4 ms·

The appeal of Freud is that there's clearly something true about it. It's not all true, not even close, and as a predictive model it is extremely weak; the ways

by ajkjk 3y ago

The appeal of Freud is that there's clearly something true about it. It's not all true, not even close, and as a predictive model it is extremely weak; the ways it's not true is really important and everyone figured out that it's there so they moved on to other models. But it's got (I believe) true parts, even though you can't really call them "science", and those parts appeal to people like me who are looking for something... more than therapy, I guess.

DiscourseFan 3y ago
I don't know how familiar you are with Freud, but it's not something that can be made piecemeal. The Oedipal complex is not "true" or "false," it describes the universal process of socialization that children enter into (even Aristotle said somewhere, that children begin by calling all men "dad" and all women "mom," until they learn to differentiate via naming). But the various conditions of the Oedipal complex are diverse: it boils down to, in the end, not the simple conventional "mommy, daddy, me," but a triadic formulation: the child only understands themselves as individual, insofar as they have lost the mother's affection (i.e. they're being weaned), and thereby gains an object of desire (originally, the love of the mother) which is always already lost, and a process whereby they can return to a state of pre-subjectivity i.e. where their desires would have always already been fulfilled; a return to a position whereby that affection (of the mother) can be returned, by assuming the role of whatever it is that took the object of desire away, in order to get it back, thereby gaining subjectivity in seeing themselves as that which they desire to replace. This is termed identification, which is a repression of that drive towards pre-subjectivity, a drive which Freud entitles the "death drive." For Freud, there is always something that precedes all theorizing or origination, some excess towards which desire aims--towards, precisely, a state before desiring itself--but which it never fulfills. The Oedipal triad, therefore, is the first and most basic articulation of this drive towards death in its social function, even if it is made particular for the time and place where Freud lived, it is necessary as a part within the larger system: a part which relies on the regular function of others, like the death drive, like repression, like the unconscious. Each part of the system is defined in relation to all the others, and defined in relation to its appearance in a symbolic system and its authorization at the level of discourse; that is, at the level at which one speaks, since it is only within symbolic exchange that one first enters into a social world. One gains language through the word "mama," not because mama, the most basic, repetitive sound that any child can make, has any significance, but because the very appearance of a word that has come in place of the "actual" object of desire implies an infinite separation already from that object in its full sensuous reality: the object, once announced, is already lost, on account of the fact that it can be announced as separate from the very thing it supposedly describes. And from then on, the child is "castrated," i.e. cut off from the source of pleasure through their very entrance into the world of symbolic structures; through, more simply put, their entrance into language. This implicates all other systems of thought, giving to all other discourses a biological, material explanation for the formation of language itself, but one which is always permanently separated from the very biological origin by that very excess towards which it aims--the drive towards death, which, for Freud, always points to a pre-animated, pre-vivified world. A world before language and the psyche that would come to describe it. So that the materiality, and the relation to the material world of every discourse, is always established as a permanent site of loss, to which (very fortunately for itself) psychoanalysis always has a method to prepare a way forward despite this loss, through the rigorous analysis of its own development.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  Pretty much totally disagree. You can take all the parts piecemeal. You can use the underlying concepts of his model without buying the dubious narrative of the Oedipus complex. And you can say there's something that "rings true" about the Oedipus complex without interpreting it as a literal predictive theory, aka, accept it in part while rejecting it in the whole. Easily. It's a model, and taking it piecemeal can consist either of borrowing its nouns without its story, or taking part of its story but saying it's not the full picture, or not completely right, etc.
- qarl 3y ago
  > I don't know how familiar you are with Freud, but it's not something that can be made piecemeal. Hm. That seems unlikely.
  - bavent 3y ago
    Care to elaborate? A four-word rebuttal to a well-written, fairly detailed response doesn't really make your case for you.
    - qarl 3y ago
      Well - for one - I don't see at all how the well-written, fairly detailed response supports that initial claim. I feel like my four-word rebuttal has as much support as did his initial statement.
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        I guess this is really four words: tl;dr
        SubiculumCode 3y ago
        when it comes to Freud, I tend to keep it to four letters.
      - DiscourseFan 3y ago
thfuran 3y ago
>there's clearly something true about it. It's not all true, not even close, and as a predictive model it is extremely weak; the ways it's not true is really important In what way is it clear that there's something true there?
- ajkjk 3y ago
  A lot of his basic ideas are so enmeshed into our public conception of how people work that we don't even realize they come from him, the main example being the basic ideas of "subconsciousness" and "repression". The interpretation of dreams stuff is definitely not as predictive as he claimed, but it's definitely got something to it; compared to "thinking dreams are random and meaningless" it's definitely a better theory to guess that they involve repressed stuff. Etc.
- qarl 3y ago
  I don't know much about Freud and his theories - but as one example - I'd say that his concept of defense mechanisms seems pretty spot on. The last few years have given us many examples of psychological projection.
hyperthesis 3y ago
It's not falsifiable. Some things, e.g. id/ego/super-ego seem truish, but only because they package up already accepted things. It's like a "theory" in the Arts: a way of thinking, of analysing, a framework. It's neither true nor false, but may be convenient terminology.
- PheonixPharts 3y ago
  > It's not falsifiable. Neither is Popper's Falsification Theory. The only thing that pointing this out demonstrates is that a theory does not fit under Popper's specific definition of normative science... which in the philosophy of science itself is not held in particularly high regard. So what you're basically pointing out is that, according to one very specific philosopher of science, Freud is more philosophy than he is normative science. Which is something that I think virtually all advocates of Freud would uncontroversially agree with.
  - throw310822 3y ago
    > Neither is Popper's Falsification Theory. Sounds perfectly falsifiable to me: you just need to show a well accepted scientific theory that cannot be falsified even in principle. However, Popper's seems more a principle or a criterion than a theory. By which I mean, you're free to refuse it and incorporate any amount of non-falsifiable statements in your "science". I just suspect it won't have much predictive power.
  - tnecniv 3y ago
    What makes his theory non-falsifiable?
- skim_milk 3y ago
  The problem with this philosophy is that we have brain scan studies, phylogenetic, developmental, neuroscience, and thousands of pages from established experts on psychology that document these three systems of learning and memory. Who give a hoot we live in Descartes' demon and anything could be not real? The elephant is in the room. Id/ego/superego is clearly a thing, either that or you're not familiar with the field, or you're not living in shared reality! Malignant egalitarians who think everyone's opinions are just should really learn to push back harder on things that have, like, one in a trillion odds on being false. The only thing up for debate are the definitions, functions, and boundaries of these three.

by ajkjk 3y ago

DiscourseFan 3y ago

I don't know how familiar you are with Freud, but it's not something that can be made piecemeal. The Oedipal complex is not "true" or "false," it describes the universal process of socialization that children enter into (even Aristotle said somewhere, that children begin by calling all men "dad" and all women "mom," until they learn to differentiate via naming). But the various conditions of the Oedipal complex are diverse: it boils down to, in the end, not the simple conventional "mommy, daddy, me," but a triadic formulation: the child only understands themselves as individual, insofar as they have lost the mother's affection (i.e. they're being weaned), and thereby gains an object of desire (originally, the love of the mother) which is always already lost, and a process whereby they can return to a state of pre-subjectivity i.e. where their desires would have always already been fulfilled; a return to a position whereby that affection (of the mother) can be returned, by assuming the role of whatever it is that took the object of desire away, in order to get it back, thereby gaining subjectivity in seeing themselves as that which they desire to replace. This is termed identification, which is a repression of that drive towards pre-subjectivity, a drive which Freud entitles the "death drive." For Freud, there is always something that precedes all theorizing or origination, some excess towards which desire aims--towards, precisely, a state before desiring itself--but which it never fulfills. The Oedipal triad, therefore, is the first and most basic articulation of this drive towards death in its social function, even if it is made particular for the time and place where Freud lived, it is necessary as a part within the larger system: a part which relies on the regular function of others, like the death drive, like repression, like the unconscious. Each part of the system is defined in relation to all the others, and defined in relation to its appearance in a symbolic system and its authorization at the level of discourse; that is, at the level at which one speaks, since it is only within symbolic exchange that one first enters into a social world. One gains language through the word "mama," not because mama, the most basic, repetitive sound that any child can make, has any significance, but because the very appearance of a word that has come in place of the "actual" object of desire implies an infinite separation already from that object in its full sensuous reality: the object, once announced, is already lost, on account of the fact that it can be announced as separate from the very thing it supposedly describes. And from then on, the child is "castrated," i.e. cut off from the source of pleasure through their very entrance into the world of symbolic structures; through, more simply put, their entrance into language. This implicates all other systems of thought, giving to all other discourses a biological, material explanation for the formation of language itself, but one which is always permanently separated from the very biological origin by that very excess towards which it aims--the drive towards death, which, for Freud, always points to a pre-animated, pre-vivified world. A world before language and the psyche that would come to describe it. So that the materiality, and the relation to the material world of every discourse, is always established as a permanent site of loss, to which (very fortunately for itself) psychoanalysis always has a method to prepare a way forward despite this loss, through the rigorous analysis of its own development.

ajkjk 3y ago
Pretty much totally disagree. You can take all the parts piecemeal. You can use the underlying concepts of his model without buying the dubious narrative of the Oedipus complex. And you can say there's something that "rings true" about the Oedipus complex without interpreting it as a literal predictive theory, aka, accept it in part while rejecting it in the whole. Easily. It's a model, and taking it piecemeal can consist either of borrowing its nouns without its story, or taking part of its story but saying it's not the full picture, or not completely right, etc.
qarl 3y ago
> I don't know how familiar you are with Freud, but it's not something that can be made piecemeal. Hm. That seems unlikely.
- bavent 3y ago
  Care to elaborate? A four-word rebuttal to a well-written, fairly detailed response doesn't really make your case for you.
  - qarl 3y ago
    Well - for one - I don't see at all how the well-written, fairly detailed response supports that initial claim. I feel like my four-word rebuttal has as much support as did his initial statement.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      I guess this is really four words: tl;dr
      - SubiculumCode 3y ago
        when it comes to Freud, I tend to keep it to four letters.
    - DiscourseFan 3y ago

thfuran 3y ago

>there's clearly something true about it. It's not all true, not even close, and as a predictive model it is extremely weak; the ways it's not true is really important In what way is it clear that there's something true there?

ajkjk 3y ago
A lot of his basic ideas are so enmeshed into our public conception of how people work that we don't even realize they come from him, the main example being the basic ideas of "subconsciousness" and "repression". The interpretation of dreams stuff is definitely not as predictive as he claimed, but it's definitely got something to it; compared to "thinking dreams are random and meaningless" it's definitely a better theory to guess that they involve repressed stuff. Etc.
qarl 3y ago
I don't know much about Freud and his theories - but as one example - I'd say that his concept of defense mechanisms seems pretty spot on. The last few years have given us many examples of psychological projection.

hyperthesis 3y ago

It's not falsifiable. Some things, e.g. id/ego/super-ego seem truish, but only because they package up already accepted things. It's like a "theory" in the Arts: a way of thinking, of analysing, a framework. It's neither true nor false, but may be convenient terminology.

PheonixPharts 3y ago
> It's not falsifiable. Neither is Popper's Falsification Theory. The only thing that pointing this out demonstrates is that a theory does not fit under Popper's specific definition of normative science... which in the philosophy of science itself is not held in particularly high regard. So what you're basically pointing out is that, according to one very specific philosopher of science, Freud is more philosophy than he is normative science. Which is something that I think virtually all advocates of Freud would uncontroversially agree with.
- throw310822 3y ago
  > Neither is Popper's Falsification Theory. Sounds perfectly falsifiable to me: you just need to show a well accepted scientific theory that cannot be falsified even in principle. However, Popper's seems more a principle or a criterion than a theory. By which I mean, you're free to refuse it and incorporate any amount of non-falsifiable statements in your "science". I just suspect it won't have much predictive power.
- tnecniv 3y ago
  What makes his theory non-falsifiable?
skim_milk 3y ago
The problem with this philosophy is that we have brain scan studies, phylogenetic, developmental, neuroscience, and thousands of pages from established experts on psychology that document these three systems of learning and memory. Who give a hoot we live in Descartes' demon and anything could be not real? The elephant is in the room. Id/ego/superego is clearly a thing, either that or you're not familiar with the field, or you're not living in shared reality! Malignant egalitarians who think everyone's opinions are just should really learn to push back harder on things that have, like, one in a trillion odds on being false. The only thing up for debate are the definitions, functions, and boundaries of these three.