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Comment by mrxd | Hacker News Reader

> Freud came as a kind of a doctor for mind, calling his clients 'patients' and mimicking "real" doctors in any way he could.

This is a popular misconception. In fact, Freud was a "real" doctor who studied neuroscience in medical school and had a career as a doctor working in hospitals. The most interesting thing about psychoanalysis is that it was invented by neurologists like Freud and his mentors Jean-Martin Charcot and Josef Breuer, not by psychologists. The "talking cure" was originally used to cure people who had been hospitalized with various physical symptoms and ailments.

The popular myth holds that psychoanalysis is a non-science trying to mimic science, but in reality it is the other direction. It was originally closer to biology and moved away from that.

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Freud’s work wasn’t science or resembling it. It was a mix of observations and thoughts. Biology at the tine was way closer to modern science.

In fact, Karl Popper’s seminal work that characterized science and is essentially used to define science today, was motivated in no small part by trying to formalize Alfred Adler’s claims in a rigorous consistent verifiable and falsifiable manner - and realizing that was impossible.

I agree, my point is that psychoanalysis was developed by medical doctors trained in scientific methods and scientific understanding of human biology. So they were certainly aware that psychoanalysis wasn't scientific and never pretended it was. Freud attempted to link psychoanalytic observations to neuroscience, but ultimately abandoned that project because he thought the science of the day wasn't sophisticated enough.

> The popular myth holds that psychoanalysis is a non-science trying to mimic science, but in reality it is the other direction. It was originally closer to biology and moved away from that.

At the time biology itself was not a very scientific discipline. Biology became a real science when chemistry caught up with biology and biochemistry was born. Before that biology was mostly like a psychology: a lot of vague words, theories telling us things about something that cannot be seen or measured, and so on.

Though I can agree, that with the time psychoanalysis moved even further from science than it's starting point.

YES! And Freud's early works are so interesting, particularly his model of the psyche in Studies on Hysteria (which I assume he elaborates more fully in "Project for a Scientific Psychology").

It's only just now, 100 years later, that we're starting to develop the neuroscience to ground these theories more definitively (thanks to Karl Friston), and what Friston's seeing is quite close to what Freud posited back then. See research like: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27471478/

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