Interesting, I'm not well read on Freud's work and the notion that he equated female sexual desire with male sexual desire isn't one I've heard before. It seems in some way (maybe just slightly) contrary to the impression I've gleaned from most summaries: that he effectively thought women were governed by subconscious sexual desires in a way that men were not. Can anyone help me out here?
On a related note, I'm very interested in his rather indirect legacy through his nephew, Edward Bernays, and insight into what Freud thought about how his nephew utilized his conclusions to lay the foundation for the PR industry.
One of the first large marketing campaigns for a tobacco company comes to mind. If I recall correctly, Bernays commissioned attractive women to smoke cigarettes in high traffic areas.
He said that everyone, men and women (and even children), were governed by subconscious sexual desires. In that respect he was pretty modern - or perhaps that thanks to his influence, we are how we are today.
But on the other hand, he did have detailed theories of male and female sexuality and how they differ. Those details (Oedpial complex, penis envy, etc.) are for the most part laughable today. But they paint an unflattering picture of both women and men, in different ways, so you do see criticism of him there.
Well, it is obvious that sex matters, and maybe Freud helped with the idea that sexual desire should warrant proper consideration, however I think he did more damage with his approach than he helped modern psychology.
All of his research was laughable by today's standards. Not just the details, everything. It is all misguided ideas made to look scientific. He was right on some points of course, but that's because chance make it so that even the most clueless individual can't be always wrong.
Maybe I am misguided myself but I don't know why Freud is credited so much. It looks like a lot of advances in psychology start with the refutation of one of his ideas rather than built on top of them.
A lot of modern psychology/psychiatry is based on refutations of his ideas, but it's a little unfair to level the criticisms you do through anachronistic lenses: psychology was hardly alone in that problem, the sciences were full of it. (And for that matter, a lot of modern science is based on refuting earlier science -- look into both QM and relativity coming out of the failure of experiments trying to detect the luminiferous aether, a development on a similar timeline to Freud.)
Viewing 19th and early 20th century science through the lens developed by Popper and ilk in the 20th century is unfair -- they'd have done better if they had the benefit of knowing something that wasn't invented yet, naturally.
Freud and contemporaries were the birth of modern psychology, in that they were a radical improvement over the prior methods, even if they don't measure up to modern standards. The reason we talk about them so much is their role in improving over what came before -- the mistakes Freud made were better than forcibly dildoing women for "hysteria" (which is what 18th century psychiatry of women often looked like).
In short, we respect Freud because he was "less wrong" than his predecessors in very meaningful ways, even if he was considerably more wrong than we are now.
Freudians used their crazy theories to do things far worse than dildoing women. Look up the history of autistic treatments for just a smatter of the terror. Remember when it was caused by the mother not loving the child?
Yeah, a lot of advances in psychology start with refuting one of Freud's ideas, but it's no different than modern (Enlightenment) physics starting with refuting Aristotle. It doesn't mean Aristotle wasn't a massively influential genius. In fact that Aristotle and Freud are the starting point for what came after them shows how important they were.
Freud deserves credit for revolutionizing an entire field, creating something new and coherent. Given the context of his time, he was a genius, like Aristotle was in his time.
Also, while most of Freud's details are of course pitifully ridiculous today, the basic insight that the unconscious matters, and that we can see its influence in indirect ways, is still a valid idea today. It's debated a lot, but it's a core concept we've never abandoned, so he deserves credit for that too.
It's not a valid idea, there is little to no scientific validity in the entire world of psychology. Psychologists will continue to chase their tails "proving" things with unscientific methods that will later be unproven. The fact that he was the first pseudo scientist to defraud the public in this field doesn't make him a genius any more than a carnival huckster is.
“Did Freud get some things wrong?” says Lee Jaffe, the president-elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association. “Sure. But he also got many things right too.” Freud’s theories on unconscious mental processes, the importance of behavioral ambivalence and conflict, the origins of adult personality in childhood, mental representations as a moderator of social behavior, and stages of psychological development are all still relevant today. Freud also changed the public’s understanding of sex and desire, perhaps more than anyone else, by equating female desire with male desire. And, just by placing sexual desire and perversions into a “scientific” context, Freud freed sexuality from the largely religious context that focused on its moral degeneration or inherent criminality.
The ways in which he was wrong are much more nuanced than what you're suggesting.
Freud claimed that schizophrenia was a result of ambivalent mother care, and quite a few other things that he had no reason to claim (if it was science and not religion).
He was wrong in many ways with no nuance whatsoever, but mostly, there isn't much in common between Freud and science. Which is basically what GP was saying.
Freud deserves credit for taking psychology as a field of study mainstream - and the debit for founding it on religious principles which, unfortunately, still dominate quite a bit of it. His net contribution is usually assumed to be positive, but that's not an uncontested conclusion.
Even today people with training in modes of therapy that are more or less theoretically divorced from Freudianism will say that "Freud is the basis of all therapy". He wasn't the first person to philosophize about the parts of the soul or the first person to offer therapy; but he was a very prolific writer and thinker early on in our attempts to bring a scientific understanding and therapeutic emphasis to what had previously been the province of religion and disinterested philosophers.
It is undeniable that he failed in many significant ways, but three basic ideas to seem to hold up:
* The transference and the counter-transference -- the patient projects on to the therapist and vice versa
* The defense mechanisms -- methods by which people seek to escape not from their situation but from their feelings about it
* The corrective emotional experience -- therapy provides a way, in part through the transference, for the patient to work through feelings that they otherwise deny themselves
Freud had many crazy ideas, too -- and both he and his successors devoted far too much time and effort to these crazy ones. Quit when you are ahead.
Various dictators and the vast majority of televangalists (e.g. Joel Osteen) come to mind. Are you sure you want to succeed that way? I don't; and while Freud's history has many redeeming features, the saying is "at least Mussolini made the trains on time"[0], so the latter might also have had redeeming features.
There needs to be a distinction between Freud the clinician, whose theories have all but been entirely surpassed in the treatment of mental illness, and Freud the philosopher, who is still a major reference point in discussions of philosophy and cultural theory. Marx is still an active force in those conversations too. These discourse discuss methods of interpreting literature, art, history and culture.
The great structural thinkers of the last century, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche were the last philosophers that attempted schemas to describe all of history and culture as a single synthesized whole governed by definable mechanisms . Their flawed tools (the world spirit, the economy, the unconscious, biological evolution, and the will to power) are all somewhat rusty but there have been no real contenders to replace them.
First, he was primarily a scientist, not a philosopher. Second, his theories are for the most part still very much dominant and accepted as true in his field - not just some overall insights and direction (as with Freud) - but the actual details. Modern biology very much believes in and is based on Darwin's theories. It's remarkable how right he still is after all this time.
This is true. But Darwin acts as a figurehead in many longstanding philosophical discussions. I'm thinking of thinkers like Herbert Spencer, who believed that the structures of darwinian evolution could be applied to cultures, religion, even the mind. When people quote "survival of the fittest" it was Spencer they are quoting, but Darwin they are referencing.
It is also possible to overstate both Darwin's correctness (Pangenesis for example was a non starter) and his novelty (The idea that humans evolved from non-human ancestors that came from the sea is as old as Anaximander -- 600 BCE).
But there is a Darwinian/Spencerian ring to way we talk about failed programming languages, coding practices, failed corporations, technologies and economies: They failed to thrive, failed to form a community to carry forward their genetics and fight against the various forces that fight against them, compete for resources etc. Darwin's ideas have sublimated into ideology...
Freudian theories were never science (as we define it today) - as Popper pointed out after trying to reconcile scientific inquiry with Freud's and Adler's work - since they cannot be falsified, see e.g. https://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/12451/why-did-kar...
They might be part of mainstream psychology (I have read conflicting accounts), but they are definitely not part of mainstream science; very little of psychology is.
Isn't Freud a case where the old line "Your work is both novel and true, unfortunately the parts that are true are not novel and the parts that are novel are not true" holds?
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 22.4 ms ] threadOn a related note, I'm very interested in his rather indirect legacy through his nephew, Edward Bernays, and insight into what Freud thought about how his nephew utilized his conclusions to lay the foundation for the PR industry.
One of the first large marketing campaigns for a tobacco company comes to mind. If I recall correctly, Bernays commissioned attractive women to smoke cigarettes in high traffic areas.
But on the other hand, he did have detailed theories of male and female sexuality and how they differ. Those details (Oedpial complex, penis envy, etc.) are for the most part laughable today. But they paint an unflattering picture of both women and men, in different ways, so you do see criticism of him there.
All of his research was laughable by today's standards. Not just the details, everything. It is all misguided ideas made to look scientific. He was right on some points of course, but that's because chance make it so that even the most clueless individual can't be always wrong.
Maybe I am misguided myself but I don't know why Freud is credited so much. It looks like a lot of advances in psychology start with the refutation of one of his ideas rather than built on top of them.
Viewing 19th and early 20th century science through the lens developed by Popper and ilk in the 20th century is unfair -- they'd have done better if they had the benefit of knowing something that wasn't invented yet, naturally.
Freud and contemporaries were the birth of modern psychology, in that they were a radical improvement over the prior methods, even if they don't measure up to modern standards. The reason we talk about them so much is their role in improving over what came before -- the mistakes Freud made were better than forcibly dildoing women for "hysteria" (which is what 18th century psychiatry of women often looked like).
In short, we respect Freud because he was "less wrong" than his predecessors in very meaningful ways, even if he was considerably more wrong than we are now.
Freud deserves credit for revolutionizing an entire field, creating something new and coherent. Given the context of his time, he was a genius, like Aristotle was in his time.
Also, while most of Freud's details are of course pitifully ridiculous today, the basic insight that the unconscious matters, and that we can see its influence in indirect ways, is still a valid idea today. It's debated a lot, but it's a core concept we've never abandoned, so he deserves credit for that too.
Yeah, and most MarCom, religion, and much of modern politics. Now you know why they don't work.
“Did Freud get some things wrong?” says Lee Jaffe, the president-elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association. “Sure. But he also got many things right too.” Freud’s theories on unconscious mental processes, the importance of behavioral ambivalence and conflict, the origins of adult personality in childhood, mental representations as a moderator of social behavior, and stages of psychological development are all still relevant today. Freud also changed the public’s understanding of sex and desire, perhaps more than anyone else, by equating female desire with male desire. And, just by placing sexual desire and perversions into a “scientific” context, Freud freed sexuality from the largely religious context that focused on its moral degeneration or inherent criminality.
The ways in which he was wrong are much more nuanced than what you're suggesting.
He was wrong in many ways with no nuance whatsoever, but mostly, there isn't much in common between Freud and science. Which is basically what GP was saying.
Freud deserves credit for taking psychology as a field of study mainstream - and the debit for founding it on religious principles which, unfortunately, still dominate quite a bit of it. His net contribution is usually assumed to be positive, but that's not an uncontested conclusion.
It is undeniable that he failed in many significant ways, but three basic ideas to seem to hold up:
* The transference and the counter-transference -- the patient projects on to the therapist and vice versa
* The defense mechanisms -- methods by which people seek to escape not from their situation but from their feelings about it
* The corrective emotional experience -- therapy provides a way, in part through the transference, for the patient to work through feelings that they otherwise deny themselves
Freud had many crazy ideas, too -- and both he and his successors devoted far too much time and effort to these crazy ones. Quit when you are ahead.
[0] But see https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2016/11/the-problem-w... ; likewise, it's possible that freud's positives will turn out not to be.
The great structural thinkers of the last century, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche were the last philosophers that attempted schemas to describe all of history and culture as a single synthesized whole governed by definable mechanisms . Their flawed tools (the world spirit, the economy, the unconscious, biological evolution, and the will to power) are all somewhat rusty but there have been no real contenders to replace them.
Darwin seems very out of place there.
First, he was primarily a scientist, not a philosopher. Second, his theories are for the most part still very much dominant and accepted as true in his field - not just some overall insights and direction (as with Freud) - but the actual details. Modern biology very much believes in and is based on Darwin's theories. It's remarkable how right he still is after all this time.
It is also possible to overstate both Darwin's correctness (Pangenesis for example was a non starter) and his novelty (The idea that humans evolved from non-human ancestors that came from the sea is as old as Anaximander -- 600 BCE).
But there is a Darwinian/Spencerian ring to way we talk about failed programming languages, coding practices, failed corporations, technologies and economies: They failed to thrive, failed to form a community to carry forward their genetics and fight against the various forces that fight against them, compete for resources etc. Darwin's ideas have sublimated into ideology...
This is just plain wrong.. the author does not have any sources, no evidence.. just a bold claim, opinion.
They might be part of mainstream psychology (I have read conflicting accounts), but they are definitely not part of mainstream science; very little of psychology is.