Bijou Drains
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TM – “I’m not following what any “Great Man” says. I’m going by my experience.
Your posts here, on the other hand, are full of academic terminology and names, as read in a book”I must admit I am “guilty” of reading books, how dreadful.
However my replies are also based on “my experience” of over 40 years of professional life of working therapeutically with some of the most challenging children and difficiult children in the North of England.
This work does not mean spending one hour a week with them in an ivory tower like Reich et al, but working directly with them day in day out 24 -7. My thoughts are based on that direct work as appled by the books and training I have undertaken.
I am, I admit, more regularly working in a more academic role, but I still get involved in direct work and in support work on a regular basis.
Wez,
Apologies for not getting back to this, I haven’t forgotten it and I’m not shirking the question, just it is a complex question and I want to set some time properly to answer with my thoughts. I will try to set a bit of time tomorrow. CheersThis is the same kind of proof by assertion, “physical exercises help loosen inhibitions and rigidity”. How? What evidence is there for that conclusion? Or is it as I said previously “The Great Man” making a statement.
It is about as much use as me saying “playing with a yo yo helps loosed inhibitions and rigidity”, typical Freudian mumbo jumbo.
You state that psychoanalysts take historical information into account. Practically all of the psychotherapeutic approaches use individual histories to assist people, not just psychoanalysis, Gestalt Approaches to psychotherapy, Transactional Analysis psychotherapy, Person Centred Approaches to psychotherapy, Dialectical Behavioural approaches, etc. etc. all progress from individual histories, that approach is not unique to psychoanalysis.
As to psychiatrists, like any other profession, there are some good ones and some bad ones
Really the term, outside of the rump of Freudians, neurosis is very rarely used. It isn’t used in the DSM or the ICD. Basically it means that a person has experienced stress and anxiety which has an impact on their development and personality. It is differentiated from organic issues in the brain. The key difference between neurosis and psychosis is that the person with neurosis maintains reality; where as the person with psychosis can lose reality (hallucination of various kinds, delusions, etc.) Psychosis is still used as part of diagnosis. Borderline Personality Disorder refers to a person having signs of psychosis and signs of neurosis.
It is fine for Reich to state that most children have a neurosis by the age of ten; it’s another thing for him to evidence this. Did he carry out a study? Did he have an appropriate sample? Did he match the sample to ensure no researcher bias?. No, it was just his view. Given that he was working as a psychiatrist it might be expected that he would see “neurosis” everywhere. Also, as the then use of the term “neurosis” was so loosely defined, what did he mean by the term anyway?
This is an example of how the Freudians end up having such a lot of loopy ideas. Basically the “great man” (Freud, Jung, Reich, or whoever), makes a statement (such as the one quoted about Reich) and then whatever horse shit the great man has spouted becomes the truth.
Chelmsford “If the practice of psychological investigation involves the observation of one’s own mental happenings, aren’t those happenings altered by the very act of observation? And isn’t this something that observation has to avoid to count as scientific?”
That is one of the major criticisms of reflective models of the mind, any reflection or analysis of what happened in our mind is by its very nature reconstructive. When I child does something “naughty” we say to the child “why did you do that” and the child responds “I don’t know” and then we say to the child “well, you must know”. But actually half of the time we don’t know why we do the things we do and when we reconstruct we tidy up the thoughts, add bits in, etc.
Part of the problem is that we tend to think in a mixture of different parts of the thought process, visual process, language, auditory thinking including noise, feelings, olfactory thinking and processing. However we nearly always explain our action through one modality language. Language is by its nature a representation of the thing not the thing itself. When we use language to say that we are bored/happy/angry, we are using a description of the feeling not the feeling itself. By its very nature the description must always be at least slightly inaccurate, therefore any recollection of events will be coloured by this inaccuracy.
Skinner and the classical behaviourists dismissed any form of attempt to gain insight to mental functions from recollection or commentary on description of mental events. They put forward the view that scientifically we can only describe behaviour from the point of view of the observer and any attempt to understand the internal mental activities would by definition be unscientific.
The classic refutation of how we need to take mental functions when we observe behaviour is by using a thought experiment.
In the thought experiment you imagine a group of Skinnerist psychologists carrying out an observation of motorist behaviour using traffic lights. By purely observing the behaviour and not trying to understand the internal motivation of the motorists, the Skinnerists would come to the conclusion that red light means stop, green light means go and amber light means speed up!
Wez – Do I think that the unconscious mind has an impact on our development of personality? I think that the sub conscious mind is also influencial (even though Freud did not use the term subconscious frequently and then only in German).
Is Freud’s model of the mind particularly useful in understanding it, absolutely no. Do I agree with the following concepts, the oedipus complex, the electra complex, the idea of penis envy, absolutely know.
I know that childhood events, including separation, trauma and loss are massively important in understanding the development of personality, cognition, language skills, sociability, physical growth, the immune system, etc.
Did some of Freud’s initial thoughts move the study forward to some extent, yes, but the development of Attachment Theory and the work of people like Bowlby, Rutter, Van Izendorn, Sagi, is far more important than the semi mystic ramblings of people like Freud, Jung, etc.
“Nobody is suggesting that Freud or Marcuse were correct in everything they said any more than Marx was.”
We might not agree with everything Marx said but we agree with the basics of the Marxian argument. The basic elements of Freud’s work, his model of the mind, his view of psychosexual development is demonstrably wrong. That doesn’t mean that he got everything wrong, just a large proportion of it and most of the foundations of his work.
I think that psychology and Marx have very clear links. However psychology and psychoanalysis are two different things.
To me Freud had some pretty interesting insights and the concepts of the unconscious mind, defence mechanisms, transference and projection, catharsis and trauma are useful starting points, however compartmentalisation of the brain/mind into the ID, Ego and Superego, his psychosexual stages, etc. etc. have not aged well.
In 1996, the journal “Psychological Science” reached the conclusion that, “There is literally nothing to be said, scientifically or therapeutically, to the advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas.” I agree.
Quite why seemingly rational and thoughtful people place such emphasis on the work of Freud, escapes me. Yes he came up with some thought provoking ideas, his view of the conscious and the unconscious was very interesting and opened up areas for discussion, but a good deal of his main work was unscientific, conjecture.
The Oedipus and Electra complex is quite clearly a way to fit the “facts” to meet the needs of the theory. Even if it was correct (but it isn’t) the whole approach is based on the late Victorian upper middle class social structure which was a small part of societal structure for a small window in history. Most families did not live like that then, didn’t live like that in the past and don’t live like that in the future.
Take the Little Hans study, what a whole load of horse shit (sic). Little lads play with their diddlers, big deal, they’re interesting, you can piddle up the wall you can squirt them about, what’s not to like. It doesn’t mean they want to murder their father and have sex with their mother. If little girls had diddlers, they’d piss up the wall as well.
Rutter wrote about Bowlby that “Bowlby himself in his first volume was very firm in terms of the importance of psychoanalysis in what he wrote but in 1988 he said that psychoanalysis was never more wrong than in its theory of child development, so he became more distant from psychoanalysis, in some ways and not others. He, like me, remained positive about mental mechanisms but he regarded the theory of psychosexual stages as “total bunk” and it was. “Total bunk”; those are my words, not his but that is more or less what he thought.” Couldn’t put it better myself.
We’ve gotta get out of this place – The Animals
Won’t get fooled again- The Who
Police and Thieves – The Clash (Junior Murvin)
Left us to burn – The Daintees
Ghost Town – The Specials
Ohio – Neil Young
What’s Going On – Marvin GayeHeard all of them at various discos
A very different political viewpoint, but some fantastic music. Will miss Mr Harley, must have seen him 20 or so times live
Hi imposs1904,
If, as I understand, you are currently in the US and cannot access BBC iplayer, you can purchase a VPN (there are some free ones as well), then set the vpn to the UK. You can then stream BBC player programmes. I use this technique to access Gaelic Games coverage through the RTE player. Apologies if I am teaching my granny to suck eggs.
