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Comment by poly2it | Hacker News Reader

Why does he need to make a historical justification for it then? It would be disingenuous if, as the blog author suggests, Andreessen knows better.

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People have been doing self-examination for a long time, but Freud's use of psychoanalysis is a fairly modern phenomenon and it's benefits are dubious. Modern therapy looks increasingly like pseudoscience. I expect biotech/AI advancements to make much of modern therapy irrelevant over time, as we obtain fine-grained control over the actual processes in the brain causing various afflictions.

modern therapy has nothing to with Freud, modern therapy approaches are empirically tested, and show efficacy comparable to medication, but sure other than that whole modern scientific approach... its definitely just pseudoscience

the only pseudoscience you mentioned is the idea that mental "afflictions" are entirely biological

For sure Freud and modern therapy as practiced today are very different. Freud influenced the language, structure, and goals of talk therapy more than the exact methods most therapists use now. Modern therapy kept many of his clinical observations about inner conflict and relationships, but dropped or revised a lot of his more speculative theory.

Since mental illness or other trauma is entirely contained to the brain, you can in fact say that the problem is entirely biological. We are starting to see the tech industry make real inroads to biology. Neuralink, gene therapies, AI designed drugs, etc. All of these innovations will decrease the need for therapy, which at best you can say helps people learn to live with conditions, but never permanently fixes the problem.

> empirically tested

Doesn't really matter when most of the results are unreproducible.

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