We have no free will, according to a scientist.

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By their fruits how they make you feel you shall know them.

I actually agree with you on all this... and I think I was quick to make a hasty judgement there. I can be arrogant too lol

I can also be guilty of those sins. I guess it's natural when strong emotions are involved. And this is the Politics, Philosophy and Religion section, full of thorny issues.

Freud was a clinician who used the scientific method to make careful observations to formulate his theories, While his theories have poor external validity, psychoanalysis is actually as effective as any other psychotherapy subsequently developed in the 20th century (e,g, CBT). While people might not like him, his contribution to psychology and human behaviour has been enormous.

Very poor science, if it could be called science at all. Tiny numbers of observations on a non-representative sample, highly imaginative and sweeping conclusions with little or no objective impartial testing, a dogged insistence that he was always right. He labelled his critics antisemitic or diagnosed them with conditions he had invented. It was more like a religion than a science.
https://www.livescience.com/why-freud-was-wrong.html
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/ ... ces.gender

Psychology/Psychiatry do not adhere solely to quantitative methodology. Many therapies used today are sourced from observation and qualitative feedback. The qualitative field is nowadays on a equal footing with quantitative in psychology, Freud's methodology was mainly criticised because the unconscious mind resists replicability and external validity, But the proof of the pudding is psychoanalytic therapy (developed by Freud) works and is just as good as CBT or other clinicallly "gold standard" methods

Freud is not a god, he is human and probably (for his time) a product of his environment. Antisemitism was a huge problem in Vienna where he worked and was a prelude to the later rise of Nazism which took over Austria.
As to whether he spuriously labelled people with false diagnoses, perhaps he was also spiteful. But this is his own foibles as a person, I am not sure it automatically invalidates his research which he built up from numerous case studies.

^
Well, I agree that although I think Freud's science was feeble, some of his assertions ring eerily true. Even a profound faker sometimes tells the truth. He was more of an ideas machine than a scientist, and as such he generated many theories that may be worth testing, if they're concrete enough to be tested at all. It's probably true that modern psychology and psychiatry isn't much better than Freud, but that doesn't mean Freud is good, it just means modern psych theory and methods are often as bad. I agree that antisemitism was a problem in Vienna in Freud's day, and the Nazis would probably have killed him if he hadn't moved to London. So very likely his playing of the antisemitism card was sometimes valid.

I think he was to a degree correct in his belief that a lot of the psychological problems in Victorian middle-class Vienna were down to their strong taboos on sexuality, and making that assertion was bound to provoke a backlash, but I think that unfortunately he took it too far and claimed that practically every aspect of madness has its roots in sexual maladjustment to impossible sexual taboos. He took a lot of things too far, including, in "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life" his suggestion that every mistake made is a Freudian slip driven by unconscious motivation. Not so.

On a less serious note, you'd probably have to be British, or better still, Scottish, to understand this criticism:
"The trouble with Freud is that he never had to play the old Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic had both lost." - Ken Dodd (British comedian).

One thing I know Freud got right is the concept of 'id'.

You essentially have two brains (at least two but in this case these are the most important), one in your skull, one at the base of your spine. It's not a haha - thinking with my brain vs. my dick, it's built in such a way where if you sever your spine you can still procreate and I'm literally talking about the base of the spine not what's out front. It's also a part of you where if you shut it out the odds of ending up in crippling depression, anxiety, having your health get worse (and obviously - looking weak to others in such ways where your life rains glass on you because you look like you lack confidence means that you'll be in a societal punishment spiral, your health will get beaten out of your by bad employers, etc. etc.). I

It's something you're forced into an uneasy relationship with because if it takes things too far your probably in prison or people are getting letters in the mail if you move to their area, have it too tamed and you'll either be incel or incel-adjacent, thus you're constantly metering your boundaries with it but forced to comply with it enough not to have your power capped and withdrawn.

I agree that there's unconscious processing - for one thing I've noticed its results many times in myself - but I don't particularly assign its discovery to Freud because it was a known thing both during and way before Freud's lifetime. Frankly no great usefulness for his particular, elaborated model of the mind has to date come to my attention.

^ This is correct but it misses an important point that Freud's reputation to his colleagues in the medical field mean't that investigating psychoanalysis risked the ire of the medical fraternity and exclusion/ostracism. Unfortunately Freud's successor was Carl Jung (who was famous in his own right) who took unconscious processing in a direction that forever tarnished the field. I imagine talking about the unconscious would not be unlike talking about UAPs today.

Modern medicine relies too heavily on the biomedical model and Freud's work (had it been worked on and improved) would have revealed insights into unconscious drivers of behaviour from childhood into adulthood including how it affects mental health and wellbeing.

We are literally walking programs of unconscious drivers that predetermine all of our conscious thoughts and behaviours. A great analogy is the iceberg. Our conscious mind is only the tip of the iceberg whereas the large volume of ice (the unconscious) remains hidden from view.

This gets back to free will. A lot of our experiences in childhood determine how we behave today without us realising. As opposed to free will there is an element of the brain being pre-wired to respond in a predetermined way. Freud was on the right track.

I wasn't talking about 'subconscious' in general but something very specific / particular that's well described by 'id'.

Jung has similar value in terms of the concepts of archetypes and hidden complexes just that I personally have a difficult time separating id from anima other than modern Jungians like Steve and Pauline Richards specifying that anima is the relating function.

Neither were perfect, neither would have passed today's scientific rigor at least with how they present things, both did have ideas that are still found useful today.

You seem to be saying that the medical profession at the time had it in for Freud and for anybody else in the medical profession who looked into psychoanalysis. I neither agree nor disagree with that. I don't quite understand its relevence to what I said, or in what sense I missed anything.


Freud had plenty of influence in the USA for a time. If his work was a particularly good starting point for something better, wouldn't it already have happened?


Certainly a lot of our motivations are unconsciously driven. But was that particularly a discovery of Freud's?


Of course it's important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, and Freud had so many ideas that it's unlikely they were all complete rubbish. But the notion that free will doesn't exist can be arrived at by many routes other than by studying Freud, the simplest to me being the one I described on page 2 of this thread, i.e.:
"the positions, velocities, etc. of every particle in the universe depends on their prior positions, velocities, etc. This is governed by the known and unknown laws of the universe. Extend that idea backwards and forwards, and we see a universe that was always going to do what it's doing. Thus we are passive cogs in the machine, incapable of free will.".

Well, the "id" may work for you, but not particularly well for me. I'm happy enough with the notion of unconscious motivation. As for Jung, I don't think I've ever understood a word of the stuff by him that I've seen.

Some people's stuff just doesn't readily map onto what I already know, and as such it tends to be inaccessible to me. Freud talks my language in his more populist writings, but his other stuff, not so much. Not that I agree with very many of his assertions. Jung, on the other hand, is Greek to me. As such, I can neither agree or disagree with him, it's just a strange noise, and I guess I'll never know whether I'm missing anything of value or not. I gather that for a relatively vernacular person to understand certain esoteric authors, it's necessary to get hold of a "reader," i.e. a book by somebody who takes the trouble to express the ideas in plain English.

Maybe it's possible that human nervous systems are this profoundly different. I say that because I'm not talking about postulates that I find intellectually stimulating, I'm talking about things I've directly experienced. It would be a profound realization if it came down to specific neurotypes having specific internal experiences and different kinds of subconscious objects.

Yes, Freud's theories run parallel to other forms of evidence. it's fascinating how some behaviours manifest, A microbiologist I used to work with several decades ago was compulsive about washing her hands in a particular way. She told me at the time it was amusing how childcare would ring her that her 4 year old was washing her hands at kindergarden in a vigorous manner that scared the other kids. The little girl was simply imitating her mother.

Fast forward to last year and the now 34 year old daughter still washes her hands in the same way (according to her mother), Whats interesting is the daughter has no idea she washes her hands in a strange manner and has no memory of why she washes her hands that way.