Freud as Talmudist
jewishreviewofbooks.com
jewishreviewofbooks.com
Basically, if a decision has full agreement, jumping to the conclusion is wrong as it can mean some details were not properly investigated.
https://www.jewishaz.com/religiouslife/the-importance-of-dis...
Along with the written Torah there was also an oral tradition, that oral tradition would have included the info of 2,000 amaos that the article references.
What does the Talmud do? It works under the principle that everything in the oral tradition is also hinted to in the written Torah, and then it goes looking for it.
The article incorrectly claims that the Talmud derived this number from the written Torah - this is false and backwards. The people who wrote the Talmud already knew this number, their goal was to find where it was hinted to.
They were able to do so for virtually every part of the oral Torah to the extent that they even recorded every time they were unable to do so with the term "Halacha mi Moshe be Sinai". (A law direct from Moshe on Sinai, i.e. as distinct from a law that could be derived from the written Torah.)
This is such a fundamental misunderstanding of the Talmud that it kind of fails the entire point of the article.
Since most Protestant sects since 1517 had been consistently rejecting and deprecating the practice of auricular confession, men around the world, especially in Europe, were bursting with secrets. There is a basic human need to disclose our secrets to God, and to feel cleansed and regenerated and relieved of the burdens they've become.
So Freud and his colleagues designed psychoanalysis as a comfortable, secular, drop-in replacement for auricular confession, and established a new priestly class among the Protestant laity. Now it's great to fill a void, but of course Catholics and Orthodox had never ceased the original practice, and so it was clear that psychoanalysis was explicitly designed to usurp and work at crossed-purposes to the religiously-branded type.
In the past two centuries, the new priesthood has succeeded in establishing a secular church, even in disestablishmentarian jurisdictions such as these United States. By medicalizing defects of mind, and applying a "disease model" of diagnosis and treatment (but never cures) even to vices such as substance addiction, the new priesthood has established religious control over the populace in unprecedented ways (okay, maybe they are definitely precedented). The most recent expansion of this religion is from "mental" to "behavioral" health; i.e. not only your internal thoughts, but also your outward actions, are under scrutiny and subject to control.
It is interesting that recent developments have seen Roman Catholicism take an approach of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" and wholly embrace psychoanalysis, psychology and psychiatry as their own, even going so far as to accept theories of homosexuality and "orientation" as givens and psychological facts. There are now explicitly branded Catholic practitioners of mental health, where you can go for drugs, psychoanalysis, and support groups, because two churches are better than one, I suppose.
Uhh... your outward actions have always been under scrutiny? What are you getting at?
Historically, with a church established with the state, the Church was in charge of the behavioral health of their subjects. The state could make temporal laws and punish people for crimes in various ways, but the thoughts and ideas of citizens was controlled by the Church, and if citizens acted against Church teachings, this was a danger to the stability of the state. Heretics were basically traitors, in other words, and heresy needed to be dealt with, in order to preserve domestic tranquility. In the best of times, the Church held the State's best interests closely, and good churchgoers were also good citizens. Of course, this could also be a love-hate relationship.
Due to widespread distestablishmentarianism, the States are still in charge of crime and punishment and they have prisons for criminals, but they were somewhat unable to deal with heretics and wrongthink. People of mental defect, lunatics, and the criminally insane are also dangerous to domestic tranquility, and so, having lost the relationship to its Behavioral Health provider, the State has established a new religion to supplant it.
When psychiatric drugs were new, they were heralded and celebrated as a release from chains: they are indeed a method of restraint that is viewed as "more humane" because they are invisible and chemical. But this is all they are: a newfound method of restraint and control. They are not intended to cure or treat diseases, just make the people's behavior more manageable.
The Church of Psychiatry is authorized to imprison those whose behavior is not manageable. So, outward actions that are not... illegal... or subject to criminal prosecution, are still subject to scrutiny and control by the psychiatric priesthood. The power of the State is vested in them to drug, imprison, sterilize, and euthanize, just as it was in the before times.
We have always been at war with Eastasia.
But qualitatively things are also profoundly different. Most people who take psychoactive drugs do so willingly and involuntary commitment is relatively rare. In the United States and other places the criteria for such is typically danger to self or others and the process is subject to legal review. Compare that to the circumstances of the Catholic Church before reformation and secularization: the Church was not just a mechanism by which the state exerted a limited control of citizens. It was, in fact, a totalizing worldview which, for the average citizen, was as immovable as the earth. As you have pointed out, it even operated in parallel with, instead of as a subject to, the state. In some sense it was also a state or a meta-state. Psychology, in contrast, is hardly more than a disorganized cultural force with some minor powers given to it by the state and subject to its review. The average citizen is only vaguely aware of it and many people (I'd hazard a guess that most people) have no real interaction with its ideas or apparatuses. I would argue that even where psychology is given some temporal power to restrain citizens, this is done so not out of a blind acceptance of its content as true (or even a cynical assertion of its absolute truth by those in power), but as an attempt to "do the best we can" with our limited understanding of what makes human beings and human societies function or even what functioning might mean.
There is one other critical difference (if you ask me): Catholicism and Christianity (religion and spirituality in general) is freighted with a tremendous amount of utter bullshit. Physical and metaphysical claims which are transparently false or absurd. By positioning itself as scientific, and by making substantially fewer claims about the fundamental nature of the universe and the human condition, psychology is, though imperfect, substantially better than what was, if anything, an even more disordered pile of fabulation, fantasies and weird ass ideas.
Behavioral health is arguably a shift _away_ from policing the internal state of the person to instead focus on specific behaviors that interfere with a patient's life. It is bizarre to suggest this places behavior under "scrutiny and control." You may have noticed that, in fact, all of our behaviors are already under personal, legal, and social scrutiny and control. The point of behavioral health is to help people cope with _that_ reality without engaging unnecessarily with psychological narratives which, as you and others have pointed out in this thread, may not be evidence based.
Also, "In the past two centuries, the new priesthood has succeeded in establishing a secular church". This may be true in some sense, but psychoanalysis and its descendant practices have nothing like the cultural and political dominance of Catholicism in its heyday. I guess its possible to think of psychoanalysis as a church if you allow "church" to mean just any collection of ideas around which people organize and in which people believe without a level of scrutiny they apply to other kinds of ideas, but that covers quite a lot of ground.
"psychoanalysis was explicitly designed to usurp and work at crossed-purposes to the religiously-branded type." I'm genuinely interested in whether Freud ever wrote anything that suggested that he was trying to usurp Catholic confession.
You can see that very visually when you have jewish orthodox people and near them the pride parade. Also, when you see some religious people smoking pot before sabbath... or orthodox women movements. All these seems contradictory.
I think the short answer is that there was and is a tradition for education and critical thinking. There is that joke about a jewish mother of a president that feels proud of his other son, which is a doctor. There are some variations [1].
[0] https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jb...
From the paper you linked. Most of the studies cited were pretty flawed in implementation iirc. The paper you linked also fails to mention the most probable reason for Jewish success, which imo is the community itself. More specifically, the n-word, nepotism. I have a very Jewish name, and I've experienced preference for it. I think this also presents unique opportunities for access to early, high value education, regardless of socioeconomic status, which definitely skews the IQ results.
However, I personally don't think that the persecution would be as severe if Jews did not have such an insular culture, organized around the Torah and tradition.
Also, literacy and scholarship is promoted in Jewish culture due to the promotion of reading and debating the Torah and Talmud. This could have helped direct the results of their persecution. Compare the Jewish people to other persecuted peoples such as the gypsies.
I am no sociologist, but I think at the very least we can agree that outcomes result from very complex interactions of culture, geography, history, language, religion, etc.
Obviously your thinking is why to sophisticated for thoughts on human existence evolved over thousands of years.
The only people I see in prisoned by their minds have closed minds. They also like to insist others conform to their narrow view.
This is a strange statement to write because Einstein's relativity was indeed shrugged off as "Jewish Physics" by many antisemitic German physicists prior to WWII, in favour of German (or Aryan) Physics : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik