Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nav_Panel | Hacker News Reader

> the field does not fully understand itself

> This sounds crazy but they should really be looking back to the roles/practices of priests, even shamans, just to try and get some semblance of an idea of what works and what doesn't

These things are exactly what psychoanalysis did and has always done. That kind of historical and reflexive investigation appears in plenty of Freud's writings (as well as later theorists, like Lacan, who drew heavily on Levi-Strauss's anthropological work).

Too bad that psychoanalysis takes shit for being "unverifiable" and "unfalsifiable" (as if what we currently have doesn't suffer from the exact same flaws, which I believe are inherent to any study of mental phenomena).

View on HN

These are good points, but I think they are more applicable to clinical psychology, at least in US and today. Psychiatry as a science and a field of medicine is committed to a certain view of mental illness as disease that precludes this kind of theorizing. Imo.

Freud is not taken seriously anymore and for good reasons. I mean, his historical contribution was good, but it is outdated and basically bunch of nonsense as far as we know now.

Do you have any of those "good reasons" beyond "it's nonsense"? Most people who say things like that, in my experience, have lifted that opinion wholesale from their undergrad psychology professors and have never read the man's work.

Freud's penis envy would be best reason. The idea that if you claim family member sexually abused you, then you likely basically have crunch on him.

Yeah, those are most popular easy things to point at, but the level of science at the time was "few patients and tons of imagination". We are further away now.

> Freud's penis envy would be best reason.

> The idea that if you claim family member sexually abused you, then you likely basically have crunch on him.

I've never heard the latter idea, but the former seems pretty real. I've spoken with plenty of women, all completely unversed in Freudian theory, who've related experiences that sound quite a bit like "penis envy" (usually some sort of early childhood situation, Freud never intended it to be taken as descriptive of adult women).

To the extent that "penis envy" was ever a true assessment to beging with, it can be read much more easily as a desire for the same level of power in society that males had, not a desire for anything related to biology.

No, it's pretty much literally like "I had a desire to marry my mother for a brief weird period when I was a little girl, until I learned that I couldn't do that". It's not about "power in society" at all, it's about the genesis of gendered notions in the child which leads to shifting identifications and relationships with parents. As a result it is a feminist concern, but of an entirely different order.

And this is all in Freud himself! He was woke to gender!

> I had a desire to marry my mother for a brief weird period when I was a little girl

This is even dumber and only guy can think it is anything.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ whatever you say

(and to clarify, Lacan identified the literalism of the theory as a problem and abstracted the idea to the level of desire. The child wants whatever mommy desires, whatever will make her stick around, which may or may not be the literal penis. In many cases it isn't.)

>a desire for the same level of power in society that males had

And psychoanalysis has explored this too. Besides, some of that power though derives from and appears in nature (the easiest example would be physical power, allowing men to keep women down), and this difference can very well be mistakengly assotiated by the child with the visible difference of not having a penis.

Also, it's not like there's not a very common occurence when boys declare they want to "marry their mother" or girls are in "love with dad", and not very real pathological relations of that kind that expand beyond the cute stage.

> this difference can very well be mistakengly assotiated by the child with the visible difference of not having a penis.

No. It is taky stupid theory. Also, little girls of that age don't know much about penises. Unless you abused her sexually, she did not even seen that and knew very little about it.

Height and strength are easy more visible. Cloth are easy more visible. Different behavioral expectations are visible and accepted. Penis, not so much.

Penis is something young males are obsessed about as shown by their tendency to draw it a lot.

"as far as we know now" -- with a quite US-centric idea of "as far as we know now".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com