Jun 26, 2024 02:48 PM
Why Freud still isn’t dead
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/why-f...-isnt-dead
EXCERPTS (John Horgan): No scientist has been more viciously beaten than Freud. As soon as he started offering thoughts on the mind in the late 19th century, critics pounced on him, and not just because his hypotheses were so creepy. Freud never provided rigorous empirical evidence for the superego/ego/id triad, infantile sexuality, the Oedipal complex, penis envy, death instinct, transference, the repression theory of dreams and all the other conjectures that comprise the great sprawl of psychoanalysis.
Nor did Freud produce any proof that the therapeutic application of psychoanalysis (which Vladimir Nabokov called “the treatment of the id by the odd”) helps patients struggling with depression, schizophrenia and other mental ailments.
[...] But here’s the question: If Freud was really such a fraud, why do many modern mind-scientists still cite him approvingly? (Modern Freudians, just sticking to those I’ve met, include neurologist Oliver Sacks, artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, psychologist Alison Gopnik and neuroscientists Christof Koch and Eric Kandel.) Why does Freud remain so influential that Fred Crews must keep returning to “stab the corpse again,” as one reviewer of Making of an Illusion put it?
The answer is that old paradigms die only when better paradigms replace them. Freud lives on because science hasn’t produced a theory of and therapy for the mind potent enough to render psychoanalysis obsolete once and for all.
[...] Freud’s critics are right, psychoanalysis is flawed, but so are rival mind-body paradigms ... researchers have failed to assemble these data into a coherent theory of the mind and its disorders.
As for treatments, classic Freudian psychoanalysis has been succeeded by countless rival “talking cures” [...] some patients get better, others don’t.
[...] Psychopharmacology assumes that mental illnesses are malfunctions of the brain requiring chemical fixes. ... But the limits of psychopharmacology have become increasingly apparent....
[...] These are negative reasons for Freud’s persistence. The positive reason is that Freud was an intrepid, imaginative and extraordinarily eloquent explorer of the human condition. When critics such as Crews harp on Freud’s failures as a scientist, they commit a category error, because Freud is best seen as a literary figure. Literary critic Harold Bloom, who extolled Freud’s “vision of civil war within the psyche,” ranked him with Proust, Joyce and Kafka.
[...] That, in a nutshell, is my why-Freud-isn’t-dead argument. I keep recycling it because I keep finding confirmation of it...
[...] Will we ever discover a mind-body paradigm potent enough to make us, finally, forget Freud? [...] I doubt it, because to be human means to undergo a perpetual identity crisis, one that science cannot resolve. I think Freud said that somewhere... (MORE - missing details)
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Cynic's Corner: The Oedipus complex, for instance, was the result of Freud being so uncomfortable with patient accounts of childhood sexual abuse, that he interpreted them in fantasy and dream context. It seemed incredible to him that upper and middle class Austrian/German parents of the Victorian era could have been performing such acts. Yet this idiotic misconception of childhood development or spin-offs of it continue to thrive in intellectual circles, the arts and continental philosophy, and paleolithic corners of psychiatric treatment itself.
Such are contemporary examples of how humans have strangely gotten by with quack beliefs throughout their history. That's probably a general territory that should be studied in itself -- how societies can survive despite so many practices and thought orientations being "ineffective" or bogus. Rather than outraged experts pretending such tribal narratives are absolutely detrimental or constructively value-less.
https://johnhorgan.org/cross-check/why-f...-isnt-dead
EXCERPTS (John Horgan): No scientist has been more viciously beaten than Freud. As soon as he started offering thoughts on the mind in the late 19th century, critics pounced on him, and not just because his hypotheses were so creepy. Freud never provided rigorous empirical evidence for the superego/ego/id triad, infantile sexuality, the Oedipal complex, penis envy, death instinct, transference, the repression theory of dreams and all the other conjectures that comprise the great sprawl of psychoanalysis.
Nor did Freud produce any proof that the therapeutic application of psychoanalysis (which Vladimir Nabokov called “the treatment of the id by the odd”) helps patients struggling with depression, schizophrenia and other mental ailments.
[...] But here’s the question: If Freud was really such a fraud, why do many modern mind-scientists still cite him approvingly? (Modern Freudians, just sticking to those I’ve met, include neurologist Oliver Sacks, artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, psychologist Alison Gopnik and neuroscientists Christof Koch and Eric Kandel.) Why does Freud remain so influential that Fred Crews must keep returning to “stab the corpse again,” as one reviewer of Making of an Illusion put it?
The answer is that old paradigms die only when better paradigms replace them. Freud lives on because science hasn’t produced a theory of and therapy for the mind potent enough to render psychoanalysis obsolete once and for all.
[...] Freud’s critics are right, psychoanalysis is flawed, but so are rival mind-body paradigms ... researchers have failed to assemble these data into a coherent theory of the mind and its disorders.
As for treatments, classic Freudian psychoanalysis has been succeeded by countless rival “talking cures” [...] some patients get better, others don’t.
[...] Psychopharmacology assumes that mental illnesses are malfunctions of the brain requiring chemical fixes. ... But the limits of psychopharmacology have become increasingly apparent....
[...] These are negative reasons for Freud’s persistence. The positive reason is that Freud was an intrepid, imaginative and extraordinarily eloquent explorer of the human condition. When critics such as Crews harp on Freud’s failures as a scientist, they commit a category error, because Freud is best seen as a literary figure. Literary critic Harold Bloom, who extolled Freud’s “vision of civil war within the psyche,” ranked him with Proust, Joyce and Kafka.
[...] That, in a nutshell, is my why-Freud-isn’t-dead argument. I keep recycling it because I keep finding confirmation of it...
[...] Will we ever discover a mind-body paradigm potent enough to make us, finally, forget Freud? [...] I doubt it, because to be human means to undergo a perpetual identity crisis, one that science cannot resolve. I think Freud said that somewhere... (MORE - missing details)
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
Cynic's Corner: The Oedipus complex, for instance, was the result of Freud being so uncomfortable with patient accounts of childhood sexual abuse, that he interpreted them in fantasy and dream context. It seemed incredible to him that upper and middle class Austrian/German parents of the Victorian era could have been performing such acts. Yet this idiotic misconception of childhood development or spin-offs of it continue to thrive in intellectual circles, the arts and continental philosophy, and paleolithic corners of psychiatric treatment itself.
Such are contemporary examples of how humans have strangely gotten by with quack beliefs throughout their history. That's probably a general territory that should be studied in itself -- how societies can survive despite so many practices and thought orientations being "ineffective" or bogus. Rather than outraged experts pretending such tribal narratives are absolutely detrimental or constructively value-less.
