Talk:Sigmund Freud

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Question from an anonymous user

'Did Freud suffer from womb envy?' - discuss. ^{— Unsigned, by: 82.198.250.66 / talk / contribs}

Reminder to myself/request

This page needs more about the really batshit parts of Freud's theories, like penis envy and sexism, schizophrenia being caused by the gay, Oedipus complex, etc., which I'll get around to adding unless someone swoops in with it before me. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 03:56, 8 April 2011 (UTC)

Don't forget all the coke he did and the lack of patient confidentiality. HollowWorld (talk) 19:48, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Things wrong with this page

1. The article asserts that "the concept of the unconscious" is "the idea that human beings are not always aware of their own motivations". Wrong. "The idea that human beings are not always aware of their own motivations" is a commonplace that anyone can accept and has nothing specifically to do with Freud's ideas. Arthur S. Reber and Emily Reber's The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology defines the unconscious (in Freud's sense) as "a domain of the psyche encompassing the repressed id functions, the primitive impulses and desires, the memories, images and wishes that are too anxiety-provoking to be accepted into oonsciousness". Think about it carefully, and you'll see that this not only does not mean the same thing as "the idea that human beings are not always aware of their own motivations", it isn't even close.

2. "Freud is often grouped with Nietzsche and Marx as one of the great thinkers of the 19th century as in Paul Ricoeur's Masters of Suspicion" - Masters of Suspicion is in italics, implying that it is a book. Did Ricoeur actually write a book with that title? I could be wrong, but I don't think so.

3. "Nevertheless, Freud's work was an important step forward in decriminalizing mental illness, as asylums in the 19th century tended to be far more interested in containing the 'undesirables' of society rather than therapeutic solutions" When, exactly, was mental illness, as opposed to some of the behavior associated with it, ever 'criminal' per se?

4. "There is great irony in the fact that Freud was a prolific smoker of cigars (an oral fixation on a penis substitute), and died of throat cancer that was most likely caused by this habit though that was not known in Freud's time" - How does whoever wrote that know that Freud's cigars were penis substitutes? Or what caused Freud's cancer? The last part of the sentence confuses knowledge of the causes of cancer in general with knowledge of what caused Freud's cancer - quite different subjects.

5. "He did, however, turn toward a sort of secular Judaism late in his life" - that's meaningless.

6. "His ideas have been criticized by feminists such as Betty Friedan and postmodernists such as Michel Foucault" - Foucault was not a postmodernist.

7. We're told that Freud perpetuated "Opposition to women's liberation/suffrage". Opposition to women's suffrage would mean that Freud opposed women being allowed to vote. Are you sure that this was Freud's view? Really?

8. "While Freud did not see homosexuality in and of itself to be a mental illness, he did view it as a form of stunted sexual development" - Not completely wrong, but "stunted" is an inappropriate term to use. Also, why are you sure that this is "nonsense"?

9. "He also believed that homophobia led to sexual repression in gays, which caused a range of mental disorders, most notably paranoia or schizophrenia. The alleged connection was, of course, later found to be utter bullshit." That's a mangled and nearly-incomprehensible account of Freud's ideas that hardly deserves comment.

10. "rejecting the existence of the unconscious would be considered denialism probably on par with mental illness denial" In a word: rubbish.

11. "Repressed memory is now considered pseudoscientific. There is no special mechanism that 'represses' memories and it's likely that many of the 'repressed' memories Freudians claim to have discovered were actually just inventions of the therapist or patient himself." How do you know?

12. "Dream interpretation is currently patent quackery." I can understand why someone would say that, but a term like "quackery" really would only apply in a field with recognized standards. "Of uncertain value" would be a more suitable expression here.

13. "However, modern psychologists generally regard his description of the workings of the unconscious mind as patent nonsense." Wrong, perhaps, but not patent nonsense.

I have no intention of trying to fix any of the above-mentioned mistakes, but I thought I'd state them for the record. Please note that the list is non-exclusive. Prince of Glantri (talk) 04:47, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Feel free to edit the article. ^pathetic 09:40, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

My decision not to try to fix the problems of this article is not based on any belief that I am not allowed or able to edit it. Clearly, I can edit it, however, I choose not to, since my preferred solution to the article's problems (wiping it completely) has already been rejected. I decided to note some of its problems in case others are inclined to try to fix them. Prince of Glantri (talk) 07:36, 27 February 2012 (UTC)

14. Nonsense he perpetuated: "Female hysteria". WRONG. Freud was, in fact, adamant in advocating hysteria as a gender neutral mental disorder, diagnosing many of his male patients with it. Therefore, the nonsense he advocated was rather just "Hysteria" in general. ^{— Unsigned, by: 193.2.179.139 / talk / contribs}

Most important question: why did he become so influential?

The most important question is not treated. Why did this scientist who was mediocre at best become and remain so influential for such a long period of time? Mediocre scientists are abundant but they are not influential. Why was Freud an exception? Andries (talk) 18:09, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

One notable theory is that exactly because he was such a shameless bullshitter (scientist is too high of a word for him, by his own admission too), he could trump everybody else. Whereas early sound research had just barely got over the psychophysical phase, and was figuring out a great deal of abstract-yet-fundamental questions (from the big philosophical ifs, to what theoretical framework to adopt, to the statistical methods) he just cut straight to the finish line with clear cut answers. And it was all a self-reinforcing cycle from there, if you can imagine it. Made up fables put no limit on the metaphors and verbiage that you can use to gull the reader, which in turn gets amazed from the apparent amount of "explanatory" power, which leds to the notoriety success that will then embolden the author into even further obfuscating and falsifying the facts.
IMHO it's not that he was so influential *directly* with the scholars of his generation per se, but after taking over the public opinion's imagination just about everybody and their aunt basically started from there (then of course, like Popper himself, they may have later reconsidered it.. but nonetheless this was a huge headstart). If The Principles of Psychology might have been shared and appreciated between intellectuals of the time (like Wittgenstein), The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was easily read by the average literate Joe (in Italy, one of the most classic high school readings even has a certain "Doctor S." and its therapies as an integral plot element).
If you really wanted to grasp at straws, you could still eventually argue that in a worsening world that had just barely accepted germ theory for something so organic as infectious disease.. even just stating that "the mind can be influenced" was non-trivial (as said, at a time when actual scientific psychology was struggling to blossom into the mainstream) but come on. Other people were already "shifting the attention inwards", he's just famous because he covered the absolutely legitimate uncertainty that every honest guy had in the day with lies, sex and literal poop. Fuck what little progress you could even conjure existed, if it had to mean a century of despicable nefarious malpractice (and somewhat worse, active sabotaging of rigorous studies). --Mirh (talk) 16:10, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Freud reconsidered

Ostensibly my reaction towards Freud’s work is of a piece with the reaction of most sceptics—the majority of Freud’s work is composed of pseudoscience and sexist nonsense. However, I’ve recently been watching this discussion— Donald Davidson and Jim Hopkins on Wittgenstein, Freud, and Irrationality—which provides an interesting perspective on irrationality. Davidson argues that irrationality can only occur in predominantly rational organisms, as Davidson puts it (see time-mark 02:10 onwards):

“”Irrationality is a disease of rationality, not an absence of it.

Let us assume then, that there is, in the dialectical sense, something that Freud gets right, then a problem persists: can we separate any Freudian wheat from the obvious chaff? and, a more urgent question follows: is there a rigorous method that could separate what Freud gets right, or more generally, what an arbitrary theory gets right, from what it gets wrong? The problem with the latter question is holistic: The wheat we tried to harvest from Freud’s field is dependent on an array of problematic background assumptions and theory (that is, of course, if you could consider any of Freud’s ideas well-formed enough to warrant the label “theory”). Anyhow, I’m interested in the challenge of overcoming my strong cynicism towards anything “Freudian”; and in proper Davidsonian spirit, I’d like to charitably engage with some of Feud’s ideas, tentatively that is … For now, the video alone provides some mental nourishment. Leucippus^{Salva veritate} 01:58, 3 September 2021 (UTC)

We know the guy was a hack and a liar. We know he just made up shit on the go, carefully crafting his grift like Goop or Scientology. We know he even mocked empiricism itself, adopting cult-like self-discipline for his acolytes. And to this day there are still people defending him and his circlejerky methods, creating great damage to the discipline as a whole. Why do you even want to care? I understand that "for the records", "fair is fair" and even "because" can be valid reasons, but there's definitively something unstated if you want to focus your attention on these specific minutiae as opposed to the far more impeding questions about his frankly scaring appeal. Like, of course there are also people debating who invented the light bulb or the telephone, but I'm not seeing engineers still cling to the war of the currents the same way that people (and not just randos, I mean staff in psych departments) are still pushing psychoanalytic literary fucking criticism. --Mirh (talk) 16:13, 30 January 2024 (UTC)

Grünbaum is detached (aka maybe expand on falsifiability)

I read his paper, and I was actually surprised to see Freud even conceiving counterfactual reasoning. Also, I suppose whether you should consider a theory and its partisans separately or not is a pretty good dilemma.
Yet, aside of this he looks like having born yesterday. By no means the article is bad, and he does seem to correctly report each other positions (unlike that Habermas clown), but god isn't he more concerned with playing philosophical gotcha than actually trying to assess the "practical" situation on the field? To be sure both noble activities, but despite what the title may suggest he's basically taking an offense with "the letter" of Popper's work rather than "the spirit".
Yes, even fucking religion is theoretically testable insofar as claims about any real-life entity is made. So, logically nothing physical-world-adjacent could truly be irrefutable (which is claim a). But somehow he never gets around to explicitly acknowledge the far more essential claim b being true (despite later even making a stricter implication about Freud's moral as well as intellectual bankruptcy):

“”have supplied a requisitely sophisticated refutation [...] by showing how Freud contrived, by tendentious misuse of the method of free association, to find a repressed wish-motive in every latent dream-content.

“”if one of these [counterwish] dreams which cannot be explained as any other kind of wish fulfillment were to occur to someone who had never heard of Freud’s theory [and hence has no motive to prove him wrong], this would be most damaging to that theory

Call it a research program, criticize the whole social enterprise comprised of people, blame any referent other than the "plain theory itself", but this is as much an indictment on unfalsifiability as you could get. To be a psychoanalyst (or at least a Freud-lover), is to be an blindfolded cultist that knows no . And no, waking up 80 years later (when you know damn well that no educated person would ever give you the benefit of the doubt) that special pleading homosexuality wasn't right, doesn't cut it. Especially without even a shred of self-reflection or retrospect, you just updated the presentation of your confidence trick not your beliefs (there's not even a comparison with how physicists reacted to the real life spinning wheel example, or the ludicrous rabbit hole they put themselves into with dark matter).

A generous sum up of the valid criticism could be, as Frank Cioffi puts: Freud isn't a pseudo-scientist because his theory is untestable or because he refused to capitulate to some one particular falsification (both things that frequently happened nonetheless), but even more generally because of his constant pretence to have tested hypotheses (to whatever low standard of integrity you would expect from a minimally sensible person) when in fact he did not. Be it due to outright forgery/feigning/mystification of his data, or because of the most sluggish mental "carelessness" when assessing likelihoods, alternative explanations and whatnot. ^{— Unsigned, by: Mirh / talk / contribs}