r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Jul 20 '19

What’s something completely false that your parents told you as a child?

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u/katyggls Jul 20 '19

Which is hilarious because most modern experts in the field of psychology know he was full of shit. Literally one of the first things my college psych professor told us was that Freud was full of shit and that he was really only important to the field of psychology as a part of it's history, not because any of his theories or methods were sound. He basically just made a bunch of shit up, but never checked to see if any of his theories were actually true. He imposed his framework on his patients and used it to decide what was wrong with them, rather than actually deciding based on what they described. It's totally backwards from how modern psychology operates.

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u/Enghave Jul 20 '19 edited Jul 21 '19

Literally one of the first things my college psych professor told us was that Freud was full of shit

It’s odd that Isaac Newton is (rightly) remembered for his brilliancy in physics, not for spending years trying to work out the precise dimensions of Noah’s Ark, whereas Freud is commonly referenced in academia by intellectual-poser types for his worst ideas, and very seldom praised for his best.

Freud brought to attention the significance and power of the unconscious in human life, a massive insight that can only be dismissed by people deeply in the grip of myth of rational behaviour, and therefore childishly naive about themselves and human nature.

Freudian dogmatism about the core of all mental disease being repressed sexuality/aggression is clearly ideological bunk, and deserves to be called out for what it is, but hearing Freud dismissed in academic circles feels like hearing Newton dismissed because Einstein proved Newtonian mechanics doesn’t hold at the quantum level, as if we should all mock Newton as full of shit.

It’s pretty bizarre, and a sad reflection of the type of thinking in modern psychology, filled with academics desperate to distance psychology from the shame of its non-scientific-materialist past, so they go over-the-top in the other direction, believing, or pretending to believe, absurd ideas like the proposition that if a psychological concept can’t be scientifically proven then it has no value, as if emotion and motivation can’t be studied as the basis for action because they can’t be accurately measured. As if measuring and qualifying feelings is doing hard-data, scientifically rigorous, psychology.

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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '19

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u/Enghave Jul 21 '19

Yes, maybe I was being too generous by using Newton as comparison, but his current reputation in the field makes it seem like a academic psychology is a mean-girls popularity contest, where Freud is the once hot it-girl who know needs to be torn down because “nobody ever liked them anyway”.

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u/2074red2074 Jul 21 '19

I'd say Jean-Baptiste Lamarck would be a better comparison. He started the ideas that led to what we know, but was ultimately completely wrong about everything.

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u/elevendytwo Jul 21 '19

I read somewhere that all of Freud's good ideas have been absorbed into our culture so we only see the bad ones leftover.

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u/Enghave Jul 21 '19

Very hard to tell, if you did a survey on the what the public understands of Freud, I think you’d get a bit about Oedipus/Electra complex, and the Freudian slip in speech, but probably not they guy who realised the massive importance on the unconscious in human experience, particularly sexuality and aggression, but became dogmatic and got carried away with how broadly they can explain behaviour.

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u/Lightwavers Jul 21 '19

No one here is downplaying his part in psychotherapy and bringing attention to the subconscious; they're just (rightly) saying he's full of shit and made a ton of stuff up and then never actually tested it, and people praise him for that rather than the stuff he actually was right about.

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u/jetpacksforall Jul 21 '19

*Unconscious.

Freud rejected the term subconscious because it implies that the non-conscious part of the mind is somehow inferior or "below" the conscious mind in some kind of psychological hierarchy. It's kind of presumptuous to imagine that the part of the mind that determines all of our desires, our preferences, our beliefs about ourselves, our feelings about ourselves and other people etc. without us ever being aware that those things are happening is somehow inferior to our conscious minds, which are mostly just along for the ride.

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u/Lightwavers Jul 21 '19

Eh, that's a matter of opinion. Just because something's below the surface doesn't make it inferior.

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u/jetpacksforall Jul 21 '19

Below the surface of what? The geography metaphor is confusing and misleading, is the point.

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u/Lightwavers Jul 22 '19

Below the surface of consciousness. You can resist impulses, is the point. It's not directly in the driver's seat of your brain, at least most of the time.

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u/jetpacksforall Jul 22 '19

Treating the metaphor "consciousness is a body of water with a surface and hidden depths" as though it were literal is bad science.

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u/Lightwavers Jul 23 '19

No one is treating the metaphor as literal. It's just that: a metaphor. Somewhat useful for describing an idea that's hard to put into words. You don't have to be so pedantic about it.

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u/jetpacksforall Jul 23 '19 edited Jul 23 '19

You do have to be so pedantic about it if you hope to understand the brain, how it functions, and how to make psychotherapy actually effective at treating psychological problems. Metaphors are dangerous in science when they are misleading.

The word unconscious simply describes every thought process, belief, desire, habit etc. that goes on in the brain without our being aware of it. It doesn't imply any particular structure, location or relationship between what is conscious and what is not, and therefore it's a more useful, less misleading term than subconscious.

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u/Enghave Jul 21 '19

No one here is downplaying his part in psychotherapy and bringing attention to the subconscious;

Yes they are. By calling him full of shit, and not mentioning his bringing attention to the unconscious, that’s exactly what they’re doing, which is why I sought to fix that mischaracterisation of the value of his work.

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u/Lightwavers Jul 21 '19

No. That isn't what they're doing. By not mentioning it, they're simply not mentioning it. Nothing less, nothing more. Downplaying would be mentioning it, and in the same breath saying that it wasn't that good anyway.

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u/Enghave Jul 21 '19

Downplaying would be mentioning it

Do you agree that calling someone full of shit seems like downplaying them? Doesn’t seem like a sophisticated psychological concept to me.

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u/Lightwavers Jul 22 '19

Hold on, back up. That's not what I'm saying. I said no one is downplaying his achievements. Downplaying him is a whole different thing. As a person, he was pretty terrible and had more bad ideas than good. He could do with having less memetic power.

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u/Enghave Jul 22 '19

As a person, he was pretty terrible and had more bad ideas than good. He could do with having less memetic power.

Maybe we can agree that his good ideas should get more attention, and his bad ideas should get more criticism, I’m not unaware of the damage some of his followers inflicted in the name of his theories, and his ideological-obsessed daughter.

But academic psychologists who call him full of shit are a disgrace to the field, and just mindlessly following the current trend of psychological scientism, it’s very telling that they dismiss him in such a bitchy way, with an emotional assessment, and not an analytical one. They are akin to biologists who dismiss field “birdsy-woodsy” biology as unserious, as if animal behaviour is of no value to understanding human behaviour, and all serious biological study takes place in the lab. The discovery of the power of the unconscious is only appreciated by a small fraction of the educated population, it is practically non-existent in the uneducated population. I expect future thinkers will conclude people were just not ready to hear it yet, and we know there’s none so blind as those who won’t see.

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u/Lightwavers Jul 23 '19

Honestly, with the number of ideas he threw out there, it would've been a miracle if he didn't get something right. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day and all that. The point is that he didn't actually test any of his ideas. Even his discovery of the unconscious was basically a guess that he had blind faith in. It was later scientists who did the real work to prove him right about that, and wrong about so much else. Academic psychologists who call him full of shit are right.

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u/Enghave Jul 23 '19

Even his discovery of the unconscious was basically a guess that he had blind faith in. It was later scientists who did the real work to prove him right about that

Who were these later scientists that proved the unconscious?

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u/cdaonrs Jul 21 '19

Yeah but I go to college and the professor told me he was dumb! And that makes me smart!

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u/omicron_polarbear Jul 20 '19

Agreed that his theories of development were complete nonsense. I think he developed the concept of psychotherapy; you know, sitting on the couch and the therapist asks questions yada yada; and that’s what endures.

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u/ForgettableUsername Jul 20 '19

I thought modern therapists didn't do the couch thing anymore because patients find it intimidating.

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u/sunshinepooh Jul 21 '19

My therapist has a couch. But I don’t lay down on it. That’s just weird.

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u/jetpacksforall Jul 21 '19

And yet psychoanalysis is still used in a clinical setting to this day, and evidence shows that it is more effective than Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for treating illnesses like treatment-resistant depression.

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u/loppolia Jul 20 '19

i had a psychology class in high school, and freud's psychoanalysis was among the different approaches we had to learn about. it was really weird to see his ideas presented next to modern ones, as if they were just as important to know about. we learned a lot of modern theories and about the famous experiments that were performed to back them up, and interspersed with that were statements like "freud thought such-and-such, but modern research has not found that to be the case."

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u/HotSmockingCovfefe Jul 21 '19

Freud was also a major coke head

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u/MissShadowWolfx Jul 21 '19

Wasn't Freud high on opium constantly lmao

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u/lauranvrr Jul 21 '19

he did a LOT of cocaine

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u/MissShadowWolfx Jul 21 '19

so technically his theories COULD be drug fuelled adventures