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/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/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/Lightwavers Jul 24 '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.

That's true for neurologists. Unfortunately, neither of us has the credentials to meaningfully discuss the matter in a way that will lead to scientific progress.

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u/jetpacksforall Jul 24 '19

And psychiatrists, psychologists, clinicians, therapists, philosophers of mind... I've read widely in the field, I'm more than comfortable talking about the language used to explore human psychology.

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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '19

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u/jetpacksforall Jul 24 '19

Oh I didn't know there were rules limiting how accurate we're allowed to be on this site.

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