anyone that knows something about the brain.
And people who give him credit for coming up with the idea that we have inner psychological self/child etc etc etc, just please, the brilliant minds of centuries past deserve more credit than that.
I have heard Freud described as someone who asked all the right questions and got all the wrong answers.
Here in Canada, you basically can't say "Fuck Freud" if you're a practicing psychotherapist, as there is something in the ethics code about respecting your peers. I can say it as I didn't make it to the PHD, but it's a bit frustrating to realize the field is self-regulating and at least 25% of its members basically don't believe in the power of... evidence.
Not unrelated, epistemology classes are not mandatory, despite the field being in the rare position of accepting (or at least tolerating) several vastly different epistemological viewpoints. Kind of like studying homeopathy and epidemiology in the same program.
Stones, replication crisis and glass houses...
This is a scary trend. I'm no psychologist but it seems like going backwards.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/08/france-is-50-y...
An lot of my scepsis comes from seeing how Freud's theories are still applied very dogmatically in France. One terrible example from the article above is autistic children being taken away from autistic mothers, since autism, according to these psychoanalysts, is caused by the lack of maternal emotional warmth.
Please, if you think you have real comportemental issues, go see a real doctor and not psychanalyst.
They wasted 15 years of my mother's life and made my and my siblings' life a lot more difficult than it had to be.
Freud, like all philosophers, said some pretty dope stuff and some pretty weird stuff. The mental model he provided us is quite easy to understand and even if we don't have an explicit ego, superego, or id, the subjective ideas those concepts represent can help us with things like acknowledging we have turbulence under the water of our psyche which we can't control most of the time and can direct our willful choices if unprocessed and given power.
Personally I've a resurgent awareness of Freud due to binging on Slavoj Žižek philosophy talks, which often reference Freudian psychology.
As a critical theorist, Freud was rejected alongside many old white dudes in an understandable reactionary reflex for many decades. One had to turn to Fanon to access thinking about the unconscious. I would argue that currents in philosophy to us Lacan and Freud to read capitalist subjectivity alongside new interpretations of Hegel have shifted the field tremendously, starting with the 1989 work of Zizek Sublime Object of Ideology. Over the decades this work has increased in relevance as a way of understanding a way out of our current predicament.
What's our current predicament?
The appeal of Freud is that there's clearly something true about it. It's not all true, not even close, and as a predictive model it is extremely weak; the ways it's not true is really important and everyone figured out that it's there so they moved on to other models. But it's got (I believe) true parts, even though you can't really call them "science", and those parts appeal to people like me who are looking for something... more than therapy, I guess.
>there's clearly something true about it. It's not all true, not even close, and as a predictive model it is extremely weak; the ways it's not true is really important
In what way is it clear that there's something true there?
It's not falsifiable.
Some things, e.g. id/ego/super-ego seem truish, but only because they package up already accepted things. It's like a "theory" in the Arts: a way of thinking, of analysing, a framework. It's neither true nor false, but may be convenient terminology.
I don't know how familiar you are with Freud, but it's not something that can be made piecemeal. The Oedipal complex is not "true" or "false," it describes the universal process of socialization that children enter into (even Aristotle said somewhere, that children begin by calling all men "dad" and all women "mom," until they learn to differentiate via naming). But the various conditions of the Oedipal complex are diverse: it boils down to, in the end, not the simple conventional "mommy, daddy, me," but a triadic formulation: the child only understands themselves as individual, insofar as they have lost the mother's affection (i.e. they're being weaned), and thereby gains an object of desire (originally, the love of the mother) which is always already lost, and a process whereby they can return to a state of pre-subjectivity i.e. where their desires would have always already been fulfilled; a return to a position whereby that affection (of the mother) can be returned, by assuming the role of whatever it is that took the object of desire away, in order to get it back, thereby gaining subjectivity in seeing themselves as that which they desire to replace. This is termed identification, which is a repression of that drive towards pre-subjectivity, a drive which Freud entitles the "death drive." For Freud, there is always something that precedes all theorizing or origination, some excess towards which desire aims--towards, precisely, a state before desiring itself--but which it never fulfills.
The Oedipal triad, therefore, is the first and most basic articulation of this drive towards death in its social function, even if it is made particular for the time and place where Freud lived, it is necessary as a part within the larger system: a part which relies on the regular function of others, like the death drive, like repression, like the unconscious. Each part of the system is defined in relation to all the others, and defined in relation to its appearance in a symbolic system and its authorization at the level of discourse; that is, at the level at which one speaks, since it is only within symbolic exchange that one first enters into a social world. One gains language through the word "mama," not because mama, the most basic, repetitive sound that any child can make, has any significance, but because the very appearance of a word that has come in place of the "actual" object of desire implies an infinite separation already from that object in its full sensuous reality: the object, once announced, is already lost, on account of the fact that it can be announced as separate from the very thing it supposedly describes. And from then on, the child is "castrated," i.e. cut off from the source of pleasure through their very entrance into the world of symbolic structures; through, more simply put, their entrance into language.
This implicates all other systems of thought, giving to all other discourses a biological, material explanation for the formation of language itself, but one which is always permanently separated from the very biological origin by that very excess towards which it aims--the drive towards death, which, for Freud, always points to a pre-animated, pre-vivified world. A world before language and the psyche that would come to describe it. So that the materiality, and the relation to the material world of every discourse, is always established as a permanent site of loss, to which (very fortunately for itself) psychoanalysis always has a method to prepare a way forward despite this loss, through the rigorous analysis of its own development.
From an empirical perspective, the theories of psychotherapy are profoundly uninteresting. Debate has raged for decades about the dodo bird verdict - the hypothesis that all psychotherapies have equivalent outcomes - but the data has rendered that debate moot.
Psychotherapy is effective, but only marginally better than placebo. The differences in efficacy between various modes of psychotherapy are statistically insignificant and undoubtedly clinically insignificant. People receiving psychoanalysis improve at basically the same rate as people receiving CBT or IPT or ACT or a raft of other interventions that loosely resemble psychotherapy. In the most basic sense, it doesn't matter whether Freud was a genius or a fraud; entertaining his theories, even if only to criticise them, is a distraction at best.
The bottom line is that people tend to feel a bit better when they talk about their problems with someone who is attentive, supportive and non-judgemental. That's a valuable insight, but it's inherently limited and it's never going to yield the kind of treatments that we want and need.
So therapy is not effective as per the paper. This seems like an astounding conclusion. Has anyone read the paper in detail and has a deeper opinion?
The study compares types of psychotherapy and commonly used medication. Both work about equally well, but neither has a large effect. This mostly shows that the effect size of psychological interventions in general is small.
But it sometimes helps, and as someone who has benefitted from psychotherapy I'm deeply grateful.
The fact that psychotherapy works about as well as medication is pretty impressive, considering some of these medications have serious side effects.
This is a very limited perspective, reducing Freud and the development of psychotherapy theory to, as you put it, feeling “a bit better”.
Freud was as much a mystic, philosopher, and literary genius as he was a psychiatrist. I've found his ideas to be extraordinarily deep and they have influenced my life and thinking in profound ways.
He never left.
It is nice to see some renewed interest in psychoanalysis.
Sure, Cognitive Behavior Theory can work really well for some people but I fear the phrase "evidence based" is a bit of over-hyped in a field with a major reproducibility crisis. Again, it can be perfect for the right person but it is not a silver bullet.
Especially for some people with PTSD it might not work that well or even be contra-productive.
So if you feels like CBT is not working for you, maybe give psychoanalysis a shot. There is more to it than Freud anyway.
There is no silver bullet, but if we're going to talk reproducibility, CBT blows any psychoanalysis-based approach out of the water, even once we account for all the outright fraud.
It's true however that psychoanalysis has evolved a lot over time and bringing it back to Freud every time is not really fair to modern approaches.
Yeah, go see psychanalysts when you have a real mental issue, give them your money, every weeks for 15 years. To 4 different ones, with only one response 'psychoanalysis is a lifelong work' when you don't see improvement.
Then, if you're lucky, you'll meet a psychiatrist, who within 5 minutes will say 'I think I know your issue, do you consent to a blood test?' and discover within half a day you're bipolar.
Too bad, your bipolarity already estranged you from your daughter and old friends. Hopefully you'll work on reconnecting since now, a real doctor actually found the issue.
Psychanalysts are crooks and are not doctors.
Or DBT or IFS. There's a handful out there.