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Comment by schiptsov | Hacker News Reader

Rediscovering sublimation? Again? ^_^

It is said thousands years ago - control your emotions or be controlled by emotions. Freud emphasized that energy bounded to some emotions and mental states can be redirected, transformed, controlled.

General Taosist example is a river overflowed with monsoon water. It sweeps out everything when uncontrolled, but if people have built some dams and walls in advance, then all flooding waters will run into more-or-less controlled way.

So, if one can control himself why not use ones obsessions instead of being used by them?

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"Freud emphasized that energy bounded to some emotions and mental states can be redirected, transformed, controlled. General Taosist example is a river overflowed with monsoon water."

Freud was a pseudoscientific hack, and Taoism. while a nice philosophy, is not empirical science either. You've fallen far short of any decent standard of evidence here.

I have no time and intention to launch into a big discussion about scientific approach to mental states and their relation to the bodily ones. What I can tell for sure - describing and studying them scientifically in separation from other dynamic processes is deeply flawed approach.

You can, for example, find tons of studies about so-called 'attention window' or 'working memory span', but they didn't even mention that those characteristics could be dramatically reduced under stress or any other state of overload. There are a dozen variables on which it depends on, from the time of day to a noise level.

And, of course, calling Freudian works a hack is a little bit naive. Yes, you could call his Interpretation of dreams a hack, but he developed and extended a more general theory of mental dynamics, which, ironically, was known for aeons in the East.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=working+memory+under+str...

Yes, you could call his Interpretation of dreams a hack, but he developed and extended a more general theory of mental dynamics, which, ironically, was known for aeons in the East.

Which, by the way, is all scientifically unsubstantiated bullshit until you show me some properly documented and controlled experiments demonstrating otherwise.

Which, by the way, is all scientifically unsubstantiated bullshit this statement is too bold to continue any reasonable discussion. ^_^

Freud was extended and popularized the theory of unconscious mental dynamics which need not to be explained to any educated person. It covers almost anything from cognitive tasks and linguistics to somatic processes.

Secondly, he developed theory of therapist-patient relationships which was extended after him to anything from propaganda and advertisements to NLP and other influental techniques.

Of course, unconsciousness was known since Upanishads, but Freud was popularisator.

I'm not saying that Freud was unimportant in the history of ideas or anything; I'm saying there's no concrete evidence any of his theories have any predictive value over the actual behavior of human beings.

You see, I can afford to be categorically dismissive of Freud, Taoism, the Upanishads, and Miss Cleo because of a far more important development in the history of ideas: empiricism.

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