I always mention this when there are articles about logical approaches to psychology that mention Freud: Freud was the first person to attempt to create an enti

I always mention this when there are articles about logical approaches to psychology that mention Freud: Freud was the first person to attempt to create an entirely physical theory of the psyche, and he attempted to understand psychological operations as a product of neurological reactions[0]. To be fair, not many in the early 20th century would know of this work, since it wasn't published until some years after Freud's death. But Psychoanalysis was developed out of the fact of his failure: that human relations, and human psychology, were "messy," they were unable to be accessed through traditional empirical means, and so there was a need to develop a new method of evaluating therapeutic subjects which, by dint of its subject, grew to be quasi-mystical (if you want the deep Freudian mysticism, read "Beyond the Pleasure Principle."[1]) But these myths, acknowledged as much by Freud, were in principle used not to describe reality, but to give a framework for teaching analysis: for instructing others how to go about the therapeutic approach. No myth, no logic, no grammar is universal to the psyche; and yet humans live in interrelations, there is at some level a groundwork for both social and psychological life, a particular set of relations: Lacan, who came after Freud, heavily employed the use of pure math and logic in order to describe this set of relations, but these formulas were never meant to capture the "whole" thing, because one could never: they were only meant to give a framework for analysis, a framework for analyzing operations of human beings in their social world. Freud may not have been perfect or spoke the absolute truth: but there was never an absolute truth to speak about, and the success of HBO's myriad (and explicitly Freudian) Dramas I think demonstrates the validity of the method: just like Oedipus Rex was able to stimulate horror in its ancient audience, Freud was able to capture what it was about that play that triggered the reaction, and we can now easily recreate it over and over and over again. Honestly though, it is getting a little tiring to see psychological dramas rehashing the same co-ordinates over and over. I completely endorse moving away from his work to create something new, a reinterpretation if you will (just like with Lacan), but the outright dismissal is inappropriate and misguided, in my book. [0]http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/freud%20fleiss%20letters/200711781-013.pdf http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/freud%20fleiss%20letters/2007... [1]https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/assets/pdf/freud_beyond_the_pleasure_principle.pdf https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/assets/pdf/freud_beyo...