The Cult of Sigmund Freud
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
For example, compare the understanding of tuberculosis in the 1850s to the understanding of today. Then it was called 'consumption' and there were various theories about its causes, its transmissibility, and its treatment, but today we can do a definitive PCR test and we know the root cause is an infectious bacteria (though even so, we are still not really sure why, in a cohort of exposed individuals, some immune systems are capable of defeating the microorganism and others are not). Doctors could fairly reliably diagnose it, but that was about it.
Similarly, today there are no definitive tests for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, ADHD, depression or anxiety, and it really just comes down to the opinion of the psychologist/psychiatrist. It's clear a history of trauma of various sorts increases the risks of developing mental illness, but nobody can say with much certainty if there are genetic predispositions or not. The two most prevalent approaches to treatment are therapy vs. a collection of drugs with problematic side effects, and even there, the psychedelic class of drugs has largely been banned though they do show promise in controlled treatment (this is changing, but slowly).
Obviously the whole mental illness field has a long way to go if it wants to catch up to the infectious disease field (and even there, we're seeing a lot of recent failures of public health goals, be it from the rise of antibiotic resistance or reckless gain-of-function research).
This isn't accurate. As far back as my psych degree in the late 2000s there were clear estimates of the degree of heritability of various psychological disorders - especially disorders with strong organic elements like schizophrenia and ADD/ADHD.
What makes psychological disorders difficult to understand is not a mysterious hidden biogenic causation. We know at least in terms of percentage contributions, quite a bit about the involvement of physical processes and systems in psychological disorder, from the gut microbiome to inflammation.
If psychological disorders were essentially diseases, with prognosis, a set of distinct aetiologies etc, psychology would just be a branch of medicine with poor data. Unfortunately mental illnesses are profoundly unlike physical illnesses in numerous ways. For example their symptomatology is usually culturally determined - e.g.: things we associate with depression in the West (dysphoria, anhedonia, melancholy etc) are quite different from the symptoms of epidemiologically similar disorders in other cultures (e.g.: pre-westernisation China).
There's a lot to unpack here, but psychological disorders are profoundly more complex (ontologically) than physical disorders. Often the medical lens isn't particularly helpful. For example we see rates of disorders like anxiety and depression rise under stressful socioeconomic conditions. These are often disorders of meaning and the persons understanding of the world. There are also a host of 'culture bound' syndromes - from anorexia to folie a deux to koro, that make no sense to think of in terms of 'illness'.
So it's as likely that the medical model is holding back understanding of these often sociological, psychological and cultural phenomena as helping. That said it's not nearly as simple as that, since there are genetic components to so many disorders!
Could you expand on that? How is depression different in China?
This study (from the 80s) looks like one of the origins of that idea - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00051427
Bear in mind my degree is quite old at this point, but a reference point for me during my undergrad was Malcolm MacLachlan's brilliant book Culture and Health A Critical Perspective Towards Global Health.
https://brownsbfs.co.uk/Product/MacLachlan-M/Culture-and-hea...
Here's a quote from the book (which I was lucky enough to receive as a PDF preprint in college)
"The experience of depression within an individual can vary over time – commonly referred to as the disease course – and, as already noted, it can vary between individuals of the same culture – commonly referred to as a disease syndrome. Kleinman’s suggestion that depression can also vary across cultures and across different historical epochs is quite consistent with a biologi- cal view of depression. He has also studied a condition known as neurasthenia. This condition, commonly reported in China, is characterised by a lack of energy and physical complaints such as a sore stomach. Klein- man has suggested that, although depression and neurasthenia are different illness experiences, they are both products of the same underlying disease processes – depression. In other words, neurasthenia is the Chinese version of western depression."
It's obscenely expensive, but you may hypothetically be able to find other ways of reading the book online.
How can this be stated with any certainty when we don’t even have a medical definition of what schizophrenia actually is, just a description of some symptoms. What are these genetic components, and how can we be at all sure it isn’t a behavioral transmission?
Yes - all psychological disorders are syndromal. None are purely genetic or environmental, in fact the DSM and and ICD explicitly rule out psychosis or positive schizophrenic like symptoms caused by say toxin poisoning from their diagnostic criteria.
What we can do is heritability studies on those who do fit the diagnostic criteria. We can test their relatives on neurocognitive batteries, including twin studies and get quite an accurate picture of the level to which genes contribute on a population level. Here's one review - https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/43/4/...
So you're right in asserting that schizophrenia likely isn't one clearly delineated disorder, but this is less due to an unclear 'medical definition', and more due to the fact that it's not entirely endophenotypic. It has sociogenic and psychogenic elements too - as do ALL psychological disorders.
We diagnose from symptoms, but symptoms too are culturally mediated. We can never have a simple 'medical definition' of schizophrenia, because it's not only genetic, or only environmental, or only behavioural. It exists on the line between the creation and performance of personhood, and the biological mechanisms that make that possible.
Put another way - if schizophrenics behaved 'normally' we wouldn't have a disorder at all. We deduce an internal experience of suffering, based on what they tell us of their inner experience (delusions and hallucinations), and the ways in which their behaviour departs from normative. We see a disease course, because many patients also have physical symptoms over the life course (like catatonia), although this is complicated by the brain damage caused by long term use of antipsychotics. A disorder of perception, selfhood and behaviour isn't reducible to a biological mechanism gone wrong - any more than joining a cult, following an extremist belief, or committing an act of terrorism would be. Those behaviours too could be said to have a genetic component - in so far as there are measurable aspects of impulsivity, neuroticism etc that can be used to explain them. But they're clearly not a disease in the conventional sense of the word.
It's not just "mommy milkers," Freud describes in his writings the entire structural order of being and the interrelation between our actual experience of reality and our mode of describing it as being deeply intertwined. How can someone trump such a claim with regular "empirical" findings, such a notion of empiricism from some pure, privileged stand point is already infected with a set of presuppositions which make it impossible to question the very social norms which structure their perspective. Freud is still so popular, so well-read, because for all his kookiness, his coke-addiction, his authoritarianism and his cult of personality, he still made pathbreaking discoveries about the structure of the human psych. You can shit talk him all you want, but people really do want to fuck their therapists, and it was only Freud who was first able to formally theorize why.
Freud did also directly credit Schopenhauer as his philosophical antecedent, so there's not even any controversy there. Just like Plato, he made up his own myths, doesn't mean they weren't practical. The trouble is not his mythology, its everyone else's, and everyone who fails to recognize the mythological origins of their own empiricism and notions about the world.
From my studies it just sounds like people didn’t like how authoritative Freud was. Which is funny given the line about the necessity for a confident doctor leading to positive outcomes. Jung even had a falling out with him. But the author is also a neurosurgeon, quite a brilliant one at that. It sounds like a cyclical review in itself. Almost like a modern version of the exact book he is reviewing given his own relationship as a neurosurgeon potentially being forgotten alongside Freud.
Great article!
No, they didn't. Here's how Heraclitus used Logos (as I described it above): https://chs.harvard.edu/chapter/17-the-heraclitean-logos/
And here's how Aurelius used it: "Marcus Aurelius uses logos to refer both to the divine that infuses and directs all things in nature and to the “fragment” of God, the rational mind, that is found in every person".
Nothing to do with the subconscious in either case.
I don't care to argue. I believe everyone is right in their own interpretations. It isn't unheard of for something that predated an idea to then be interpreted as an extension of said contemporary idea.
“Everything can mean anything. Words have no meaning.”
> I don't care to argue.
No wonder. Who would?
[1] https://aras.org/concordance/content/logos?back=concordance&...
Freud did not popularize the unconscious or thinking about how you think. Basic children's sunday school at a Church even talks about how you think. Major religions from Christianity to Buddhism talk about how the thought life of a person affects everything and the split and conflicted nature of humans. They just don't use post-freudian terms like conscious and unconscious.
What freud popularized was a secular way of coping with how humans think, analyzing it in a purely secular context and considering thousands of years of knowledge on the subject as childish fairytales and defining a framework by which a modern secular world can explain the actions of people and respond to them.
Socially, I have seen horrific impacts of his work from criminal punishment to people attempting to understand and help people who have chosen to be evil (worst examples being child rapists, school shooters,etc... not sick, evil! But evil has no place in a freudian context).
This documentary shared on HN a while back was eye opening for me, how almost every aspect of modern capitalist life was influenced by freud:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s&feature=youtu.be (Century of the self). Worth watching the whole thing.
I don't discount psychoanalysis as quackery but I am very hostile to it. I would need to filter any attempts of psychoanalytical thinking with a ton if critical analysis, taking it with buckets of salt!
Evil has no place in any psychological context. People who commit these crimes ARE sick. Whether or not they're evil is up to you, but its not a question for psychology
You're saying psychology cares about evil just prefers to use the term sickness. Or maybe I misunderstood and you were really saying psychology does not consider analysis of why people do evil something worth studying.
But I will say that people who molest children ARE often mentally ill. Often, they themselves were abused and people who undergo traumatic experiences have a tendency to recreate those experiences. Seeing child molesters as purely evil and irredeemable does nothing to help us prevent child molestation.
People who abuse children are in a position of power to do so. They violate the trust given to them for their pleasure. They know right from wrong, they know the concept of innocence, they know their actions cause harm. The thing psychology in it's inglorious ignorance leaves out is the concept of knowing your actions will affect someone adversley and you would not want that thing done to you. They are evil because they knew what they were doing and the harm it will cause and did it anyways because they know they will get away with it. You know what one good way to verify this is? They hide their actions! A person who had no idea they were causing harm will not hide their actions. A person fit to stand trial knows right from wrong, a convict chose wrong and for this crime that person chose to harm a child for their own gain.
Keep in mind, I am not claiming that it is impossible for a person to have been brainwashed and traumatized so much that they are no longer in control if their own actions and cannot process concept such as harming others or innocence. Such people can pleas insanity and if found insane they will be locked up seeking treatment. That is not the typical priesr or gym teacher that abuses children.
> Seeing child molesters as purely evil and irredeemable does nothing to help us prevent child molestation.
Yes it does and your thinking in my opinion is what has caused such an explosion if this crime since the 20th century. Recognizing sane people who commit horrific crimes for what they are allows society to deal with them accordingly. If society acknowledges evil then society much also choose to be evil and ignore it or destroy it. Suddenly no punishment seems sufficient and humane treatment becomes impossible (as it should!). By how much do you reckon this crime would decrease if they were tortured in horrible medeival ways and their torture was public and streamed on the internet and tv? I'd reckon by at least 90%! So society had chosen to feel good and humane over protecting its most innocent members! And part of the cause is psychology telling you feeling good about yourself is the most important thing.
You just cannot ignore the concept evil and act surprised when it is rampantly spreading.
But psychology is not alone, the catholic church excuses the acts of priests and blames it on the devil much like you blame it on sickness. Any system that refused to put the blame entirely on a (sane) perepetrator is at fault.
In politics you saw the so called "evangelicals"(not all of course) who supported trump no matter how much harm he caused and look at he has done to america!
And psychology is useless in a debate on morality. And therefore, unless you prove your antecedent of evil being an illness, when discussing crime.
The Ancient Greeks were very famous for pederasty, and yet their culture is universally renowned. Homosexuality was also a very common practice in Greece, which was considered until somewhat recently a vile act performed by the mentally ill. What is to you "vile," is to another perfectly socially acceptable. Except, apparently, fucking your mother, which was considered horrifying to both the ancient Greeks and our contemporary culture, and every culture in the entire world.
You can call Freud a moral relativist if you want, but he certainly discovered universal moral qualities, they just made people very uncomfortable, because it wasn't biases against murder, or stealing, or pedophilia, but something so (relatively) common in society, but which nobody would speak of. According to Freud, then, everybody is sick, because everybody has desires which they can't fulfill without coming to significant social harm--especially of the sexual order; and breaking sexual codes always results in some of the most severe punishments: It's legal for a police officer to kill someone under the right circumstances, never to rape them. The purpose of treatment, then, is not to stop people from having violent and/or sexual fantasies, but to convince and train them to divert those urges to a socially useful purpose. It is better to live in an organized society--according to Freud--than total anarchy.
Where as psychiatry deals with the chemistry and biology of the brain with respect to undesirable behavior. still, the politics of the day decides what is a sickness but with psychiatry you have to prove some chemistry or makeup of the brain is responsible while with freud's psychoanalysis it is a belief which is conscious or subconscious that needs to be washed out if your brain.
Let's consider two very different examples of a sickness. Both homosexuality and interracial relationships were considered undesirable behaviors for which you should be treated and unless it changed in the last few years transexuality is still considered a disoreder (wanting to modify your body for any reason I believe). Yet whether you disagree or agree with past or current designations of these behaviors as sickness, it is undeniable that the politics of the day is the deciding factor for what is socially unacceptable and therefore a disease which makes it hard for me to accept the field as anything more than pseudo science.
Complex ways to call beliefs sicknesses do not seem like a particulary honest or intellectual way of analyzing people's minds. And this wouldn't be happening if freudianism acknowledged clearly that it is a tool of a specific belief system as opposed to a science just as much as religion can consider behavior wrong and fixable freudian psychoanalysis defines social sins that need to be corrected by supposedly scientific beliefs.
A Freudian analyst would never proscribed certain behaviors for their patients, but would perhaps advise them to find ways to keep themselves out of trouble. If we lived in a society where it was acceptable to challenge your enemies in single combat to the death (like virtually all societies in the west before the 20th century) then an analyst would probably tell their patient that they should just be careful and make sure that it was a decision the patient made with a full, conscious understanding of the repercussions. Every society has acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence, which becomes all the more clear during times of war, when virtually all violent means become socially acceptable against the enemy.
Also,
>Where as psychiatry deals with the chemistry and biology of the brain with respect to undesirable behavior. still, the politics of the day decides what is a sickness but with psychiatry you have to prove some chemistry or makeup of the brain is responsible while with freud's psychoanalysis it is a belief which is conscious or subconscious that needs to be washed out if your brain.
there is no "conscious or subconscious" beliefs for Freud, there is only the conscious and the unconscious, which are precisely that which we are actively aware of, and that which we are not aware, in the cognitive processes of the mind. What someone says the believe is a lot less important than what they say about their belief, and what sort of structural orderings they are applying (in language) that reveal how they understand the world around them. And,
>with psychiatry you have to prove some chemistry or makeup of the brain
I think you are giving Psychiatry far too much credit. You should know Freud was the first person to attempt to create a physical model of the psyche, and he utterly failed, which is why he developed psychoanalysis (cf. Project for a Scientific Psychology). And to this day not only is he credited as being the father of modern psychiatry for that reason, virtually no progress has been made since his work.