Submitted by thelivingphilosophy t3_109zihx in philosophy
And here I thought Sigmund Freud was the “Father of Psychoanalysis.” Author maybe needs a different title to bestow on Nietzsche. Also didn’t realize that Nietzsche predates Freud by such a wide margin.
I haven't really read anything by Freud, but I'm a fan of Nietzsche. I've heard in a few lectures that some of Freud's ideas bear a strong resemblance to those of Nietzsche, but that he denied having read him.
Interestingly, this article seems to corroborate this, and further suggests that he was intentionally lying. Maybe he should share the title a little.
That is interesting. I was a psychology major, so I’m more familiar with Freud than Nietzsche. Didn’t realize he predated Freud by decades!
Haha and I studied philosophy but not psychology! (Okay it was just a minor, but I focused on the classics and German existentialism).
Fun crossover episode we just had.
Right? It’s neat to see the other side of the coin.
Didn't realize there were psych departments still giving air to that old fraud.
Well to be fair I graduated a few years back. And most of what was covered on Freud was general history of psychology and references to general theories.
Fairish enough.
(and now that I think to it, even in my department they actually have a dedicated track for "diehard admirers" tbhh)
Can I ask what is the problem with him? Is his work not at least as worth study as that of other thinkers who did or believed terrible things, but who have nonetheless been widely influential to our world and intellectual history?
EDIT: Genuine question, I am not trying to bait anyone or debate cancel culture, I am just curious about your take.
The question was legitimate, your edit sounds actually way more worrisome if any...
Anyhow, the problem is both that he was an absolutely poor scholar, if not even a liar, and that the crap he was pushing was contrivedly bigot (for as much as, I guess it wasn't particularly more than the average guy of the time).
https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/liu10/files/2010/08/KPopper_Falsification.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Freud_Was_Wrong
Perhaps you can credit him for being enough of a successful snakeoil salesman (with all its flashy sexualized everything) to break certain taboos of the day around mental health. Which is.. mhh, kinda positive I guess?
But everything else was just psychobabble. His fame basically halved the psychological knowledge production for 70% of a century, and especially in a philosophical sub his name should be proscribed except to underline how science doesn't work and shouldn't happen.
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Do we not still use the concept of the id, superego and ego?
Those have bore out over and over in and outside of psychoanalytic theory. I just love how everybody has been jumping on the anti-Freud bandwagon for the last 30'40, years it's really laughable.
I'm so disappointed in the field that I wanted so to enter. It's obviously now driven by social trends and political party subgroups. Very sad.
> Do we not still use the concept of the id, superego and ego?
No. The modern consensus in psychology absolutely does not support in any way, the existence of an ID, Ego, or Superego.
I'm pretty sure the previous poster made it clear that the concept of these is so ingrained now in the modern thinking of psychology that we don't even recognize that anymore. The concept of the three actually exist not only Within the ideas of psychoanalysis but other treatment modalities as well. I remember my ex-husband in treatment coming home asking me about the" King baby" Id as was trying to be explained to him in substance abuse counseling. These were not trained psychologists they were treatment counselors.
Where is your evidence that these ideas are at all ingrained in modern psychology? 3 discrete parts of the subconscious, each with their own purpose in guiding your behavior sounds like a very specific hypothesis and I have never encountered any modern psychology who purports that there is any evidence of it.
>And these were not trained psychologists they were treatment counselors
You are missing the conclusion that they believed in this unsupported hypothesis because they are not actual psychologists. Why would I trust them to actually know real psychology if they aren’t even psychologists!
They were trained by psychologists, genius. 🙄
All's I did was Google personality theory and the first one that came up with psychoanalytic which does contain id ego and the superego so I think you're wrong 🤷♀️
How do you know they were trained by psychologists? All the psychologists I know, people who were actually working in scientific research, said that Freud was never that important to actual psychology and was always much more popular in the public consciousness. Wilhelm Wundt and William James are the early pioneers of scientific psychology.
And googling personality test is not a good way to judge the support of scientific theories, as anyone intelligent might tell you.
I didn't Google personality test I Googled personality theory.
I would suggest that you look up the required studies of a substance abuse counselor to answer your own question.
I believe I was discussing psychoanalytic theory as opposed to clinical research.
So are you denying that the concept of the ego, superego, and id are part of the mainstream modern thinking about personality?
> So are you denying that the concept of the ego, superego, and id are not part of the mainstream modern thinking about personality?
You have a double negative there, but yes, I am denying that modern psychology supports the hypothesis of an id, ego, or superego.
And I corrected prior to 3 minutes, how desperate are you to discredit rather than discuss?
Do you not get the very idea of a subconscious is due to Freud? Thanks for showing a perfect example of the modern psych student who tries to act like Freud wasn't a major part of the beginning of psychology.
It is absolutely amazing that you are both engaging in ad hominem attacks in the Philosophy subreddit, and also seem to think that Freud was the originator of the subconscious/unconscious. He was not, which a cursory google search, which you apparently use to judge the validity of scientific theories, would show you.
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OH AND FYI: SUBCONSCIOUS DOES NOT = UNCONSCIOUS- PSYCH 101.
> Do we not still use the concept of the id, superego and ego?
No, not even tangentially.
> I just love how everybody has been jumping on the anti-Freud bandwagon for the last 30'40, years it's really laughable.
It's really laughable that it took so long for the cognitive revolution to spread.
> I'm so disappointed in the field that I wanted so to enter. It's obviously now driven by social trends and political party subgroups.
You meant peer-review, reproducibility and statistical rigour, dude. Wtf.
wtf is right. Black and white thinking is the curse of this time.
Do they not teach now that Research and Psychology are different than counseling and talk therapy? Different treatments, different environments for treatments... ignorance abounds, per usual. Treatments vs theory and self report "science"?
YMMV and wokism won't heal your mind, tbh.
> Do they not teach now that Research and Psychology are different than counseling and talk therapy?
Clinical psychology is and must be based on proper research...
Nobody said that you must tell patients to evaluate their life through a chi-squared test
> Different treatments, different environments for treatments... ignorance abounds, per usual.
That's why you must be accurate.
No goddamn single case studies in a private setting, which.. uh, a single person can fake and call it a day for half a century.
> YMMV and wokism won't heal your mind, tbh.
Wtf^2
I studied psychology a couple of decades back that was still after the book, why freud was wrong.
Many things by freud are still used and accepted, it's not because a lot of his work is debatable or even plain wrong that he didn't lay the groundwork for psychology in general and that he had a major influenece that is still in effect in various fields.
The concept of the id is something that never really went away, and same thing for the ego and its defense mechanisms.
Or the subconscious mind? or traumatic repression?
Misleading and bad beyond belief.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind#Controversy_and_criticism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressed_memory
There are probably thousands of people that were persecuted over this bullshit concept.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind#Controversy_and_criticism
People disagreed, sure, but who's model of the unconscious are you familiar with? Jung's or Franz Brentano's? How often have you seen the idea of the collective unconscious pop up in pop culture?
>There are probably thousands of people that were persecuted over this bullshit concept.
Remember that Freud originally said his patients were likely being molested by their parents, and was forced to walk back those comments after a large amount of public outcry. Also, remember that he was one of the first psychiatrists to renounce the his own sexual fantasy root cause theory in 1905, a good 75 years ahead of the rest of the world.
> People disagreed, sure, but who's model of the unconscious are you familiar with? Jung's or Franz Brentano's?
None of them?
Most educated people today follow Kahneman's dual process theory if any.
But my point was more like the absolute roundabouts that researchers and therapists have to go, because "unconscious" has become an absolutely deleterious concept with no possibility of redeem.
> How often have you seen the idea of the collective unconscious pop up in pop culture?
Jesus F. Christ man. Where in the hell do you think you are? Dr. Oz's den or a somewhat professional sub?
> Remember that Freud originally said his patients were likely being molested by their parents, and was forced to walk back those comments after a large amount of public outcry.
Remember also how there's no damn standard except "anything goes" and everything and its opposite can still be true anyway.
> to renounce the his own sexual fantasy root cause theory
I think you are missing some part of the sentence there...
Thank you!
Everything Freud and Jung got right has been so thoroughly ingrained into modern thought that all we ascribe directly to them now is their failures
Excellent point!
Freud used the term unconscious mind, and thought it functioned in specific ways that modern psychology does not support. And to my knowledge, modern psychology does not support traumatic repression either.
wow ideas evolve over time? no way!
He is no fraud, you just haven't read him!
Remember that Lou-Andreas Salome was a dear friend to Freud and that he had a lot of respect for her, so it is very evident why many of Nietzsche's ideas are in Freud's works.
No doubt and you know what reading Nietzche does to you and can imagine what knowing him intimately would be such an eyeopening; thus her not speaking of any of this to Freud is naive. And so is thinking Freud didnt read Nietzche.
Schopenhauer is another very very similar author to Freud.
Nietsche literally psychoanalyzed himself to death and, strangely, his father seemed to have also. Freud brought similar ideas to clinical psychology (as far as I know), I also don’t believe for a second Freud wasn’t fully aware of Nietzche’s teachings.
No, not literally.
Worth noting it wasn't until Bernays utilized some of Freud's concepts to revolutionize advertising on a social conscious level. He's slimy.
> and further suggests that he was intentionally lying
Like when he was "curing" those women.
I don’t think so. Freud was so much about repression being the root of neurosis. He was for more unbridled expression, more decadence.
Repression is also necessary for the development of culture and art. Repression for Freud wasn’t a good or bad thing, just a psychological phenomenon that could be harmful in certain cases.
e: my tired mind confused repression with instinctual renunciation, sorry!
That's sublimation
Yeah, I’m quite embarrassed for past me. I somehow inserted repression into this passage from The Lacanian Subject by Bruce Fink:
>Freud talks about that loss [of juissance] in terms of “instinctual renunciation” that he considered necessary for all cultural achievement.
Apologies!
In Freud’s terminology what you’re referring to is suppression, which is a conscious decision to compartmentalize in order to achieve specific goals. The psychological profile of Neitzsche would have given Freud a lot to work with, and I don’t think there are many affinities. Their approach to libido, for example, is completely opposite.
Nietzsche is so fundamental to Freud that he routinely lied about never having read Nietzsche because he was scared of finding his theories already present in N's work (which is somewhat true).
Yeah. Another redditor linked an article and just the abstract was illuminating. I had no idea…
Schopenhauer predates both of them, to be honest. Nietzsches draws a lot of his psychology—in particular his theory of drives—directly from Schopenhauer. And a lot of the concepts that both Nietzsche and Freud elucidate, such as repression and rationalisation, are found—albeit to a lesser developed extent—in Schopenhauers works. Not to speak that Freud borrows his theory of sex from Schopenhauer and develops it further.
Thank you. 🏅
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