We just know better than to take Freud seriously about anything.
Do you agree or disagree with the following things?
People sometimes do things which are not fully conscious, though if we think about these actions, we might find some hidden motive. Seems like reason is only one of the forces that move our mind; desire and group values are other significant forces.
Healing psychical problems by hypnosis is not safe. The “healed” problems usually reappear later.
People often think about sex (surely much more often than is polite to admit in Victorian society).
Our dreams are related to our emotions.
Because for me, this is the historical contribution of Freud to psychology. It does not mean he invented it all, but at least he popularized it, and I guess it was pretty controversial at that time.
The second point relates to the Victorian fad for Mesmerism [1], the fourth is wisdom of the ages, and the other two are Freud lite. Where are his id, superego, and ego now? One might as well credit medieval alchemists with modern chemistry. What do you think of the well-known claims by various critics that he “set psychiatry back one hundred years”, or that psychoanalysis is the “most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century”? (Quotes from here.)
[1] Hypnotherapy still exists, but it’s curious that there has never been a single substantial mention of it on LessWrong. The Google box brings up just two mentions-in-passing. I guess the idea of getting into a verge-of-falling-asleep state while listening to a voice droning suggestions into one’s ear isn’t going to appeal much here, for all the magical powers attributed to it in fiction and by NLP practitioners (do I repeat myself?). Searching for “hypnosis” gives a lot more hits, but from a quick glance, little discussion.
I’m not sure that’s true. In the pre-Freud examples I can think of, dreams were interpreted as predicting actual future events. (Think Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream, or the portentious dreams in Shakespeares’s Julius Caesar, or lots of folk methods for dreaming about a future spouse.) Freud’s claim that dreaming about a crop failure meant something about your fears or emotions, rather than actual future weather conditions, was a new idea.
The second point relates to the Victorian fad for Mesmerism
At time when Freud worked, Mesmerism was a popular topic, today it is not. Of course today criticizing Mesmerism would be a waste of time. (Hopefully a hundred years later people will consider criticizing homeopathy or creationism a waste of time. But it does not mean that people who are criticizing it today are wasting time.) I do not know enough about history of medicine to estimate how much Mesmerism was popular among physicians in that era. By the way, at the beginning Freud also used and advocated the hypnotic cure, but later he said “Oops”. He completely reworked his theories at least twice.
the fourth is wisdom of the ages
Sure, but how did people use this wisdom? There were many attempts to explain dreams, but seems to me they either required some irreproducible personal talent or a dictionary saying “X means Y” without any explaining what is the relationship between X and Y or how to explain things you don’t find in the dictionary. Saying that dreams are censored metaphorical scenarios of our supressed wishes coming true, and actually using this framework to explain some specific dreams, seems like an improvement to me.
Where are his id, superego, and ego now?
Used by psychoanalysts; shortly revived and popularized by Eric Berne in 1960s.
One might as well credit medieval alchemists with modern chemistry.
Yes.
Freud was not a scientist. Scientists make hypotheses, construct experiments, evaluate them statistically, etc. Freud was a physician—he tried to cure his patients when the general state of knowledge in his area was pathetic: mostly useless, often harmful. So he made up some heuristics, they seemed to work (though it could also be a placebo effect), compiled them into theories, and published books. He trained a few followers, and some people found his theories (with some updates) useful for a few decades. I would classify his teachings as an “expert opinion”, not “science”. And if you’d prefer the word “pseudoscience”, I wouldn’t say you are wrong. This is how psychology was done at that time.
Unfortunately, many criticism of Freud comes from people preferring their own, ahem, pseudosciences. If you compare Freud’s theories with contemporary experiments that sometimes use computers, brain scanners, analyzers of chemicals in blood, or drugs produced by multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical research… but sometimes only a clever idea of an experiment and statistical processing of the results, then of course Freud is on a similar level as medieval alchemists. But in my experience, most people don’t waste their time to state the obvious. Most criticism of Freud is merely signalling preference to some other school of psychology; typically Jungian or behaviorist.
There are cca 5 traditional branches of psychology, all of them pseudoscientific, though some of them believing to be more scientific than others because the did some simple experiments with animals, and then widely generalized their results. Doing experiments is correct, of course. The wrong part is concluding that “my experiment discovered X, therefore everything in animal or human mind is X” and then selectively gathering evidence that supports it, and inventing rationalizations when contrary evidence is unavoidable. All the traditional branches were guilty of this. If they would at least contradict each other, their debates could be resolved by an experiment. But all of them claimed to understand everything and refute the competition, while carefully making testable predictions (if any) only in a very small area where their teachings originated, and where probably their maps matched the territory best.
It’s like saying “Newton was wrong” when some poeple mean that “Newton was wrong, because space-time is curved, as Einstein has shown”, while other people mean that “Newton was wrong, apples fall down because they are made of the earth element mixed with water element, and these elements always want to travel downwards”, or even worse “Newton was wrong, apples don’t fall down, the power of zodiac levitates them; only when a bad person radiates a negative energy, they fall down” (that was suppossed to be an analogy to “only sick people think about sex all the time” and similar).
What do you think of the well-known claims by various critics that he “set psychiatry back one hundred years”, or that psychoanalysis is the “most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century”?
The second quote comes from an immunologist, not psychologist. The first quote comes from a competing Jungian school, but it comes from a guy who actually made a questionnaire to measure some Jung’s concepts. Too bad for Freudians they didn’t have a guy who would make an equivalent questionnaire to measure something that Freud described; and I guess it means something that they didn’t have one. But for me, these quotes are simply signalling superiority of one tribe over another.
(For me the conflict between Freud, Jung, Adler and others is already over. We don’t need to argue whether people truly care about sex, about spiritual wisdom, or about power, or love, or self-actualization, or whatever. First, humans can have many values, not only one terminal goal. Second, it can be all different aspects of the same underlying evolutionary process: we need to survive and reproduce, for that we search power and love, and for that we signal our skills and wisdom. Though I admit my sympaties for the Freudian tribe.)
Hypnotherapy still exists, but it’s curious that there has never been a single substantial mention of it on LessWrong.
I remember a short discussion about how to administer a “placebo hypnosis” for a double-blind test. :D
If you can recommend some easily reproducible test and write an article, I think some readers will participate. Problem is to design the test to prevent a placebo effect and other methodological problems.
Scientists make hypotheses, construct experiments, evaluate them statistically, etc.
This seems too narrow a conception of science: Did Darwin do science that way?
What Freud didn’t succeed in is to elevate psychology from a preparadigm state (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense). But Freud’s main concern was mental conflict, and I don’t think its study has today reached the stage of genuine science. Cognitive-behavioral approaches to treatment largely ignore mental conflict, and the result is that they are more collection of tricks than a theory. Because students typically set the bar too high for psychoanalysis, Freud’s own principal trick, free association, is vastly under-utilized.
Do you agree or disagree with the following things?
People sometimes do things which are not fully conscious, though if we think about these actions, we might find some hidden motive. Seems like reason is only one of the forces that move our mind; desire and group values are other significant forces.
Healing psychical problems by hypnosis is not safe. The “healed” problems usually reappear later.
People often think about sex (surely much more often than is polite to admit in Victorian society).
Our dreams are related to our emotions.
Because for me, this is the historical contribution of Freud to psychology. It does not mean he invented it all, but at least he popularized it, and I guess it was pretty controversial at that time.
The second point relates to the Victorian fad for Mesmerism [1], the fourth is wisdom of the ages, and the other two are Freud lite. Where are his id, superego, and ego now? One might as well credit medieval alchemists with modern chemistry. What do you think of the well-known claims by various critics that he “set psychiatry back one hundred years”, or that psychoanalysis is the “most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century”? (Quotes from here.)
[1] Hypnotherapy still exists, but it’s curious that there has never been a single substantial mention of it on LessWrong. The Google box brings up just two mentions-in-passing. I guess the idea of getting into a verge-of-falling-asleep state while listening to a voice droning suggestions into one’s ear isn’t going to appeal much here, for all the magical powers attributed to it in fiction and by NLP practitioners (do I repeat myself?). Searching for “hypnosis” gives a lot more hits, but from a quick glance, little discussion.
I’m not sure that’s true. In the pre-Freud examples I can think of, dreams were interpreted as predicting actual future events. (Think Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream, or the portentious dreams in Shakespeares’s Julius Caesar, or lots of folk methods for dreaming about a future spouse.) Freud’s claim that dreaming about a crop failure meant something about your fears or emotions, rather than actual future weather conditions, was a new idea.
At time when Freud worked, Mesmerism was a popular topic, today it is not. Of course today criticizing Mesmerism would be a waste of time. (Hopefully a hundred years later people will consider criticizing homeopathy or creationism a waste of time. But it does not mean that people who are criticizing it today are wasting time.) I do not know enough about history of medicine to estimate how much Mesmerism was popular among physicians in that era. By the way, at the beginning Freud also used and advocated the hypnotic cure, but later he said “Oops”. He completely reworked his theories at least twice.
Sure, but how did people use this wisdom? There were many attempts to explain dreams, but seems to me they either required some irreproducible personal talent or a dictionary saying “X means Y” without any explaining what is the relationship between X and Y or how to explain things you don’t find in the dictionary. Saying that dreams are censored metaphorical scenarios of our supressed wishes coming true, and actually using this framework to explain some specific dreams, seems like an improvement to me.
Used by psychoanalysts; shortly revived and popularized by Eric Berne in 1960s.
Yes.
Freud was not a scientist. Scientists make hypotheses, construct experiments, evaluate them statistically, etc. Freud was a physician—he tried to cure his patients when the general state of knowledge in his area was pathetic: mostly useless, often harmful. So he made up some heuristics, they seemed to work (though it could also be a placebo effect), compiled them into theories, and published books. He trained a few followers, and some people found his theories (with some updates) useful for a few decades. I would classify his teachings as an “expert opinion”, not “science”. And if you’d prefer the word “pseudoscience”, I wouldn’t say you are wrong. This is how psychology was done at that time.
Unfortunately, many criticism of Freud comes from people preferring their own, ahem, pseudosciences. If you compare Freud’s theories with contemporary experiments that sometimes use computers, brain scanners, analyzers of chemicals in blood, or drugs produced by multi-billion-dollar pharmaceutical research… but sometimes only a clever idea of an experiment and statistical processing of the results, then of course Freud is on a similar level as medieval alchemists. But in my experience, most people don’t waste their time to state the obvious. Most criticism of Freud is merely signalling preference to some other school of psychology; typically Jungian or behaviorist.
There are cca 5 traditional branches of psychology, all of them pseudoscientific, though some of them believing to be more scientific than others because the did some simple experiments with animals, and then widely generalized their results. Doing experiments is correct, of course. The wrong part is concluding that “my experiment discovered X, therefore everything in animal or human mind is X” and then selectively gathering evidence that supports it, and inventing rationalizations when contrary evidence is unavoidable. All the traditional branches were guilty of this. If they would at least contradict each other, their debates could be resolved by an experiment. But all of them claimed to understand everything and refute the competition, while carefully making testable predictions (if any) only in a very small area where their teachings originated, and where probably their maps matched the territory best.
It’s like saying “Newton was wrong” when some poeple mean that “Newton was wrong, because space-time is curved, as Einstein has shown”, while other people mean that “Newton was wrong, apples fall down because they are made of the earth element mixed with water element, and these elements always want to travel downwards”, or even worse “Newton was wrong, apples don’t fall down, the power of zodiac levitates them; only when a bad person radiates a negative energy, they fall down” (that was suppossed to be an analogy to “only sick people think about sex all the time” and similar).
The second quote comes from an immunologist, not psychologist. The first quote comes from a competing Jungian school, but it comes from a guy who actually made a questionnaire to measure some Jung’s concepts. Too bad for Freudians they didn’t have a guy who would make an equivalent questionnaire to measure something that Freud described; and I guess it means something that they didn’t have one. But for me, these quotes are simply signalling superiority of one tribe over another.
(For me the conflict between Freud, Jung, Adler and others is already over. We don’t need to argue whether people truly care about sex, about spiritual wisdom, or about power, or love, or self-actualization, or whatever. First, humans can have many values, not only one terminal goal. Second, it can be all different aspects of the same underlying evolutionary process: we need to survive and reproduce, for that we search power and love, and for that we signal our skills and wisdom. Though I admit my sympaties for the Freudian tribe.)
I remember a short discussion about how to administer a “placebo hypnosis” for a double-blind test. :D
If you can recommend some easily reproducible test and write an article, I think some readers will participate. Problem is to design the test to prevent a placebo effect and other methodological problems.
This seems too narrow a conception of science: Did Darwin do science that way?
What Freud didn’t succeed in is to elevate psychology from a preparadigm state (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense). But Freud’s main concern was mental conflict, and I don’t think its study has today reached the stage of genuine science. Cognitive-behavioral approaches to treatment largely ignore mental conflict, and the result is that they are more collection of tricks than a theory. Because students typically set the bar too high for psychoanalysis, Freud’s own principal trick, free association, is vastly under-utilized.