proving someone wrong. specially loud mouths that sustain themselves by not being peer reviewed, has advanced human kind more than any kind of grudge or something. the problem freud didn’t have peer review because at the time there were very psicologists
Sure he had peer reviews, both Adler and Jung broke with him. Reading either of those, though, without sticking to what they didn’t disagree about with Freud probably leads you more astray than ignoring them in favour of Freud. Roughly speaking Freud’s issue is that he reduces everything to base drives, a very animalistic view, with Adler social relations come into play, the desire to be an individual agent, and with Jung everything meta. If you read Jung without understanding, not just intellectually but viscerally, the instinctual you’re going to drift off into fantasy playing symbolic games that have no relationship to what’s actually going on, sticking to Adler while ignoring Freud makes you, erm… a radfem? They love to deny the personal in favour of the social, sure there’s other groups doing that those just came to mind first. Oh boy and Freud would’ve had a field day with political lesbianism.
Sure you can make fun of takes such as “if women would relax properly they could get vaginal orgasms instead of only clitoral” but, well, considering what other takes were in vogue back in the days that’s kind of endearingly wrong. The accusation of having been unscientific is right-out unfair: He was quite methodological and data-driven indeed, and the people who started the whole trend of dissing him for that, behaviourists (Skinner on the forefront) have produced little of value. Figures that if you want to do psychology you can’t ignore the subjective, say “the mind is a black box, conscious experience is irrelevant and that’s it”. The field is messy, that’s for sure, but so is the psyche so that’s to be expected. We shouldn’t make things simpler than they are.
Main things you should be critical about with Freud is his symbolic determinism, “this kind of image means that”, the mind is way too flexible, symbols to much nurture instead of nature, for that to be a viable approach. Or, differently put: Patients of Freud had Freudian dreams, Patiens of Adler had Adlerian dreams. Another sore point the other two mentioned about him is that he was quite selective when it came to his patients – somehow they were largely attractive women, Jung and Adler had a way broader span (though Jung worked for a long time largely with schizophrenics due to, well, being a psychiatrist). Oh and Freud was a cokehead.
Not much bad to say about Adler short of his incompleteness wrt. Jung, and make sure to not read him as a sociologist, as to Jung, again: Take him by his word when he says you need to understand the others to understand him. And when he says stuff like “I’m glad to be Jung, and not a Jungian”: Avoid to be dazzled, or think that the Red Book is about you or truth or society or metaphysics or whatnot, it’s about Jung’s own personal shit. Read his actual theories not his secret diary.
Oh and just to tie everything together: When Jung says that Archetypes are the self-portraits of instincts, that’s exactly the connection to Freud: Instincts e.g. anticipate the presence of and need to relate to mate material, and in that interaction between “relating” and “opposite sex” you have the anima/animus as a psychological phenomenon. And first you (probably) related to your mother (instinct to relate to caregiver), and then you might have failed to grow up, failed to affirm independence (for whatever internal or external reason, not entirely unlikely Adlerian), and now you mix up the actual mother of your actual kids (anima) with the old image of your own mother (caregiver) and that, anon, is why you want to fuck your mother. Doesn’t work like that for women because their mothers aren’t the opposite sex. Yes that’s all cishetnormal once you get other stuff involved it gets even more messy. Take those things more as a guide: By learning how the statistically common cases can be pieced together sensically you develop an understanding of the involved pieces and thus are able to make sense of different arrangements, or differently shaped pieces. In the end the exception is the norm.
proving someone wrong. specially loud mouths that sustain themselves by not being peer reviewed, has advanced human kind more than any kind of grudge or something. the problem freud didn’t have peer review because at the time there were very psicologists
Sure he had peer reviews, both Adler and Jung broke with him. Reading either of those, though, without sticking to what they didn’t disagree about with Freud probably leads you more astray than ignoring them in favour of Freud. Roughly speaking Freud’s issue is that he reduces everything to base drives, a very animalistic view, with Adler social relations come into play, the desire to be an individual agent, and with Jung everything meta. If you read Jung without understanding, not just intellectually but viscerally, the instinctual you’re going to drift off into fantasy playing symbolic games that have no relationship to what’s actually going on, sticking to Adler while ignoring Freud makes you, erm… a radfem? They love to deny the personal in favour of the social, sure there’s other groups doing that those just came to mind first. Oh boy and Freud would’ve had a field day with political lesbianism.
Sure you can make fun of takes such as “if women would relax properly they could get vaginal orgasms instead of only clitoral” but, well, considering what other takes were in vogue back in the days that’s kind of endearingly wrong. The accusation of having been unscientific is right-out unfair: He was quite methodological and data-driven indeed, and the people who started the whole trend of dissing him for that, behaviourists (Skinner on the forefront) have produced little of value. Figures that if you want to do psychology you can’t ignore the subjective, say “the mind is a black box, conscious experience is irrelevant and that’s it”. The field is messy, that’s for sure, but so is the psyche so that’s to be expected. We shouldn’t make things simpler than they are.
Main things you should be critical about with Freud is his symbolic determinism, “this kind of image means that”, the mind is way too flexible, symbols to much nurture instead of nature, for that to be a viable approach. Or, differently put: Patients of Freud had Freudian dreams, Patiens of Adler had Adlerian dreams. Another sore point the other two mentioned about him is that he was quite selective when it came to his patients – somehow they were largely attractive women, Jung and Adler had a way broader span (though Jung worked for a long time largely with schizophrenics due to, well, being a psychiatrist). Oh and Freud was a cokehead.
Not much bad to say about Adler short of his incompleteness wrt. Jung, and make sure to not read him as a sociologist, as to Jung, again: Take him by his word when he says you need to understand the others to understand him. And when he says stuff like “I’m glad to be Jung, and not a Jungian”: Avoid to be dazzled, or think that the Red Book is about you or truth or society or metaphysics or whatnot, it’s about Jung’s own personal shit. Read his actual theories not his secret diary.
Oh and just to tie everything together: When Jung says that Archetypes are the self-portraits of instincts, that’s exactly the connection to Freud: Instincts e.g. anticipate the presence of and need to relate to mate material, and in that interaction between “relating” and “opposite sex” you have the anima/animus as a psychological phenomenon. And first you (probably) related to your mother (instinct to relate to caregiver), and then you might have failed to grow up, failed to affirm independence (for whatever internal or external reason, not entirely unlikely Adlerian), and now you mix up the actual mother of your actual kids (anima) with the old image of your own mother (caregiver) and that, anon, is why you want to fuck your mother. Doesn’t work like that for women because their mothers aren’t the opposite sex. Yes that’s all cishetnormal once you get other stuff involved it gets even more messy. Take those things more as a guide: By learning how the statistically common cases can be pieced together sensically you develop an understanding of the involved pieces and thus are able to make sense of different arrangements, or differently shaped pieces. In the end the exception is the norm.
Spite and laziness are the driving factors behind lifting humanity out of the stoneage