Freud’s Discontents

>> If this is true, then it's definitely a practice that needs to be focused on again. I've had nothing but bad experiences with various medical professionals throwing drugs at me the moment I mentioned personal difficulties.

I've found it to be true. Understanding where my undesirable behaviors come from is helping me correct them tremendously. It can be a painful process - expect to get worse before you get better - but it can be effective if you're working with the right person. For me the mental picture was less like an onion and more like a tangled knot of yarn, but it is straightening out quite nicely.

I personally don't like the Freudian approach. There are other non-drug based camps.

"I definitely don't remember anyone trying to work on anything with me."

This is too bad.

We really have to much faith in 'pills' when they are obviously just a temporary fix for something underlying.

I had a physical ailment that was hard to diagnose, the doctors could be bothered.

Finally I 'fixed myself' simply by sleeping normal hours, quitting the red-bull, and quit my job and took some time away from stress. That did it.

Scary: not a single doctor asked me about my habits! If they did, they would have found I was sleeping 5 hours a night, drinking 3 redbulls a day, and max-stressed. The answer was obvious to any fool! But several doctors missed it!

Good luck with your issue.

The difference seems to be in the type of degree. People who want to prescribe drugs to treat their patients need a medical degree, so that is what they get. People who want to help their patients work things out through other forms of therapy or counseling don't need the medical degree, so they generally go for a non-medical degree like a Ph.D. in Psychology. Then they can help people without having a prescription pad, and just refer patients who need drugs to someone with a medical degree.

So, choosing a provider based on their degree is probably the best way to get the help you want.

PS: This applies to the US, not sure how it compares to other countries.

On the contrary, the theories of Freud, Jung, etc. may strive to place the study of human psychology into a larger context, but it is evolutionary psychology that actually accomplishes this task.

Right now, the field of psychology is replacing phrenology and faith healing with biochemistry. And, you know what, good riddance!

In some sense, the lack of grandeur in present research comes from academia realizing just how complex psychological nature is.

Freud's era was one that underestimated the complexities of analysing, well, complex systems, where phenomena arise not out of the interactions of more-or-less pure entities like in Newtonian physics, but as the chaotic aggregation of heterogeneous subsystems, like what we now understand many biological processes to be.

I think the field today is doing what mathematics had been doing a couple ago; back then mathematicians realized that calculus was on shaky foundation, and developed tools to set mathematics on a firm logical and set theory foundation. Likewise, psychology is investigating neurology and trying to find a firm foundation in it.

Because most of his theories are nonsense. He got the idea of the unconscious right and understood transference eventually, but the rest of his theories are mostly bunk.

Worse, some are harmful bunk. He denied the existence of child sex abuse and invented a set of complex rationalisations which blamed the victims and shamed them for inventing fantasies.

We know now that at least some of their stories were correct, and not fantasies and delusions at all.

Pure Freudian psychoanalysis is incredibly expensive and time consuming and never scores well when tested objectively. It's not an exaggeration to say that in terms of value for time and money it's more of a scam than astrology and homeopathy are, but it never seems to get the same attention from debunkers.

Modern approaches that score much better (e.g. ACT and other MBTs) have almost no baggage imported from Freudian beliefs.

I think it's a lot because many of his ideas that were revolutionary for the time are considered obvious in hindsight. Mental illness at the time was often considered to be the result of some moral failing, and those with it are degenerates and beyond help. Freud and other founding members of psychology presented a radical idea that mental illness is a disease, its sufferers should be treated with kindness and compassion, and it can be treated by talking.

Probably because he was wrong so often, and his ideas got popular. Being wrong in a medical field is Not Good - it leads to real harm. I've heard it phrased as "he had the wrong answers, but the right questions".

Freud's impact on psychology is sort of like Aristotle's impact on science. He laid the foundations of the field, had indisputably profound insights into the mind and without him, psychology would hardly exist in its current form. However, basically all of his specific conclusions are... wrong. They reflect a lot of personal biases and are pretty off-base; worse, they were taken as fact by a lot of early researchers, which bogged down the field for a long time. Depending on who you ask, Freud is either absurdly underrated or overrated; he's such a fundamental figure in the field that it's really hard to look at his impact "objectively," or even understand what that means.

It's not just that a lot of his theories were wrong (something he had in common with Galileo and Newton), but that his wrong theories were taken far too seriously for far too long by certain sectors of the humanities (cough critical theory cough) as well as writers of film and television whose sole exposure to psychology was Freud in History of Psychology 101.

I think the hate is justified, to an extent. Freud's influence is not due to his theories, but his invention of the "talking cure." His original theory of deep-seated psychosis was more in line with the modern view: that it usually springs from traumatic sexual violence experienced in infancy or childhood. But this put him between a rock and a hard place: either go forward with his research and lose his academic career, or join the rest of society in blaming the victims. Freud chose the latter, and put such a convincing intellectual spin on it that he even earned a reputation as a scientific genius.

The problem with Freud is that his ideas have been taken seriously for way too long. His theories of human psychology are on par with phrenology in their ability to provide a framework that explains human behavior. It's rank pseudo-science.

And now, finally, evolutionary psychology is gaining widespread acceptance.

"but why does everyone seem to hate on Freud, considering he has had a tremendous influence on modern psychology?"

Because his theories were not necessarily scientific, and it was unjust perhaps that he had such influence.

The irrationality studied by Dan Ariely et al it's not comparable _at all_ with the freudian irrationality. The former brings to the forefront our fauly heuristics and biases. The later is about how culture and our psyche actively makes us ignorant of parts of ourselves that are inconvenient, and that can come out in bursts of irrational, unstable, "crazy" behavior.

It wasn't his methods. His idea of curing by talking is now standard practice, but was revolutionary for that time. The problem was that it put him on the path to exposing the widespread incest and rape that was going on in his society. Freud initially believed his patients, but wasn't prepared to face the consequences, so he changed his tune, and this reversal led him to come up with the far-out psychosexual theories he's so famous for.

Freud is still regarded as the father of modern psychology, perhaps because he was the first to actually sit down with his patients and take them seriously.

Here's an article that tells the story in detail: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1984/02/freud-an...

I think it may be hard to point to bad "experiments" of Freud's, since he didn't conduct psychology experiments the way we think of today, i.e. the gold standard being double-blind randomized controlled trials. In part, this is because it's somewhere between difficult and impossible to do this kind of research in a clinical setting. In part, his lack of solid experimentation was due to the immaturity of the field and the difficult of ever doing rigorous experiments in therapeutic psychology; in part, he was just not a great scientist, anyone who argues otherwise is just engaging in apologetics.

I think that calling his brain science "junk" however (which I'm not accusing you of, just repeating your characterization, which is definitely a position some people hold) is a bit uncharitable, partly because in retrospect all of the nascent "brain science" from that time was pretty junky, but also because he was aware and often explicit that his writings were highly theoretical and speculative, e.g. his writings on the death drive, and his writings on politics and civilization were often cases of him just following lines of thought to see where they went. I think some people take Freud too seriously here (though he also sometimes took himself too seriously).

> And, since it's Freud, one that won't turn my stomach?

Ah, a primitive emotion - fear - protecting you from the psychosomatic response (nausea) emanating from the id, the reptilian section responsible for protecting you from primal dangers (attack/rape).

That was a lame attempt to be meta, but I think one of his junk theories was the oedipus complex[1], the theory that children sexually lust for a parent. I think that one has mainly been discounted, but as another poster said, Freud sort of blew the lid off all the rapey things that were going on (people came to him with "hysteria", which was probably PTSD and anxiety, he asked them about their history, most of them were raped/molested/traumatized, and decided these rape victims needed a clean, palatable theoretical explanation instead of condemning their attackers).

Not all of his stuff was junk, though. His drive-defense model is still partially in use today (just google psychological defenses, see the list of them on wikipedia). What bugs me about Freud critics is they appear to bash him as if he's out there now, still practicing. He came up with this stuff 100 years ago, and just like pioneering medical doctors from 100 years ago (who aren't criticized even a fraction of Freud), his research is obsolete and has been replaced by more refined and sophisticated models. I dont know why so many people wont accept that: we dont remove an appendix the way we did in 1912, just as we dont treat depression the way Freud did. And we dont condemn 1912's surgeons as fools for not knowing what we know today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_complex

There's a lot of nonsense thrown around about Freud. If you're interested, there's nothing better to just read the man himself. You can form your own opinions and you'll get a lot more out of it than reading someone's inevitably biased commentary.