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FiestaBeans t1_iwmw8y9 wrote

Reply to comment by egregiouscodswallop in New psychology research rebuts Sigmund Freud's "wrecked by success" hypothesis: People with exceptionally successful careers tend to be healthier than their less successful peers by HeinieKaboobler

If you read his examples, he wasn't talking about lack of health of successful people, but the let-down he observed in some individuals after they achieved a particularly arduous goal. Because of how we use the word "success" nowadays, I wonder if a better translation of what he said would be "wrecked by achieving a goal".

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bigfor4 t1_iwnehz3 wrote

“we have refuted Freud” actually just refutes their misinterpretation of Freud Why is this so common?

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Alrik t1_iwny1hf wrote

I am a former attorney.

I also taught undergraduate journalism at an R1 university.

Gave my students an article about legal research that mentioned how sometimes desirable documents will be unavailable because they are privileged.

My class could not move beyond a massive argument about how privilege is openly favored in the court system. This continued even after I stopped to explain that "privileged" in this context is a legal term meaning someone holds a right to prevent their disclosure.

Nope. It continually and repeatedly devolved until I declared that we would be getting a new article to read, whereupon the students still complained that I gave them such an openly classist and outdated article.

So yeah, I absolutely believe that modern researchers are unable to compartmentalize their understanding of things so as to fit the context.

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FiestaBeans t1_iwnmjnn wrote

Based on my experience in industry:

- People don't have great reading skills

- Critical thinking is rare (many people who make it into advanced fields do so by following instructions, not by questioning assumptions)

- Groupthink is common, especially in academia. One person suggests a study, gets approval and sponsorship, and nobody can question it from then on.

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HouseOfSteak t1_iwpgzeg wrote

Where is groupthink less common? One might expect that it should be less common in academia and be disappointed that it isn't and thus percieve a greater amount due to the discrepency between expectations and reality, but I'm not getting any ideas that others are faring particularly better.

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The-Magic-Sword t1_iwnlkyg wrote

Because modern psychology was founded on a rejection of psychotherapy (which Freud was a big part of) but the psychology that replaced it is now also having massive issues, and because the discipline was founded on that stance, people didn't learn Freud so much as they learned a caricature of Freud.

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Senecatwo t1_iwnpa19 wrote

On top of that, it's uncomfortable to confront childhood traumas, primitive power dynamics, and sexual neuroses. Maybe for some people its a defensive reaction formation to discredit the idea of an unconscious mind or unconscious motivations for certain patterns of behavior to avoid being triggered into a confrontation with complex internal emotions.

Likewise if you had a relatively stable upbringing without any obvious dysfunction much of the material he brings up would just range from perverse to fantastical in how it must sound on its face.

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The-Magic-Sword t1_iwnqysv wrote

There is a very very interesting dynamic in why modern psychology has been so fascinated with the chemical theory of depression and CBT. They 'sound' right and comfortable and dignified. There's something to be said for respectability politics in psychology.

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HouseOfSteak t1_iwphbl1 wrote

Because language evolved and we're getting different meanings off of what someone wrote over 80 years ago?

Without a proper primer on the meanings of very important terms and the differences in their definitions from 80 years ago and now, it's no surprise that people would naturally come to the wrong conclusions despite making no errors.

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bigfor4 t1_iwrcmpj wrote

You assume a thorough or good-faith reading of the material when it hasn’t been demonstrated at all. You know that when you adjusted for differences in spelling court testimony form 400 years ago is just modern English? The KJV and Shakespeare leave a false impression on readers, they intentionally used already archaic language to give an impression to readers and listeners that they they were taking in something high brow. They effectively were using archaic English to model the difference between say contemporary Latin and classic Latin.

I really don’t think English or German has changed so much in the past 80 years that the excuse for the researchers is they couldn’t parse it’s actual meaning.

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HouseOfSteak t1_iws5sx6 wrote

I'm not actually assuming that. I figured you meant 'so common' as 'regular people who read a thing and don't put much effort into it', or 'first-year philosophy students that think they know more than they do', as opposed to referring to researchers who supposedly should know what they're doing.

There was a comment somewhere in this post about how an entire class decided to argue about 'privileged' and class, when the entire hold-up was a misunderstanding of the word 'privileged' in a court room setting. I'm pulling this from memory from hours ago since I can't find the original comment.

I figured you were referring to something like that.

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batiste t1_iwnjuev wrote

Ha yes the grand Master can never be wrong. Karl Popper explained it well!

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abagofdicks t1_iwn7ebn wrote

Yeah I’ve always interpreted it that way. It’s like how people get rich and bored. Musicians finally get the gigs and they lose interest.

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Protean_Protein t1_iwn3sxy wrote

Wrecked by excellence.

Or as Michael Hutchence of INXS once put it: “elegantly wasted”.

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FiestaBeans t1_iwn6lnm wrote

Who am I to argue with Michael Hutchence, but I think the fame and achievement of that is more what Freud would have identified as the success of concern in his case. Not just being extremely talented.

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rarokammaro t1_iwnusra wrote

Don’t pull all of your goal eggs into one basket. It’s the fast track to losing purpose and meaning.

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