4 ms·

Unfortunately for Freud, most of his best ideas/creations became so widely accepted people forgot he was the one who had them in the first place. The unconscio

• DeathArrow 3y ago
  I thought psychiatry is a branch of medicine. And medicine should be based on science. None of Freuds ideas seems to be based on science.
  • lelanthran 3y ago
    > I thought psychiatry is a branch of medicine. And medicine should be based on science. None of Freuds ideas seems to be based on science. Psychiatry is a branch of medicine. Psychology isn't.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• ouraf 3y ago
  On one hand, society always had some puritan reflex reaction when talking about early childhood and psychosexual theories... Mixing sexuality and childhood feels wrong even on the most honest educational environments. On the other hand, Pavlov became famous for the positive reinforcement study he developed to optimize a brutal methodo to extract dog drool, but somehow the animal abuse part was mostly ignored for a long time. You can't choose what part of your work will become more popular or the most common association with your name...
• daynthelife 3y ago
  > It's like if all we remembered about Newton was alchemy. It’s ironic you say this. Like Freud, and unlike Newton, alchemists did not use scientific methodology. Also like Freud, alchemists get an unfair treatment by modern society, being remembered only for their mistakes. Medieval alchemists developed and refined distillation and crystallization, discovered acids and minerals, and developed metallurgy through the extraction of metals from ore. Just like psychology after Freud, the scientific field of chemistry grew rather naturally out of the advances made in alchemy.
• sonorous_sub 3y ago
  Considering the fact that he lifted the concept of the unconscious mind from Eduard von Hartmann, I’d say it’s just desserts. Maybe this time around the actual originator of the idea will get credit, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
• dang 3y ago
  Yes, he's the water we're swimming in. Here's an example I've been wondering about for years: Freud taught that early childhood experience has a profound impact on adult life. Did anyone have this perspective before Freud? Was there a precedent? If I think of literary depictions of childhood in the 19th century, for example in Dickens, there can be great pathos, but not a psychological awareness of the consequences. This emphasis on early childhood experience is tectonic in Western culture and we still haven't caught up to it in practice. If it really was Freud's contribution, that alone makes him great. Another dimension of Freud is that he was a taboo-breaker, and in that sense a heroic figure. Some of the steps he dared to take are still so out-there that they can't be openly discussed. That's pretty remarkable after a hundred years.
  • akerr 3y ago
    Societies have gone through waves of considering children. Proverbs 22:6 is a good example of how the Judeo-Christian worldview contrasted with those around, including regarding children: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.”
    • dang 3y ago
      (I see how my wording "early childhood experience has a profound impact on adult life" could lead to this association, but that was imprecision on my part.) Freud's insight wasn't about training children—it was about the psychological impact of early relational experience. What we now believe about developmental trauma, for example, or the idea that later relationships are patterned after what happened in one's family of origin—all of this, unless I'm mistaken, derives from Freud. As smeeth was pointing out, it's easy to see things that Freud got wrong, and not so easy to see what he got right, because they have become so foundational that even Freud's staunchest critics take them for granted.
  • thinkingemote 3y ago
    Most children didn't survive early childhood until very recently. Times were closer to Freud than we are to him now.
• skim_milk 3y ago
  [flagged]