Posted: Aug 16, 2018 3:32 pm
Jacques Lacan - Wikipedia -- "In 1951, Lacan started to hold a private weekly seminar in Paris, in which he urged what he described as "a return to Freud" that would concentrate on the linguistic nature of psychological symptomatology."
"Return to Freud"? That seems almost like a religion, with its returning to the revelations of the Prophet.
There is a certain Farsight who does physics like that, describing himself as going back to the original Einstein in relativity. His main arguments are not mathematical, but interpretations of quotes from Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Minkowski, Feynman, and others. Just like a theologian, it seems to me.
Freud&Pseudoscience--2007.pdf Interview with Frank Sulloway
FS started off by doing very detailed research into how Freud got his ideas, and he concluded that Freud was not the great discoverer that he was often viewed as being, and that he himself had claimed. A lot of his notions were just plain wrong.
FS notes that doing science is a two-step process: (1) generating hypotheses and (2) testing them. Freud was *very* good at (1) and a *massive* failure at (2).
He then notes psychoanalysts' mythmaking about the origins of psychoanalysis, trying to make it fit psychoanalysis itself.
He continues with describing how psychoanalysts had cut themselves off from mainstream medicine and psychology, creating their own training institutes and dismissing trainees' objections as "resistances". This started rather early, in the 1910's and 1920's.
He notes one of Freud's rather curious interpretations. A certain Clarence Oberndorf had a dream about driving a carriage pulled by a white horse and a black horse. Freud interpreted that dream as CO being ambivalent about whether he wanted to marry a white woman or a black woman. The two haggled about this interpretation, until Freud got fed up with CO's "resistances". FS claimed that that was rather typical.
Noting that psychoanalysis has an answer for just about *everything* psychological, FS concludes that it is not only pseudoscience, but also much like a religion.
It even has a sectarian sort of quality, with some of Freud's colleagues splitting from him and setting up their own schools, colleagues like Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung.
"Return to Freud"? That seems almost like a religion, with its returning to the revelations of the Prophet.
There is a certain Farsight who does physics like that, describing himself as going back to the original Einstein in relativity. His main arguments are not mathematical, but interpretations of quotes from Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Minkowski, Feynman, and others. Just like a theologian, it seems to me.
Freud&Pseudoscience--2007.pdf Interview with Frank Sulloway
FS started off by doing very detailed research into how Freud got his ideas, and he concluded that Freud was not the great discoverer that he was often viewed as being, and that he himself had claimed. A lot of his notions were just plain wrong.
FS notes that doing science is a two-step process: (1) generating hypotheses and (2) testing them. Freud was *very* good at (1) and a *massive* failure at (2).
He then notes psychoanalysts' mythmaking about the origins of psychoanalysis, trying to make it fit psychoanalysis itself.
He continues with describing how psychoanalysts had cut themselves off from mainstream medicine and psychology, creating their own training institutes and dismissing trainees' objections as "resistances". This started rather early, in the 1910's and 1920's.
He notes one of Freud's rather curious interpretations. A certain Clarence Oberndorf had a dream about driving a carriage pulled by a white horse and a black horse. Freud interpreted that dream as CO being ambivalent about whether he wanted to marry a white woman or a black woman. The two haggled about this interpretation, until Freud got fed up with CO's "resistances". FS claimed that that was rather typical.
Noting that psychoanalysis has an answer for just about *everything* psychological, FS concludes that it is not only pseudoscience, but also much like a religion.
It even has a sectarian sort of quality, with some of Freud's colleagues splitting from him and setting up their own schools, colleagues like Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung.