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FiestaBeans t1_iwmw1hp wrote

I seem to be missing something. It doesn't look like they tested anything close to his theory at all. For the record, I'm not a fan of Freud, nor do I have any opinion about whether his wrecked by success theory is true, but Freud seems to believe that people who work exceptionally hard to achieve a goal fall into depression and a bad mental state after achieving that goal.

But in the study, it seems to suggest that they tested how healthy particularly talented people are based on a much broader definition of success, not the achievement of a specific goal.

"Freud gave several examples to illustrate his claim: A woman falling to mental illness after succeeding in a long struggle to become the legal wife of her partner; an academic who struggled for many years to take his mentor’s post after mentor’s retirement, only to lose confidence in own abilities and fall to depression after achieving this goal."

"To test for the existence of the “wrecked-by-success” phenomenon, Harrison J. Kell and his colleagues conducted two studies. In the first study they analyzed data on the three most talented cohorts from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth..

The aim of the second study was to test the findings of the first study on a group consisting of 714 elite STEM doctoral students in 1992, with equal numbers of men and women...

In both studies, researchers asked participants about their income and to complete assessments of their physical and mental health conditions, psychological adjustment and health, attitude towards aging, relationships and family, and health behaviors (sleep, alcohol use, smoking and exercise). Participants were divided into two groups based on their income. 25% participants with highest income were considered the exceptionally successful group, while the remaining 75% of participants were considered less successful."

I think that what Freud is talking about is the let-down after achieving a particularly difficult goal--not about people who are successful relative to their peers after a long career in which they exert effort that is within the range of normal for people of the same social class.

Post-race blues, the arrival fallacy / post-goal depression, and things like that would be a much better way to quantify what Freud was talking about.

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RemoveTheSplinter t1_iwnhc1f wrote

This. And it’s supported by that dopamine depletion thing that Andrew Huberman is always going on about.

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nekogatonyan t1_iwnp6f9 wrote

>I think that what Freud is talking about is the let-down after achieving a particularly difficult goal--not about people who are successful relative to their peers after a long career in which they exert effort that is within the range of normal for people of the same social class.

I was thinking of it in terms of stress. Everything you cited, from a woman trying to get married and an academic getting a bigger job, these are major life events. We know all major life events, good and bad, are stressful and the more stressful events we experience within a year, the more likely we are to end up sick. The human body can only deal with so much stress before it begins to break down.

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Iperovic t1_iwpm29g wrote

You mean to tell me someone went out and funneled evidence that fits their own hypothesis, narrowing research down to a small and controlled focus group, then put a historic name in the title for clickbait?

That's nEvEr been done before, especially not in social sciences

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