Most psychologists don’t care about Freud’s work outside of a historical sense and kinda hate him as a person. His work was quite literally used as an example of pseudoscience by Karl Popper.
And yet for some reason philosophers have an obsession with integrating his views into their work and artists keep using his views as inspiration and analyze existing works via the lens of psychoanalysis.
Why?
I blame their mothers.
I blame the mother fuckers.
I blame the cigars
They want to kill their fathers and talk about Freud to their mothers?
Honestly I think it’s as simple as his notariety.
He is one of the most well-known psychologists and is a bit of a pop culture icon.
It’s like how you see most non-physicists talk about Einstein more than they do Feynman or Higgs.They spend multiple weeks on him in Intro to psychology classes. Even though they tell you at the end it’s a bunch of rot (if you haven’t figured it out yourself), if that’s like 1/5 of your psychological knowledge, you’re gonna use it
His work is important to study from an historical perspective in order to see how psychology grew into what it is today, in the same way that it’s important that we learn about outdated concepts like tabula rasa and phrenology in order to better understand what is correct. The fact that he applied so much of his own subjective thoughts to his brand of psychology shows us how we, as potential future psychologists, also have the same capacity to search for confirmatory evidence and eschew disproving evidence in search of a theory. He’s a great example of what not to do when it comes to psychology.
Thesis envy
Freud actually did do something very very important for modern psychology. He popularized the idea of the subconscious: that humans have thought processes they are not aware of and mostly can’t control (actually the more I learn about it the more I feel like a marionette on my gut bacteria’s strings but that’s besides the point). I’ve also heard he did actually nail down the cause of many mental illnesses: child sexual abuse, but that there was some (formal?/ informal?) political pressure to not list that as the actual cause so he caved and said the patients must have made it up. I’m struggling to remember where I heard that but unfortunately given my personal and professional experience with the mental health system (the personal was more than I liked; the professional is getting there), this sounds depressingly familiar.
The fact that he caved and jeopardized data cause of public opinion makes me hate him even more
Modern psychology doesn’t necessarily support a subconscious, either. At best some individual practitioners like the concept.
Freud’s big contribution was therapy, or a “talking cure” as he called it. The rest was cocaine-fueled nonsense
That is bullshit. Everyone with a pulse knows the brain processes information unconsciously. It’s the basis for most of cognitive psychology, in fact.
Unconsciously, sure. Like, it turns three colour channels into a rainbow plus shades. Subconsciously, no, there’s no (measured) suppressed self that wants to fuck mom or whatever.
Of course there is. For example there’s the study where they brushed chairs with testosterone.
The response to that chemical being present demonstrates goal-driven personality operating below the level of consciousness.
Uncovering unconscious motivations is like 95% of therapy. Everything that isn’t yet articulated is the subconscious.
Uncovering unconscious motivations is like 95% of therapy.
I’ve done a ton of it, from multiple different practitioners, and none of it was like that. It was more about changing habits and examining conscious but unchallenged beliefs.
Even good psych has replication problems. I don’t know where your funky chair study was published or the methodology and sample size, but I’m skeptical that amounts to a lot of evidence of anything.
Probably because his ideas is what made popular psychology known to the world. His ideas have largely been debunked but there are nuggets that have been developed and become something different, rather than abandoned.
His ideas about ego, id superego etc are more commonly understood than the current psychiatric terms.
So, just like we call it pop culture, pop psychology is well known and he’s the head.
I get that for the artists, but what about the philosophers? Are they not big dick academics who will lose their standing if their ideas are nonesense?
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Because “hehehe penis” is more fun than an actual understanding of psychology.
It’s the only psychologist who has a name known to the bulk of laymen, so he’s quoted for the sake of sounding educated. And more often than not, entirely misquoted to produce a “credible” argument.
The thing is, he wasn’t even a psychologist.
Well I know for sure he was a coked up one. And if he’s not a psychologist, then he was just cokehead.
That’s about what I was thinking, the self-perpetuating fame. The general population just doesn’t know the names of many psychologists, but they’ve heard of Freud and a handful of Freud’s ideas.
I think some of this is also just that pop science often lags years or decades behind real science. Most people couldn’t name another famous psychologist, or an evolutionary scientist beyond Darwin, or a physicist beyond Einstein.
Specifically regarding art and philosophy, even if Freud’s idea were wrong, you can still glean something useful (or at least interesting) from using them as a starting premise.
It’s a way of framing discourse, ideas, and concepts. In the most general sense, id, ego, and super ego descibe that which is fundamental and can not change, that which can change but is not known at hand, and that which is presently known and can be actively changed. Try applying this framework to current events and you’ll see why people still discuss it.
Police brutality is a good example. What is fundamental to a police officer and drives them? What more maleable mindset does this create? What conscious decisions and actions does an officer take?
Obviously, this framing doesn’t perfectly capture the issue, but it does set you on a structured path to addressing it. If having an authoritative personality is what drives a police officer, how might we instill a more positive mindset when they are on patrol? How can the actions of a police officer negate that mindset?
And so on, but sometimes a cop is just a cop…
To be clear, the vast majority of academic philosophers (at least in the Anglophone world) find Freud to be useless pseudoscience. Freud gets taken seriously in literary analysis and continental philosophy. The latter is a minority position (although drawing a hard and fast line between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy is pretty difficult these days).
When I was getting my PhD in philosophy, I would have been laughed out of the room if I wrote a term paper that used Freud in any significant way.
Laziness and expediency.
Freud’s theories are pretty simple to understand and easy to map onto. Back when Freud was influential, people were easily able to import and use it in their literary theory, philosophy etc. Same thing happened with Lacan but since Lacan builds on Freud it’s essentially the same thing.
In order to use an updated understanding of psychology or even better, neurology, people would have to learn a whe lot of much more complex theory and facts, and explain it to their readers, and apply it into their own thing.
It’s much easier for an overworked academic to take this wrong but much-used system that everyone already knows.
This gets at the history of literary and art theory in the 20th century. The basic answer is that people in the arts adopted psychodynamic frameworks from Freud, Lacan, etc, while actual psychologists moved on.
Most psychologists kinda hate Freud as a person? Do they want to talk about that? Why have hate for a dead person?
Look up “penis envy”. Or “Oedipus complex”. Or some of his views on women.
My psychiatrist often kills five minutes of my hour convo ranting about freud. I love it. (Until I had to pay for mental services directly instead of my work paying for it)
Not true in Argentina and France, both infected by psychoanalysis and in particular by Lacan.
Your psychologists are Lacanian? And I thought it couldn’t get any weirder after being told you fellows get blue dollars from caves.
