As someone who has actually read a few Freud’s books long ago (before reading books by Ariely, Ridley, etc.), here are a few things that impressed me. Things that someone got right hundred years ago, when “it’s obviously magic” and “no, thoughts and emotions actually don’t exist” were the alternative famous models of human psychology.
This is a completely inaccurate depiction of Psychology as it existed during Freud’s time. You list Jung, one of Freud’s victims, as the only example of a “rival.” I think perhaps this is standard continental Euro-Chauvinism. Could it be that you are really unaware of Francis Galton’s development of psychometrics or William James’ monumental Principles of Psychology? James is a good example of someone who was a predecessor/contemporary of Freud who studied the same topic but did not go utterly off the rails into Crazy Land the way Freud did. He took a naturalistic view of the human mind, drawing upon introspection and empiricism. Galton’s contributions were vast and showed actual mathematical rigor.
Freud’s biggest contribution was probably his attempt to invent Psychopharmocology. (The short-term outcome was getting a lot of unfortunate people addicted to cocaine, but the basic idea had merit.) As for his theory of the human mind, it is worthless and set Psychology back by decades.
Sadly Freudian Psychoanalysis is Religion and Big Business now, and still practiced heavily in Mitteleuropa and parts of South America.
James was impressive. Galton… did something a bit different; also impressively.
With regard to Galton and psychometrics in general: That’s another problem with psychology, that it is a wide field, and somehow (at least in the past) the things that were interesting were difficult to measure, and the things that were easy to measure were not interesting to most people. This is why there were so many different schools in psychology: they often didn’t strictly contradict each other, it was more like everyone discussed something else—and yeah, sometimes they made huge generalization based on the part they studied.
Imagine that you go to a doctor and say: “I feel unhappy, sometimes I have problems to sleep at night, and I don’t know why but I noticed myself behaving irationally towards my girlfriend lately. Can you help me, doc?” And the doctor says: “You know, I specialize at something else. I shine people flashlight into their eyes, and measure how many milliseconds it takes them to blink. I have a lot of data, serious statistics and stuff. I can measure how fast you blink, and tell you whether you are a slow-blinker or a fast-blinker with p < 0.0001. Certified 100% pure science.”
That’s not doing the same thing better; that’s doing a different thing. Yes, he is a good scientist, but he didn’t answer your question, and he can’t cure you. Fifty years later, someone may build a therapy by gradually expanding his research, though.
This is a completely inaccurate depiction of Psychology as it existed during Freud’s time. You list Jung, one of Freud’s victims, as the only example of a “rival.” I think perhaps this is standard continental Euro-Chauvinism. Could it be that you are really unaware of Francis Galton’s development of psychometrics or William James’ monumental Principles of Psychology? James is a good example of someone who was a predecessor/contemporary of Freud who studied the same topic but did not go utterly off the rails into Crazy Land the way Freud did. He took a naturalistic view of the human mind, drawing upon introspection and empiricism. Galton’s contributions were vast and showed actual mathematical rigor.
Freud’s biggest contribution was probably his attempt to invent Psychopharmocology. (The short-term outcome was getting a lot of unfortunate people addicted to cocaine, but the basic idea had merit.) As for his theory of the human mind, it is worthless and set Psychology back by decades.
Sadly Freudian Psychoanalysis is Religion and Big Business now, and still practiced heavily in Mitteleuropa and parts of South America.
James was impressive. Galton… did something a bit different; also impressively.
With regard to Galton and psychometrics in general: That’s another problem with psychology, that it is a wide field, and somehow (at least in the past) the things that were interesting were difficult to measure, and the things that were easy to measure were not interesting to most people. This is why there were so many different schools in psychology: they often didn’t strictly contradict each other, it was more like everyone discussed something else—and yeah, sometimes they made huge generalization based on the part they studied.
Imagine that you go to a doctor and say: “I feel unhappy, sometimes I have problems to sleep at night, and I don’t know why but I noticed myself behaving irationally towards my girlfriend lately. Can you help me, doc?” And the doctor says: “You know, I specialize at something else. I shine people flashlight into their eyes, and measure how many milliseconds it takes them to blink. I have a lot of data, serious statistics and stuff. I can measure how fast you blink, and tell you whether you are a slow-blinker or a fast-blinker with p < 0.0001. Certified 100% pure science.”
That’s not doing the same thing better; that’s doing a different thing. Yes, he is a good scientist, but he didn’t answer your question, and he can’t cure you. Fifty years later, someone may build a therapy by gradually expanding his research, though.