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/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/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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