For the record, that long comment was not completely directed to you; it was something I have already thought should be written, and reading your comment was simply the moment when my inaction changed to action.
People are full of biases and rationalizations, and if you give them a theory which says “actually, other people often don’t even know what happens in their own minds”, well, that can hurt them regardless of whether the theory is true. And yes, this is what most amateur “psychologists” do after seeing “psychoanalysis” done on TV and learning the relevant keywords. And I guess not a few professional psychologists are not better than this. And yes, it made it difficult to argue against Freud in cases he was wrong.
Still, as I wrote, he was capable of changing his mind. And other psychoanalysts later disagreed on some topics. But without proper scientific method we can’t be sure that these changes really were improvements, as opposed to random drift (“I am a high-status psychoanalyst, so I will signal it by adding my random opinion to our set of sacred beliefs”).
Some parts of psychoanalysis make predictions; the problem is that unlike in physics, humans can react in many different ways. It’s like a black-box testing where each “box” is internally wired differently. We do have a prediction that a dream will contain a censored version of a suppressed desire. And it feels like it should be testable. But how specifically will the desire be censored? Uhm… this depends on the specific person, on what associations they have, so again we can suspect than any result could be “explained” as some form of censorship of something.
According to wikipedia Popper compared Freud with Einstein, as two people living in the same era, whose scientific rigor was completely different. Yeah, there was a huge difference. There was also a huge difference in the amount and quality of data they had, the available tools, the complexity of the studied objects, and the general waterline of sanity in their fields. (Again, “it’s magic” and “people actually don’t think” were the respected alternative theories. Imagine starting in a similar position in physics.)
Like I said, there is a huge discussion on this issue in the philosophy of science. My guess is that most of your arguments above have already been discussed extensively.
Grünbaum’s book is considered a classic on the subject and might be a place to start (I haven’t read it, though Gellner refers a lot to it). He is critical of psycho-analysis but rejects Popper’s view of it as a pseudo-science.
For the record, that long comment was not completely directed to you; it was something I have already thought should be written, and reading your comment was simply the moment when my inaction changed to action.
People are full of biases and rationalizations, and if you give them a theory which says “actually, other people often don’t even know what happens in their own minds”, well, that can hurt them regardless of whether the theory is true. And yes, this is what most amateur “psychologists” do after seeing “psychoanalysis” done on TV and learning the relevant keywords. And I guess not a few professional psychologists are not better than this. And yes, it made it difficult to argue against Freud in cases he was wrong.
Still, as I wrote, he was capable of changing his mind. And other psychoanalysts later disagreed on some topics. But without proper scientific method we can’t be sure that these changes really were improvements, as opposed to random drift (“I am a high-status psychoanalyst, so I will signal it by adding my random opinion to our set of sacred beliefs”).
Some parts of psychoanalysis make predictions; the problem is that unlike in physics, humans can react in many different ways. It’s like a black-box testing where each “box” is internally wired differently. We do have a prediction that a dream will contain a censored version of a suppressed desire. And it feels like it should be testable. But how specifically will the desire be censored? Uhm… this depends on the specific person, on what associations they have, so again we can suspect than any result could be “explained” as some form of censorship of something.
According to wikipedia Popper compared Freud with Einstein, as two people living in the same era, whose scientific rigor was completely different. Yeah, there was a huge difference. There was also a huge difference in the amount and quality of data they had, the available tools, the complexity of the studied objects, and the general waterline of sanity in their fields. (Again, “it’s magic” and “people actually don’t think” were the respected alternative theories. Imagine starting in a similar position in physics.)
Like I said, there is a huge discussion on this issue in the philosophy of science. My guess is that most of your arguments above have already been discussed extensively.
Grünbaum’s book is considered a classic on the subject and might be a place to start (I haven’t read it, though Gellner refers a lot to it). He is critical of psycho-analysis but rejects Popper’s view of it as a pseudo-science.