
The Doctor Is In: Rescuing Freud from Modern Misunderstanding - samclemens
http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-doctor-is-in/article/2006275
======
kyleschiller
Yeah, despite being largely discredited in the sciences, Freud has always
maintained popularity in the humanities and social sciences. If nothing else,
he can be credited with framing the debates that happened afterwards. It's
telling that his "influenced" property on Wikipedia is just a list of every
psychoanalyst.

Still, I'm not entirely convinced that

    
    
      The simultaneous presence in every individual of the most evil and the most generous impulses makes society an inherent contradiction
    

really captures the lasting value of Freud's work. Maybe I should just read
the biography itself, but it seems less like he's suffering from
misunderstanding, and more like he's a popular figure a lot of people know
just enough about to be ignorant.

And then yeah, lines like

    
    
      No brain scan is ever going to destroy a belief in our own subjectivity.
    

really make this feel more like a misrepresentation of why Freud gets
critiqued in the first place.

~~~
omginternets
What I find interesting about Freud from a humanities perspective is that
psychoanalytic theory can be understood as a non-theological means of
discussing topics hitherto reserved to religious inquiry. It's essentially a
vocabulary that enables people to discuss spirituality, existential angst, and
subjection to higher forces without appealing to the supernatural.

Incidentally, Freud seems to be incredibly popular in circles that either take
a highly analytic approach to religion (ashkenazi jews, particularly in NYC)
or that exhibit an ascetic rejection of religion (Paris).

The influence and value of Freud's work in the humanities is difficult to
understate, but none of this changes the fact that his theories don't yield
testable hypotheses and don't predict behavior.

~~~
kem
I think the last part is where some of the misunderstandings come in.

For example, just yesterday I was reading an article showing that people are
likely to make naming mistakes involving things from the same category. So if
you mistakenly call one thing by another, you're sort of revealing an implicit
categorization.

This isn't surprising, and these sorts of errors have actually been used as
measurement devices, but it's very much in line with psychodynamic theory, and
very testable. Basically the whole idea of a Freudian slip at some level.

Much of modern cognitive theory is based on basic ideas first elaborated on by
Freud. People love to criticize psychodynamic theory, but then turn around and
fill their work with implicit, subconscious, competing processes.

I'm not saying that Freud got all the details right, or that he wasn't wrong
about anything. Many of his developmental ideas, for example, are probably
totally off base. However, his basic ideas about modular, subconscious,
parallel competing processes are still dominant today, and just go by
different names. Old wine, new labels.

~~~
omginternets
>Basically the whole idea of a Freudian slip at some level.

Sure, just like the basic idea that the bulk of our mental processes are not
amenable to introspection is "basically right". Still, there's a distinction
between ideas that influence scientific theory and actually _are_ scientific
theories.

The problem is that the mechanisms proposed by Freud are often defined so
broadly as to simultaneously a) prevent any useful prediction of behavior and
b) allow for subsequent findings to be reinterpreted in a psychoanalytic
context. In other words, it's virtually impossible to falsify any of Freud's
claims. The notion of superego, for instance, is so general that literally any
supervisory process can qualify, yet the id/ego/superego model utterly fails
to _predict_ human behavior.

This is the hallmark of pseudoscience. Freud's saving grace is that his
theories were subsequently refined into _actual_ scientific theories.
Psychoanalytic theory is to psychology as alchemy is to chemistry.

Note that I'm being very serious. Explicit in alchemical theory are several
ideas that were essential and seminal to the modern study of chemistry: the
notion that there are elemental substances, that substances can be
"transmuted" through physical means, that substances interact with each other
to produce compound substances, etc.

Still, it ain't science...

\---

P.S.: here is an answer I posted to cogsci.stackoverflow about what Freud got
right.
[http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/a/8368/2926](http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/a/8368/2926)

------
woodandsteel
A key reason Freud has gone out of style is that science has found that his
psychology is mistaken in key ways.

Freud believed that everything in adult psychology is an elaboration of
something already there in the infant mind. That is dubious, but even if you
accept it, there is the problem that Freud did not investigate infant
psychology directly, but instead assumed it is basically irrational, asocial
and radically out of touch with reality.

In recent decades infant psychology has been the subject of extensive
empirical study, and it turns out to be much different from what Freud
thought. See, for instance , <i>The Scientist in the Crib</i> by Gopnik,
Meltzoff and Kuhl.

~~~
woodandsteel
Oops, I wanted italics. Anyone know how to get them?

~~~
omginternets

        *this will be in italics* and this will not

------
hodwik
This is an interesting article, and its position is a bit surprising, coming
from The Weekly Standard. I want to go out and get that Bio now, for sure.

