> It frustrates me when Jewish people, especially very smart Jewish people like Freud, fail to understand that Judaism is more than just a religion, it's also an ethnic group.
This is because the waters have been, seemingly intentionally, muddied. I have seen criticism of Judaism, oddly enough even criticism by ethnic Jews, as being considered "anti-Semitic" and similar terms. Furthermore, the distinction in my experience seems to be rejected by many Jews who consider "being Jewish" as being essentially and intrinsically related to the Jewish religion enshrined in cultural practice.
The conclusion doesn’t seem to follow. All people have race, and so can be externally racist, but you would not consider a white person aggressively critiquing white culture to be anti-white, would you?
I think the article itself failed to understand or counterpoint the issue about Judaism. Judaism as a religion and ethnic group is known by criticizing themselves, even in the extreme orthodox side. "Freud as Talmudist" could be more generally seen as "Freud as a Thinker".
Is this is a criticism of the article? Because it seems like the author takes great pains to distinguish between a person who is Jewish and a person who practices Judaism.
I also don't think that ethnic group really captures it either.
For me, being Jewish is just its own thing, sui generis, that only partially overlaps with these other concepts (religion, ethnicity, nationality, etc) but isn't any of those things.
I think 'ethnicity' is a complicated term, since it's a catchall for all sorts of identities we can't quite assign to something easier to parse. In the example of the Australian Indigenous, that identity is a Venn diagram of overlapping ideas about lineage, culture, language, and tribal affiliation. Any one or more of those attributes could be potentially disrupted and yet maintain Indigenous identity and acceptance by the larger community - perhaps precariously.
A counter example would be the American designation of 'Latino' as an ethnicity, independent of race, language, and culture, and based entirely on national origin.
“Latino” refers to the mixed descendants of Spanish or Portuguese ancestry as opposed to the indigenous Mayans, Guarani, Aymara, etc that still inhabit the continent, numbering in the millions.
Sure, though you're using the community definition of the term, while the US government definition encompasses anybody from those countries, regardless of ancestry. So a Lebanese - Mexican or Chinese - Mexican with no Spanish ancestry could be considered latino by the government.
I disagree. Judaism is not an ethnic group, it's many absolutely different and disjunct ethnic groups, that only have religion in common. A Jew from Yemen has nothing else in common with a Jew from Poland. Different language, different food,. different music, different physical resemblance, different interpretation of the Torah, etc.
I recommend reading The Invention of the Jewish People, by Shlomo Sand.
As a practical example. When my father (Ashkenazi) married my mother (Sephardic), my father's grandma was devastated, because he was marrying a non-jew.
From the Catholic perspective, it is primarily a theological identity, as evidenced by the way the New Testament uses the word. Jesus, his mother Mary, the Apostles, the first so-called Christians, were all "Jews", and so in some sense, we can speak of the Jews who accepted Christ as the Messiah, and those Jews who did not. The New Testament describes the latter as "the Jews", and since there is no ethnic difference between the former and the latter, it follows that "Jew" in this context is not an ethnic, but a theological concept[0]. This isn't to say there is no ethnic sense, but the theological concept is the real focus.
Among Jews, Jewishness is taken to be communicated matrilineally, and the interpretation of such phrases as "children of Abraham" (or "seed of Abraham") is understood in carnal terms. Most Jews today are not observant, yet they still view themselves as Jews and are viewed as Jews even by observant Jews. Cultural Jewishness might seem like one way to be able to maintain Jewish identity without the theology, but because Jewish culture in the traditional sense is so theological (and frankly, all cult-ure ultimately is), one has to ask what kind of Jewish culture are we talking about? Once the underpinning and sustaining beliefs are gone, the culture loses its force and meaning, even if it takes a while for the old attachments to wither to completion. Some new theology would need to take the place of the old while maintaining the old name. Without the old theological basis, carnal identity begins to take on an even greater importance.
I might also touch on the civilizational definition of "Jewish", though because civilization is ultimately determined by religion, the question is ultimately a question of theology. Koneczny's definition comes to mind.
So the word is overloaded. But generally speaking, we are very much living in a period of identity crises. Some claim that the uptick in racial politics is the result of the decline of religious identity in the West.
[0] Incidentally, this is why some of the accusations of antisemitism that are made of Catholicism are wrongheaded and involve some kind of modernist projection of categories alien to Catholicism. "Antisemitism" is a term coined in the 19th century (conventionally attributed to Wilhelm Marr) that has in mind a racial and ethnic meaning of "Jew", but the conflict between Catholicism and Judaism is not ethnic or racial, but theological. The Rabbinic Judaism that emerged after the Crucifixion, with the destruction of the Second Temple that left the Jews with no temple sacrifice and no priesthood, is taken to be defection from the Faith, something analogous to Protestantism (recall that the Old Testament is a history of such defections, and is the history of heretical Christian sects). Judaism is taken to have transformed from a faith centered on sacrifice to one centered on observing the law. The sacrifice and the priesthood are taken to continue in the Church--the New Israel--and in the mass, now bloodless and perfected[1].
A constant worldview-pervading awareness of Jewishness as an ethnicity is only really widespread in 4 groups of people: particularly ethnic-chauvinist Jews, the hardest-core antisemites, and their victims.
Wishing for more Jews to become much more aware of their ethnicity would be one of those monkey's paw wishes.
Out of interest, are there any other groups where you believe that it would be dangerous for members of that group to be "aware of their ethnicity"? Or is it only Jews?
Freud has left an everlasting impressions on the field of psychology with frameworks to interpret and analyze human behavior and cognition. It is not a hard science, and thus things will fall out of fashion and be disregarded, that makes him no less of a pioneer, and his research stands.
Why are there so many psychologists practicing psychoanalysis today, then? Has modern psychoanalysis evolved so far beyond Freud's psychoanalysis that it became a serious branch of psychology? If so, why is it still called "psychoanalysis"?
I presume because it has a place, in a nonscientific way. A lot of issues can be merely talked through. For those that can't, the patient can be referred to a psychiatrist, who can further evaluate and identify the issues using scientific methods, and prescribe medicines if necessary (which a psychologist cannot do).
Many psychologists use psychoanalysis the same way many priests use religious stories to provide guidance. It’s a great source of allegories. It’s also prestigious and lets them charge a lot of money, while practicing “floating attention” ie. letting their mind wander while listening and not actually paying attention. Last is that in many countries anyone can pretend to be a psychoanalyst. Lacan famously said “Le psychanalyste ne s'autorise que de lui-même”.
Surprised to read this quote here!
This means nothing/no one can guarantee you being a psychoanalyst.
Just like either you can code and be good at it or not. That's all this phrase means.
Of course it gets tricky. A programmer can show the result and it either works or it doesn't. An analyst can't show anything, really. Even if the analysand claims his/her life has changed because of an analysis (people also claim Jesus changed them, for example).
About the floating attention thing, that's a very strange generalization ("analysts don't pay attention"). It is about treating all the "material" equally (ie without preconceptions).
A common opinion held in the field of psychoanalysis is that its goal isn’t even to cure people because they claim it isn’t possible. Escaping accountability by saying accountability doesn’t make sense.
> Why are there so many psychologists practicing psychoanalysis today, then?
They aren't uncommon, but CBT, DBT, EMDR, Family Systems, Internal Family Systems, Rational emotive, Humanistic, Mindfulness-based are currently much more in vogue than psycho-analysis/dynamics.
Rather than a point-in-time analysis of psychoanalytic vs humanistic approaches, there's a deeper, more interesting story in the history of prevalence between the two.
The comment section in a HN discussion won't do the story justice, but to understand the historical picture, I'd recommend reading about how homosexuality was extricated from the DSM and the stories of John Fryer, Ronald Gold, and others. It's the story of the ousting of psychoanalysts from the APA by the humanists and helps set the stage for understanding the landscape of psychology today with respect to psychoanalysis.
> Why are there so many psychologists practicing psychoanalysis today, then?
There aren't. Psychology (in the US) abandoned Freud roughly in the 50s and 60s, with the rise of Behaviorism and later Cognitive psychology. These movements tried to make psychology an empirical science, with testable hypotheses subjected to replicable experiments. (Obviously, given the replication crisis, this effort hasn't been completely successful.) Psychiatry (the medical specialization) took much longer, until the 80s, but eventually they dispensed with his nonsense as well.
Most talk therapy today entails some form of CBT, REBT, ACT, or something similar, and these have nothing to do with Freud.
Being wrong doesn't make you a charlatan. Skinner, to his credit, tried to operate scientifically, by formulating empirically falsifiable hypotheses and testing them. Freud, by contrast, crafted reams of "theory" that his followers were expected to unquestioningly accept as gospel.
> Specifically, data from the report suggests that a chiropractor will be aware of an arterial dissection occurring following cervical manipulation only once in 8.06 million office visits
I default to assuming chiropraxis is bullshit, but the existence of "potential dangers" is not a good argument against the potential existence of benefits.
Not defending chiroquacktors, but you can make any number of really goofy points by dropping an ncbi.nlm.nih.gov link into a thread without further comment. There is no real barrier to getting PubMed to link to your content.
You could use nih.gov links to 'prove' that vaccines cause autism, that cell phones and power lines cause cancer, that video games are responsible for school shootings, and that ESP is a thing.
Well, nowadays, we may have another look at this. E.g., when it comes to Freud's interpretation of dreams, think of an embedded semantic field with some activation, probably in another dimensionality than that of the field itself, much like a multi-head attention header. Now imagine a RLE enhancing some of the possible productions and suppressing others, due to training (Freud's Vorbewusstsein). What we get are productions that are still pointing to the same hot spots in the embedded field, but with minute vectorial shifts and changes in attention (compression and displacement), resulting in legitimate productions that are able to pass the controlling RLE instance. The result is pretty much the "dream text" and the process is very similar to Freud's dream work (Traumarbeit).
In other words: I'd argue, you can't believe in transformers actually doing some work and entirely dismiss psychoanalysis at the same same time.
Freuds methods are as effective as CBT. Methods based on his theories are one of the most common forms of therapy here in Germany
Regardless of what you believe about his theoretical constructs, it works
EDIT: you should also consider how this aligns with the analytic vs continental divide. In the Anglosphere we historically have a very limited view on what constitutes meaningful knowledge, partly as a reaction against British Hegelianism
What do you mean it's as effective?
Any citation in mind? Having comparable results to CBT would be a big deal
And it's also most common form in China too, but people complain left and right, from what I've heard. Same as in Germany, so maybe it's not country-dependent.
I think people just assume that it's BS based on stereotypes and a warped pop culture view of what it is. They haven't actually investigated the matter
>Freud was a conman and charlatan, and the Horace Frink affair best illustrates his character
On the one hand I can certainly agree that Freud's psychoanalytical theories were full of logical inconsistencies and holes and his publication of them marred the intellectual development of the 20th century in every field it touched, especially literature which I find particularly galling. And anyone familiar with Freud's malpractice and manipulation of patients over the years would find the Frink affair relatively tame, the guy was an absolute twisted scumbag.
Are you referring to the DSM classification instrument for mental disorders (where Freud never even was mentioned), or is there another three-letter-acronymed organisation in psychology/psychiatry I am unaware of?
Ok don’t know whether Freud was a charlatan or simply one of many explorers of his time, who believed in his theories. (Consider Lysenko and others.)
But his nephew EDWARD BURNAYS in the USA is the reason Freud came to USA and we even know about Freud. And Burnays was far more successful using methods of mass psychology — very meta, he renamed Propaganda to PUBLIC RELATIONS.
Burnays got women to smoke, and helped promote the public stock market, which now is used for IPO of many startups. Google “Century of the Self” for a great documentary.
You're sympathetically comparing him to Lysenko, which only proves my point: both were unscientific charlatans legitimized by leftists, to the detriment of many.
The vast majority of people in new disciplines were like that at the time. Rigor comes later.
I mean, didn’t most physicists in the 19th century believe the Earth was no more than 100 million years old? And everyone was afraid to challenge them until radioactivity was discovered. Bloodletting and leeches and phlogiston and humours and spontaneous generation - same thing.
They're not taken verbatim by modern mental health: they're viewed as foundational for their attention to childhood experiences, trauma, that dreams are a pure manifestation of unconscious repressed thought, etc. We take a lot for granted today that before Freud was stuck in Vitalist or true religious nonsense.
From my understanding he was starting a radical new thread of ideas that ran counter to the hard empiricism at the time that was going nowhere, or at least too slowly to help a significant portion of people (which remains the case today in my opinion). You can read the late 19th century state of neuroscience which sounds eerily close to today's views -- and the distaste for Freudianism espoused in your comment.
I have read a lot of Freud and still remain skeptical of some of the overall thrusts. But reading it and get the full context makes you realize that the modern interpretations of his thought are wildly reductionistic.
About his behavior with those in his following: It is true that he had many moments of harshness/weakness, but he was also surprisingly modern in his liberalism and self-scrutiny. I've read that he was extremely concerned about being taken seriously in the face of the large amount of reaction from society to uncomfortable ideas. So his method was to be hyper organized and disciplined.
One thing I really like about Freud is his openness to changing his ideas in the face of new evidence and his commitment to making sure there were people working on treatment/solutions to suffering that was currently happening. He was open to the idea of biological interventions in the future replacing his own interventions, but he wanted to do something that would help people now in the meantime. I don't think we've adequately established that more modern therapies and interventions work better in all types of cases and think his work is still very relevant, especially in certain types of cases. Not to mention that most of the modern therapeutic practices are based on his work in a way you can't easily tease out and cast out as irrelevant.
It seems much more likely to me that the fate of Freud's ideas were not as much discounted as integrated. Most bits of discounting was more because of other developments in society, industry, and academia. One easy example is that it's quite difficult to perform Freudian therapy at multiple times a week given modern billing and scheduling.
Again, I remain cautious about the utility of many of the ideas, but I'd recommending reading a serious book like Revolution in Mind (Makari) to ground you in the actual history of psychoanalysis. Almost everything I've read on internet blogs, articles, and some otherwise-serious writers are missing woefully important context.
From the article :
"On this view, the fact that a Jew discovered psychoanalysis didn’t mean it was a 'Jewish science,' any more than Einstein’s e = mc2 was a Jewish equation."
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
The biggest problem the talmud has in my opinion is that most people have such a distorted view of religion that the talmud is out of reach.
I find it very worthwhile for framing human interactions and worth more study.
Basing one's philosophy on magic beliefs and unquestionable appeals to authority (book or person) is building a castle on reclaimed land. Religion is a fanciful prison of illusions, delusions, and oft able to rationalize suffering imposed on others as "good".
This is my point illustrated. I can't decide if I should upvote you for helping me prove it. There are no magical beliefs and from a certain point of view the only authority is one's peace of mind.
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.
The human struggle with authority or tradition is a part of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish scholarship itself. Off the top of my head, 'Israel' was the name given to Jacob after he wrestled with God. The Book of Job was a reaction to realization that good/evil did not necessarily correlated with prosperity/failure. These are things that the faithful openly talk about.
Could the general success of Jewish people as an ethnic group be partly attributable to the Talmud and general tenets of Jewish culture helping adapt the mind to difficult circumstances and wrestling with complexity?
It is obviously impossible to generalize because there is also a lot of diversity in the community.
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].
Ashkenazi Jews have a higher IQ by a whole stddev over the general population, regardless of religiosity or socioeconomic factors [0]. It's possible the Talmud played a role in selective reproductive pressures toward this outcome, sure: learned men in Jewish culture tended to be desirable mates. But there are other historical factors at play too.
> although a recent review concludes that the
advantage is slightly less, only half a standard deviation Lynn (2004).
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.
I think the accepted view is that persecution and diaspora pushed Jews into industries like finance that lead to wealth accumulation.
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.
Freud emerged at a time in history when there was an extraordinary demand for a particular service that had been lost over the course of 300 years: auricular confession to a priest.
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.
There is no basic need to disclose secrets to God. The need to confess is carefully erected in the souls of the laity on top of the twin pillars of Catholicism, Shame and Guilt.
So by your logic, Europeans should have been gladly liberated from all that nonsense, yet they chose to reinvent and re-embrace it after only 300 years of freedom. Bizarre!
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.
Like I said in my previous comment, you can certainly characterize the current state of affairs this way. There is a certain qualitative similarity (an inevitable one, if you ask me, since _all_ societies require ways to manage anti-social behavior).
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.
Interesting, if weird, idea. Many things to take issue with, but I will take just one: ``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.``
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.
The article misinterprets what the Talmud does, and the author does so in order to try to draw a parallel with Freud.
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.
100 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 84.6 ms ] threadThis is because the waters have been, seemingly intentionally, muddied. I have seen criticism of Judaism, oddly enough even criticism by ethnic Jews, as being considered "anti-Semitic" and similar terms. Furthermore, the distinction in my experience seems to be rejected by many Jews who consider "being Jewish" as being essentially and intrinsically related to the Jewish religion enshrined in cultural practice.
I also don't think that ethnic group really captures it either.
For me, being Jewish is just its own thing, sui generis, that only partially overlaps with these other concepts (religion, ethnicity, nationality, etc) but isn't any of those things.
A counter example would be the American designation of 'Latino' as an ethnicity, independent of race, language, and culture, and based entirely on national origin.
I recommend reading The Invention of the Jewish People, by Shlomo Sand.
As a practical example. When my father (Ashkenazi) married my mother (Sephardic), my father's grandma was devastated, because he was marrying a non-jew.
> A Jew from Yemen has nothing else in common with a Jew from Poland
1) They descended from the same people 2) If they are religious, they have a tremendous amount in common
Except for the genetics we share, distinct from non-Jews, statistically significantly.
I recommend reading "Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People" by Harry Ostrer.
We really are the people of the book, aren't we?
From the Catholic perspective, it is primarily a theological identity, as evidenced by the way the New Testament uses the word. Jesus, his mother Mary, the Apostles, the first so-called Christians, were all "Jews", and so in some sense, we can speak of the Jews who accepted Christ as the Messiah, and those Jews who did not. The New Testament describes the latter as "the Jews", and since there is no ethnic difference between the former and the latter, it follows that "Jew" in this context is not an ethnic, but a theological concept[0]. This isn't to say there is no ethnic sense, but the theological concept is the real focus.
Among Jews, Jewishness is taken to be communicated matrilineally, and the interpretation of such phrases as "children of Abraham" (or "seed of Abraham") is understood in carnal terms. Most Jews today are not observant, yet they still view themselves as Jews and are viewed as Jews even by observant Jews. Cultural Jewishness might seem like one way to be able to maintain Jewish identity without the theology, but because Jewish culture in the traditional sense is so theological (and frankly, all cult-ure ultimately is), one has to ask what kind of Jewish culture are we talking about? Once the underpinning and sustaining beliefs are gone, the culture loses its force and meaning, even if it takes a while for the old attachments to wither to completion. Some new theology would need to take the place of the old while maintaining the old name. Without the old theological basis, carnal identity begins to take on an even greater importance.
I might also touch on the civilizational definition of "Jewish", though because civilization is ultimately determined by religion, the question is ultimately a question of theology. Koneczny's definition comes to mind.
So the word is overloaded. But generally speaking, we are very much living in a period of identity crises. Some claim that the uptick in racial politics is the result of the decline of religious identity in the West.
[0] Incidentally, this is why some of the accusations of antisemitism that are made of Catholicism are wrongheaded and involve some kind of modernist projection of categories alien to Catholicism. "Antisemitism" is a term coined in the 19th century (conventionally attributed to Wilhelm Marr) that has in mind a racial and ethnic meaning of "Jew", but the conflict between Catholicism and Judaism is not ethnic or racial, but theological. The Rabbinic Judaism that emerged after the Crucifixion, with the destruction of the Second Temple that left the Jews with no temple sacrifice and no priesthood, is taken to be defection from the Faith, something analogous to Protestantism (recall that the Old Testament is a history of such defections, and is the history of heretical Christian sects). Judaism is taken to have transformed from a faith centered on sacrifice to one centered on observing the law. The sacrifice and the priesthood are taken to continue in the Church--the New Israel--and in the mass, now bloodless and perfected[1].
[1] https://catholicexchange.com/church-new-israel/
Wishing for more Jews to become much more aware of their ethnicity would be one of those monkey's paw wishes.
I'd say it is universal for any group, but given particular circumstances in the actual state of the world its salience varies widely.
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...
Freud has left an everlasting impressions on the field of psychology with frameworks to interpret and analyze human behavior and cognition. It is not a hard science, and thus things will fall out of fashion and be disregarded, that makes him no less of a pioneer, and his research stands.
Fashions come and go indeed. His thinking will endure, there'll be revivals.
Why are there so many psychologists practicing psychoanalysis today, then? Has modern psychoanalysis evolved so far beyond Freud's psychoanalysis that it became a serious branch of psychology? If so, why is it still called "psychoanalysis"?
About the floating attention thing, that's a very strange generalization ("analysts don't pay attention"). It is about treating all the "material" equally (ie without preconceptions).
They aren't uncommon, but CBT, DBT, EMDR, Family Systems, Internal Family Systems, Rational emotive, Humanistic, Mindfulness-based are currently much more in vogue than psycho-analysis/dynamics.
Rather than a point-in-time analysis of psychoanalytic vs humanistic approaches, there's a deeper, more interesting story in the history of prevalence between the two.
The comment section in a HN discussion won't do the story justice, but to understand the historical picture, I'd recommend reading about how homosexuality was extricated from the DSM and the stories of John Fryer, Ronald Gold, and others. It's the story of the ousting of psychoanalysts from the APA by the humanists and helps set the stage for understanding the landscape of psychology today with respect to psychoanalysis.
There aren't. Psychology (in the US) abandoned Freud roughly in the 50s and 60s, with the rise of Behaviorism and later Cognitive psychology. These movements tried to make psychology an empirical science, with testable hypotheses subjected to replicable experiments. (Obviously, given the replication crisis, this effort hasn't been completely successful.) Psychiatry (the medical specialization) took much longer, until the 80s, but eventually they dispensed with his nonsense as well.
Most talk therapy today entails some form of CBT, REBT, ACT, or something similar, and these have nothing to do with Freud.
And you can say B J Fogg is a more modern charlatan. And Robert Cialdini. But all of them put together very interesting theories!
Being wrong doesn't make you a charlatan. Skinner, to his credit, tried to operate scientifically, by formulating empirically falsifiable hypotheses and testing them. Freud, by contrast, crafted reams of "theory" that his followers were expected to unquestioningly accept as gospel.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6016850/
> Specifically, data from the report suggests that a chiropractor will be aware of an arterial dissection occurring following cervical manipulation only once in 8.06 million office visits
You could use nih.gov links to 'prove' that vaccines cause autism, that cell phones and power lines cause cancer, that video games are responsible for school shootings, and that ESP is a thing.
I saw diminishing returns when done weekly though.
In other words: I'd argue, you can't believe in transformers actually doing some work and entirely dismiss psychoanalysis at the same same time.
Regardless of what you believe about his theoretical constructs, it works
EDIT: you should also consider how this aligns with the analytic vs continental divide. In the Anglosphere we historically have a very limited view on what constitutes meaningful knowledge, partly as a reaction against British Hegelianism
And it's also most common form in China too, but people complain left and right, from what I've heard. Same as in Germany, so maybe it's not country-dependent.
https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fa0018378
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1516/RFEE-LKPN-B7TF-K...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-...
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a slightly less intense of psychoanalysis, but based on the same theories.
It is totally evidence based and has efficacy comparable to or greater than CBT and other behavioural therapies.
On the one hand I can certainly agree that Freud's psychoanalytical theories were full of logical inconsistencies and holes and his publication of them marred the intellectual development of the 20th century in every field it touched, especially literature which I find particularly galling. And anyone familiar with Freud's malpractice and manipulation of patients over the years would find the Frink affair relatively tame, the guy was an absolute twisted scumbag.
On the other hand he did a lot of important work in biology when younger https://www.embrc.eu/newsroom/news/sigmund-freud-eel-testis-....
A shame he did not continue on with that.
Are you referring to the DSM classification instrument for mental disorders (where Freud never even was mentioned), or is there another three-letter-acronymed organisation in psychology/psychiatry I am unaware of?
Maybe he wasn't mentioned by name, but he was a major influence on earlier versions:
https://psychmuseum.uwgb.org/clinical/dsm
But his nephew EDWARD BURNAYS in the USA is the reason Freud came to USA and we even know about Freud. And Burnays was far more successful using methods of mass psychology — very meta, he renamed Propaganda to PUBLIC RELATIONS.
Burnays got women to smoke, and helped promote the public stock market, which now is used for IPO of many startups. Google “Century of the Self” for a great documentary.
I think being allowed to use an addictive substance would deserve a great deal of the credit.
You're sympathetically comparing him to Lysenko, which only proves my point: both were unscientific charlatans legitimized by leftists, to the detriment of many.
I mean, didn’t most physicists in the 19th century believe the Earth was no more than 100 million years old? And everyone was afraid to challenge them until radioactivity was discovered. Bloodletting and leeches and phlogiston and humours and spontaneous generation - same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
How about today’s pioneers… Is Bem a charlatan? Is B J Fogg? Robert Cialdini? Erik von Markovik from Mystery Method? Jeremy Miner from NEPQ? LOL
I have read a lot of Freud and still remain skeptical of some of the overall thrusts. But reading it and get the full context makes you realize that the modern interpretations of his thought are wildly reductionistic.
About his behavior with those in his following: It is true that he had many moments of harshness/weakness, but he was also surprisingly modern in his liberalism and self-scrutiny. I've read that he was extremely concerned about being taken seriously in the face of the large amount of reaction from society to uncomfortable ideas. So his method was to be hyper organized and disciplined.
One thing I really like about Freud is his openness to changing his ideas in the face of new evidence and his commitment to making sure there were people working on treatment/solutions to suffering that was currently happening. He was open to the idea of biological interventions in the future replacing his own interventions, but he wanted to do something that would help people now in the meantime. I don't think we've adequately established that more modern therapies and interventions work better in all types of cases and think his work is still very relevant, especially in certain types of cases. Not to mention that most of the modern therapeutic practices are based on his work in a way you can't easily tease out and cast out as irrelevant.
It seems much more likely to me that the fate of Freud's ideas were not as much discounted as integrated. Most bits of discounting was more because of other developments in society, industry, and academia. One easy example is that it's quite difficult to perform Freudian therapy at multiple times a week given modern billing and scheduling.
Again, I remain cautious about the utility of many of the ideas, but I'd recommending reading a serious book like Revolution in Mind (Makari) to ground you in the actual history of psychoanalysis. Almost everything I've read on internet blogs, articles, and some otherwise-serious writers are missing woefully important context.
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
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.
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].
[1] https://aish.com/51475757/
[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.
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.
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.