Bijou Drains
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It may be that gravity is not a force as put forward by Newton, however the existance of gravity is observable and prooveable, just jump out of the window if you want proof. It is also possible to observe that the effects of gravity are consistent across the universe (well with one or two exceptions, which are more about the shortcomings of the theory rather than gravity itself).
All of the “drives” which Freud puts forward as theory are not observable and cannot be consistently observed. You cannot observe these drives anymore than you can observe orgon, chi, heavenly grace or animal magnetism.
Any drive or instinct can only have evolved if it aids reproduction or survival (or at the very least has not hindered those things). If any Freudian believer of Thanatos can successfully explain how a drive or instinct involving killing yourself or destroying yourself can aid survival or reproduction, I’ll happily show my arse in the Party’s front window.
A theory is a description of reality that offers or attempts an explanation of reality’s workings. The problem is not only are what you describe as metaphores wrong teh whole theory is unsustainable.
Freud made some very interesting observations, however his observations were not unique or novel. The role of the unconscious mind had been described centuries before Freud’s birth and Rousseau and Darwin amongst others had developed models of staged child development.
In terms of a therapeutic use, I don’t think that Freud’s work should not be used therapeutically. I am a great believer in “what works works” if some people gain some benefit from it, what’s not to like.
That said, in it’s classical format I think it has very limited usage. Although modern psychotherapeutic approaches derived from the psychodynamic school, such as Gestalt and TA can be very useful. If you look at practically all therepeutic approaches you will find that they have their roots in Freud, including CBT and Dialectical Behavioural Therapy.
However that’s just my opinion, others more practiced may disagree.
I do however think that a great deal of Freud’s work contains a great deal of supposition and unsupportable assertion.
In terms of the links to political change, if the foundations are rotten, it doesn’t matter how much Marx you add to it, it still is unsteady and liable to collapse.
I haven’t forgotten that I said I would add areply about your questions about his and also to the WS article, I am in the process of putting bits together in between work and will try to get that bit posted asap.
So you don’t accept Freud’s theory of “instincts that destroy and kill” you reject his psycho sexual stages theory, his theory of the Oedipus Complex, his theory of the Electra complex and you need to adapt his theory of the death instinct to include alientation to make it make sense.
Poor old Siggy is disappearing like the Cheshire cat. Well, apart from the fact that the old bugger never smiled!
TM “Surely libido is just a name for the sexual feelings (nervous stimulation) which are aroused by certain external phenomena and certain thoughts, leading to “take off” if fortunate, and repression if not.
Surely there are three responses, take off, repression or, when you get to my age, nostalgia 🙂
Wez- “of a thoroughly psychological one containing the rival forces of ‘Eros’ (the life force) and ‘Thanatos’ (the death instinct).” genuine question, were you being ironic?
And I’m sure he did good work. Similarly if Reichian approaches help you, that’s great. Different approaches help different people, we wouldn’t think that there is only one approach to help physical health, why should there be a universal panacea for mental health.
The question here is, however, is does Freud’s and or Reich’s model of the mind stand up to critical examination, and the fact of the matter is that neither of them hold much water in my opinion.
I will though, have a read through the article from the World Socialist, I remember reading it when it was published.
I will add my thoughts to it when I get the time to do so.
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.
