Untangling the Complicated, Controversial Legacy of Sigmund Freud
thecut.com
thecut.com
“Did Freud get some things wrong?” says Lee Jaffe, the president-elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association. “Sure. But he also got many things right too.” Freud’s theories on unconscious mental processes, the importance of behavioral ambivalence and conflict, the origins of adult personality in childhood, mental representations as a moderator of social behavior, and stages of psychological development are all still relevant today. Freud also changed the public’s understanding of sex and desire, perhaps more than anyone else, by equating female desire with male desire. And, just by placing sexual desire and perversions into a “scientific” context, Freud freed sexuality from the largely religious context that focused on its moral degeneration or inherent criminality.
The ways in which he was wrong are much more nuanced than what you're suggesting.
He was wrong in many ways with no nuance whatsoever, but mostly, there isn't much in common between Freud and science. Which is basically what GP was saying.
Freud deserves credit for taking psychology as a field of study mainstream - and the debit for founding it on religious principles which, unfortunately, still dominate quite a bit of it. His net contribution is usually assumed to be positive, but that's not an uncontested conclusion.
Yeah, and most MarCom, religion, and much of modern politics. Now you know why they don't work.
It is undeniable that he failed in many significant ways, but three basic ideas to seem to hold up:
* The transference and the counter-transference -- the patient projects on to the therapist and vice versa
* The defense mechanisms -- methods by which people seek to escape not from their situation but from their feelings about it
* The corrective emotional experience -- therapy provides a way, in part through the transference, for the patient to work through feelings that they otherwise deny themselves
Freud had many crazy ideas, too -- and both he and his successors devoted far too much time and effort to these crazy ones. Quit when you are ahead.
[0] But see https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/11/the-problem-w... ; likewise, it's possible that freud's positives will turn out not to be.
The great structural thinkers of the last century, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche were the last philosophers that attempted schemas to describe all of history and culture as a single synthesized whole governed by definable mechanisms . Their flawed tools (the world spirit, the economy, the unconscious, biological evolution, and the will to power) are all somewhat rusty but there have been no real contenders to replace them.
Darwin seems very out of place there.
First, he was primarily a scientist, not a philosopher. Second, his theories are for the most part still very much dominant and accepted as true in his field - not just some overall insights and direction (as with Freud) - but the actual details. Modern biology very much believes in and is based on Darwin's theories. It's remarkable how right he still is after all this time.
It is also possible to overstate both Darwin's correctness (Pangenesis for example was a non starter) and his novelty (The idea that humans evolved from non-human ancestors that came from the sea is as old as Anaximander -- 600 BCE).
But there is a Darwinian/Spencerian ring to way we talk about failed programming languages, coding practices, failed corporations, technologies and economies: They failed to thrive, failed to form a community to carry forward their genetics and fight against the various forces that fight against them, compete for resources etc. Darwin's ideas have sublimated into ideology...
On a related note, I'm very interested in his rather indirect legacy through his nephew, Edward Bernays, and insight into what Freud thought about how his nephew utilized his conclusions to lay the foundation for the PR industry.
One of the first large marketing campaigns for a tobacco company comes to mind. If I recall correctly, Bernays commissioned attractive women to smoke cigarettes in high traffic areas.
But on the other hand, he did have detailed theories of male and female sexuality and how they differ. Those details (Oedpial complex, penis envy, etc.) are for the most part laughable today. But they paint an unflattering picture of both women and men, in different ways, so you do see criticism of him there.
All of his research was laughable by today's standards. Not just the details, everything. It is all misguided ideas made to look scientific. He was right on some points of course, but that's because chance make it so that even the most clueless individual can't be always wrong.
Maybe I am misguided myself but I don't know why Freud is credited so much. It looks like a lot of advances in psychology start with the refutation of one of his ideas rather than built on top of them.
Viewing 19th and early 20th century science through the lens developed by Popper and ilk in the 20th century is unfair -- they'd have done better if they had the benefit of knowing something that wasn't invented yet, naturally.
Freud and contemporaries were the birth of modern psychology, in that they were a radical improvement over the prior methods, even if they don't measure up to modern standards. The reason we talk about them so much is their role in improving over what came before -- the mistakes Freud made were better than forcibly dildoing women for "hysteria" (which is what 18th century psychiatry of women often looked like).
In short, we respect Freud because he was "less wrong" than his predecessors in very meaningful ways, even if he was considerably more wrong than we are now.
Freud deserves credit for revolutionizing an entire field, creating something new and coherent. Given the context of his time, he was a genius, like Aristotle was in his time.
Also, while most of Freud's details are of course pitifully ridiculous today, the basic insight that the unconscious matters, and that we can see its influence in indirect ways, is still a valid idea today. It's debated a lot, but it's a core concept we've never abandoned, so he deserves credit for that too.
This is just plain wrong.. the author does not have any sources, no evidence.. just a bold claim, opinion.
They might be part of mainstream psychology (I have read conflicting accounts), but they are definitely not part of mainstream science; very little of psychology is.