Freud's psychological theory revolves around sex — Agent Smith

Freud uses the word eros. Which at times meant sexual energy and at other times a general life force or life drive (as opposed to the death drive). Freud revised his theories constantly.

Freud is mostly studied at second- or third-hand so you really need to check your primary source. His reputation for quackery precedes him, sadly. He really was a profoundly insightful man. Though wrong about a lot of it.

Happily, Britannica has it right:

"Libido, a concept originated by Sigmund Freud to signify the instinctual physiological or psychic energy associated with sexual urges and, in his later writings, with all constructive human activity. In the latter sense of eros, or life instinct, libido was opposed by thanatos, the death instinct and source of destructive urges; the interaction of the two produced all the variations of human activity. Freud considered psychiatric symptoms the result of misdirection or inadequate discharge of libido.

Carl Jung used the term in a more expansive sense, encompassing all life processes in all species. Later theories of motivation have substituted for libido such related terms as drive and tension."

https://www.britannica.com/science/libido

If you have read a lot of Freud, then you would know better than me. I have read about Freud, discussed him with an intellectual type who received psychoanalysis, and have read a little of his writing. Did he need to call it 'science' to consider it science? Do you think he was doing 'science'? If he had been writing in the 17th century, it might have been called 'natural philosophy', or maybe like Burton's Anatomy of Melancholia, it might now be considered literature.

That he was being "scientific" is my projection of what he was doing--even if it wasn't great science.

Gotcha.

I know I'll never read his entire oeuvre so I was just curious.

Behaviorism - Walden Two - the grotesque result of an art aspiring to be a science. — ZzzoneiroCosm

The psychologist George Kelly wrote:

“I often tell my students that a psychopath is a stimulus- response psychologist who takes it seriously.”

That he was being "scientific" is my projection of what he was doing--even if it wasn't great science. — Bitter Crank

I think when it comes to psychology, ‘great science’ is an oxymoron. The more psychologists and psychiatrists try to emulate the natural sciences the less useful their work becomes. Rather than the psychologists envying physicists, it is the physicists who should be taking cures from psychology.

The psychologist George Kelly wrote:

“I often tell my students that a psychopath is a stimulus- response psychologist who takes it seriously.” — Joshs

:lol:

Behaviourist after making passionate love: 'That was great for you, darling, how was it for me?'

The social sciences--I'm including psychology--have a lamentably justified bad rep for half-baked research, sloppy methodology, unconfirmed results, and so on.

Still, have we not all read really interesting articles in the social sciences that were enlightening, and which either have been subsequently validated or which struck many readers as immediately truthful. David Riesman's Lonely Crowd, Domhoff's The Power Elite, Humphrey's study of public sex in St. Louis, MO around 1970 (Tearoom Trade), or Faith and Ferment: An Interdisciplinary Study of Christian Beliefs and Practices by Sr. Joan Chitister and Martin Marty, and The Sane Society by Erich Fromm. None of these books utilized the scientific method, though document research observation, surveys, and interviews were used.

If you have read a lot of Freud, then you would know better than me. I have read about Freud, discussed him with an intellectual type who received psychoanalysis, and have read a little of his writing. Did he need to call it 'science' to consider it science? Do you think he was doing 'science'? — Bitter Crank

I've mentioned before that I read many of Freud's 'humanistic' essays as an undergraduate. Totem and Taboo, Civilization and its Discontents, and others of that genre. He was clearly brilliant - after all along with Marx and Darwin, one of the main intellectual influences of the early 20th Century - but also 'scientistic' in the sense of attempting to address all and any problems through the lens of what he understood as the objective sciences. Basically thoroughgoing positivism, in the Comtean sense. That was really why he broke with Jung, who had a vastly larger understanding of human nature and the human situation.

but also 'scientistic' in the sense of attempting to address all and any problems through the lens of what he understood as the objective sciences. Basically thoroughgoing positivism, in the Comtean sense. — Wayfarer

Can you tell me where I can read more about Freud's scientism or positivist attitude?

I found this to get me started:

"I have repeatedly heard it said contemptuously that it is impossible to take a science seriously whose most general concepts are as lacking in precision as those of libido and of instinct [the drive] in psychoanalysis. But this reproach rests on a complete misconception of the facts. Clear basic concepts and sharply drawn definitions are only possible in the mental sciences in so far as the latter seek to fit a region of facts into the frame of a logical system. In the natural sciences, of which psychology is one, such clear-cut concepts are superfluous and indeed impossible. Zoology and botany did not start from correct and adequate definitions of an animal and a plant; to this very day biology has been unable to give any certain meaning to the concept of life. Physics itself, indeed, would never have made any advance if it had had to wait until its concepts of matter, force, gravitation, and so on, had reached the desirable degree of clarity and precision. " (Freud)

"Consequently, Freud asserted that in the sciences of nature, the basic representations (Grundvorstellungen) or the general concepts lack clarity. Only later analysis of the material gathered from observation and experiments will add some precision to these Grundvorstellungen, and therefore they stand in contradistinction to the sciences of the mind, which have to do with the domain of facts in the framework of a systematic intellectual construction. Now, psychoanalysis being founded upon clinical practice and therefore upon observation, it only remains to it to develop its results such as they present themselves – that is to say, in a necessarily fragmented form – and to resolve the problems step by step. Freud (1925, p. 32) claimed that psychoanalysis was nothing other than an Ergebnisse herauszuarbeiten, that is to say, quite literally, the elaboration of results from which one extracts hypotheses (herausen). In this sense, Freud underlined that the hypotheses were virtually contained in the results, but he also suggested that we should highlight the scientist’s imaginative capabilities, which allow him or her to arbeiten (to work) on these results in order to extract concepts and hypotheses from them. Here we can find some kinship between this Freudian method and the pattern of argumentation that Darwin built in On the Origin of the Species."


"In one of the passages of the thirty-fifth New Introductory Lecture, Freud (1932) compares the work of the analyst with the work of the scientist, going so far as to declare that their resemblance makes them identical: the analyst is a scientist."

"This is to say that, for Freud, both religion and systematic intellectual constructions – like those of the Geisteswissenschaften or the Weltanschauung – lie on the same side of the frontier, while on the opposite side lie science and, therefore, psychoanalysis."

"In any case, when Freud considers psychoanalysis to be one of the sciences of nature, the model of Naturwissenschaft was invariably that of physics, which is a constant presence in the manifest Freudian discourse: from this stems the idea of psychical forces, as well as the ongoing employment of the notion of “mechanism” and innumerable mechanical, hydraulic, and electrical metaphors that crop up in his description of the psychical processes. In this respect, Freud does not set himself apart from his contemporaries: the prestige that this discipline enjoyed was immense, with its spectacular progress seeming to confirm with each new challenge the truth of Newton’s doctrine."


https://www.cairn.info/revue-recherches-en-psychanalyse1-2014-1-page-73a.html#re1no1

↪Joshs The social sciences--I'm including psychology--have a lamentably justified bad rep for half-baked research, sloppy methodology, unconfirmed results, and so — Bitter Crank

But why is this the case? Is it just a function of the obvious fact that the social sciences deal with phenomena that are much ‘messier’ than the natural sciences due to their complexity and instability? Or are the social sciences also capable of challenging the assumptions underlying what constitutes prosper science? For instance, Skinner never accepted cognitive psychology as a real science. And older versions of cognitive science are now making similar accusations concerning the scientific legitimacy of phenomenologicallly influenced newer approaches in psychology. So it’s important to separate sloppy science from approaches that define the methods and scope of science.

Can you tell me where I can read more about Freud's scientism or positivist attitude? — ZzzoneiroCosm

that's actually a highly relevant passage.

As for my analysis, I inferred it from those essays I mentioned - Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion. They basically analysed religious consciousness in terms of psychoanalytic categories. They were very influential in his day, and obviously brilliant, but I found them reductionist. He had no inkling of anything like higher consciousness. At the time I was deep into 'theories of spiritual awakening' which are all anathema to Freud, but which can be mapped quite successfully against Jung. Of course, Jung was never mentioned in the Psychology department, the only place I encountered him was the occasional mention in comparative religion tutorials. But Freud was very much a product of The Enlightenment, seeking to vanquish 'archaic' ideas associated with religion in the clear light of science. Recall his traumatic last meeting with Jung when they broke for good - Freud asking Jung to 'promise him' that he would safeguard the 'scientific sexual theory' against the 'black tide mud' of 'occultism'.

It's probably worth mentioning that when Popper came up with his idea of falsification, that psychoanalysis was one of the examples of a theory that could not be falsified by empirical findings and therefore by implication was not a properly scientific theory (another being Marxism). Whatever 'data' a psychoanalyst came up with by way of first-person accounts from patients could be accomodated within the Freudian framework.

In a way, then, Freud was one of the 'science-religion culture warriors', although later in life he was also quite ambiguous in his attitudes to Judaism, his ancestral faith. But overall he seems to have held to the 'conflict thesis' which is that science and religion are irreconciliable.

He had no inkling of anything like higher consciousness. — Wayfarer

Right. He confesses as much in the opening pages of Civilization and Its Discontents: no sense of the 'oceanic.'

While I love reading Freud for his speculative brilliance and bombshell-perfect prose, I feel more of a brotherhood with Jung.

Another aspect of the break:

"All in all, from early on, Jung was nagged by the thought that Freud placed his personal authority above the quest for truth."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/06/carl-jung-freud-nazis

But why is this the case? — Joshs

Had I the wherewithal to answer that question, I'd probably be a tenured psych or social science professor, enjoying a comfy late career or a generous pension. Sigh.

A large part of the answer is institutional: colleges require "knowledge production" from its faculty (aka, publish or perish) and bs research is, frankly, a lot easier than coming up with deep ideas. So you have thousands of psych and social science graduate students and the several grades of the professoriat doing what they can to "produce knowledge" on a regular schedule,

The earlier psychologists who were measuring perception, learning, memory, recall, and so on did legitimate experimental scientific research -- they were doing the best they could on some of what would later be taken up by neurology. Its pretty dull stuff, imho, but baselines needed to be established.

When we turn to questions like, "How does college attendance affect the value system of working class students?" or "How does one develop character in students" the required research effort is difficult, requiring longitudinal study over maybe a decade, among other things.

You know "the marshmallow experiment"? children are left alone with a marshmallow and instructed to not eat it (until some future point). If they wait 5 minutes, they will get two marshmallows." Some children can wait, some eat the single marshmallow forthwith,

The ability to wait 5 minutes supposedly predicts how well children will do in life, where delayed gratification is commonly practiced by successful (but chronically unsatisfied?) people. I don't know whether the marshmallow experiment proves anything or not, but it's the kind of easy to do, readily replicable experiment that comes to mind.

Pedagogy produces a lot of research that often gets excoriated for being trivial. Pedagogy and Psychology are two peas in a pod in a number of ways.

Universities could maybe do us all a favor and start discouraging research in psychology, social science, and pedagogy, unless the researcher has solme really good ideas, much better ideas than what has so far been put forward.

Wow!

So Freud was bang on target! His theory of libido and eros are perfectly aligned with Darwinism in which "success" boils down to reproduction aka sex!

Don't give up on Freud or Jung yet!

You know "the marshmallow experiment"? children are left alone with a marshmallow and instructed to not eat it (until some future point). If they wait 5 minutes, they will get two marshmallows." Some children can wait, some eat the single marshmallow forthwith,

The ability to wait 5 minutes supposedly predicts how well children will do in life, where delayed gratification is commonly practiced by successful (but chronically unsatisfied?) people. I don't know whether the marshmallow experiment proves anything or not, but it's the kind of easy to do, readily replicable experiment that comes to mind. — Bitter Crank

It’s also a deeply flawed experimental paradigm in my opinion. Experiments like this , the supposed Dunning- Krueger effect, cognitive dissonance and others that appear to find cognitivist ‘bias’ in decision-making presuppose an objective starting point for that variable which is allegedly vulnerable to bias. Attempts like this to translate moral reasoning situations into empirically measurable frameworks substitute simplistic normative biases for an understanding that takes account of the perspectival nature of value.


Which gets to the point I was making that you haven’t commented on, which is that objectively based research in social psychology is using the wrong notion of science, that derived from the natural sciences. The third-person perspective currently in vogue needs to be embedded within a first-person perspective , which should be treated as primary. I’m far from alone in pointing this out.

Eugene Gendlin writes:

“ We would not expect a first-person process science to contradict the genuine findings of reductionistic science, any more than ecology does. But it places those findings within a broader perspective that can be more useful for certain purposes. One of those purposes is to understand first-person processes in such a way that 'the person' does not drop out.”

Varela and Thompson reject the claim that scientific objectivity presupposes a belief in an observer independent reality. Evan Thompson(2001) writes:

“Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates with William James' thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. By this I mean that our relating to the world, including when we do science, always takes place within a matrix whose fundamental structure is I-You-It (this is reflected in linguistic communication: I am speaking to You about It) (Patocka, 1998, pp. 9–10).”

Matthew Ratcliffe(2002) says:

“The unquestioned givenness of the objective world that is constitutive of scientific descriptions cannot capture the way in which the given is disclosed by a meaning-giving background. Thus, if anything, it is the transcendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an objective/causal description.”

The third-person perspective currently in vogue needs to be embedded within a first-person perspective, which should be treated as primary. I’m far from alone in pointing this out. — Joshs

The psychologist, social scientist, wishing he needed the apparatus of a chemist, dehumanizes the subjects by making objects (it) of them. There is no pressure from physical scientists to do this of course. It's envy on the part of the social scientist. There is more influence flowing from the corporate world, which objectifies employees and consumers as a matter of course.

The social science research that has moved me has been written from the POV of the participant observer - getting inside the group. One can observe social behavior like one observes beetles; the gang behavior one observes is equivalent to observing ant warfare--no personal involvement. Better to ingratiate one's self with a gang and put (just a little) skin in the game.

In the 1980s AIDS crisis response, quite a few gay men engaged in various educational 'interventions' which required participant observation. How else to figure out how to reach risk takers in bath houses, parks at night, back rooms, and so forth. There are risks, of course, which more objective research doesn't involve--temptation not being the least of it.

Or, this example: Primates of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin, an anthropological account of the up-scale women of the upper east side of New York City and their sharp-elbow interactions.

Long story short, if you want to understand your fellow humans, study them as fellow humans.

The psychologist, social scientist, wishing he needed the apparatus of a chemist, dehumanizes the subjects by making objects (it) of them. — Bitter Crank

:fire:

So we're just sacks of chemistry. — Neil deGrasse Tyson

The law of gravity doesn't care whether you're a saint or a sinner or a stone.

Long story short, if you want to understand your fellow humans, study them as fellow humans. — Bitter Crank

Bravo!

Behaviourist after making passionate love — Wayfarer

Is that possible?

I've mentioned before that I read many of Freud's 'humanistic' essays as an undergraduate. Totem and Taboo, Civilization and its Discontents, and others of that genre. He was clearly brilliant - after all along with Marx and Darwin, one of the main intellectual influences of the early 20th Century - but also 'scientistic' in the sense of attempting to address all and any problems through the lens of what he understood as the objective sciences. Basically thoroughgoing positivism, in the Comtean sense. That was really why he broke with Jung, who had a vastly larger understanding of human nature and the human situation. — Wayfarer

I think this can't be right for the simple reason that for Freud's theories and therapeutic methodologies first-person accounts of experiences were all important. An objectivist psychology would consist in taking into account only behavior or brain chemistry in attempting to understand and treat psychological "disorders". That is not Freud.

Freud may have aspired to develop psychology and psychoanalysis into sciences, but his approach certainly did not consist in any reductive materialist approach. He, like Jung, was interested in the role of symbolic archetypes in human psychology, even if he didn't allow them the esoteric spiritual significance that Jung did.

So, it is true that he wanted to rule any supernatural factors out of consideration, and considered religion to be a manifestation of infantile needs for guidance and generally a phenomenon which finds its origins in fear of death, but to paint him as a positivist is not at all accurate, in my view.

I think this can't be right for the simple reason that for Freud's theories and therapeutic methodologies first-person accounts of experiences were all importan — Janus

Which is precisely why his theories are nowadays often dismissed as pseudoscientific. He didn't use the term 'objectivism' but what I meant is, he conceived of his work as part of science. Agree that he was not positivist in an explicit sense, but in the general sense conceived by Auguste Comte (see paragraph 3 here). As for Freud's materialism, there is an entry here - agree he was not a simple 'reductive materialist'.

The ability to wait 5 minutes supposedly predicts how well children will do in life, where delayed gratification is commonly practiced by successful (but chronically unsatisfied?) people. — Bitter Crank

I observed that behaviour with my eldest son, now in his thirties. He always had that kind of discipline as a very small child, and lo, has generally been a very successful and balanced individual. (Don't know where he got it, as it's a quality I myself don't exhibit. :yikes: )

Right, Comte was indeed a very different animal than the logical positivists.

The approach of Vygotsky is interesting. He called for research that was not just based upon personal testimony.
In opposition to the behaviorists who said that such reports were not data, Vygotsky recognized that the development of individuals needed more than their reports to build models to try and understand the process..
How Skinner got to a place where it had to be one thing or another is a mystery.

The law of gravity doesn't care whether you're a saint or a sinner or a stone. — Agent Smith

A variation of the popular conservative mantra:
‘science doesn't care about your feelings’.

Or at least, that’s the story a certain era of science tells itself. An era just coming into being knows that valuative frameworks are the very basis of science.

@Bitter Crank

A variation of the popular conservative mantra:
‘science doesn't care about your feelings’.

Or at least, that’s the story a certain era of science tells itself. An era just coming into being knows that valuative frameworks are the very basis of science — Joshs

This just popped into my mind: Consciousness plays a major role in quantum mechanics! We're living at the wrong scale of reality (we'd be better of living quantum lives where our consciousness, perhaps feelings, make a difference).

Its been stated that successful philosophy becomes the sciences. Philosophy is sort of like a proto-science who's ultimate goal is to destroy itself. — Philosophim

That's like saying 'Old English grammar is "proto-Shakespearean?!"' :eyes:

Whenever a question can be answered factually it's no longer philosophical and is translatable into a scientific hypothesis, or problem, to be 'solved' experimentally (which may be interpreted philosophically in terms of "what it means ..." ethically / aesthetically / ontologically, etc). Scientific theories, however, are approximate explanations of the world and are therefore fallable and reviseable / replaceable by better approximations. Philosophy isn't superceded by science any more than a mother is superceded by her children. — 180 Proof

In my understanding, explaining some physical transformation manifested as a testable mathematical model is indispensible for doing science whereas interpreting such explanatory models and what the outcomes of testing them 'imply' about some aspect of the world (and, perhaps, the human condition) is doing philosophy. — 180 Proof

Science or history provide explanations of e.g. matters of fact, whereas, for me, philosophy reflectively proposes existential, critical or speculative interpretations (i.e. clarifications) of scientific, historical, etc explanations. — 180 Proof

Science informs (constrains-enables) philosophy, etc.

Philosophy interprets (problematizes) science, etc. — 180 Proof

plus these old sketches & &

So, in sum ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/553997 :smirk:

No real disagreements here. "sort of like a proto-science" was not intended to diminish its usefulness. I view philosophy as the laboratory where ideas are cooked up that can eventually be tested. Philosophy creates, science tests and confirms.

Whenever a question can be answered factually it's no longer philosophical and is translatable into a scientific hypothesis, or problem, to be 'solved' experimentally (which may be interpreted philosophically in terms of "what it means ..." ethically / aesthetically / ontologically, etc). — 180 Proof

That sums up my point nicely. I consider such philosophy a success. Philosophy is also littered with failures that have not gone anywhere beyond the lab itself. In my opinion, if a philosophy cannot eventually be turned into something testable, or put into practice in life with measurable outcomes, its just fiction. It can be comforting, exciting, and imaginative; but still fiction.

Of course, my view of science is that its "testable philosophy". But once such philosophy has been tested, a small part of it has been destroyed. Philosophy can only exist as a logical exercise. Once the real world puts it to the test, it is no longer philosophy. So this is why I noted philosophy's goal is to destroy itself. All of its successes are no longer philosophy, and all of its failures are the leftover dregs of petri dishes.

Of course Psych evolved from Philosophy. All the sciences did.

In this specific case, it was The Philosophy of Mind.

Philosophy is "the mother of the sciences."
Why?

Because, by Dr. Robert S. Hartman's definition, in his magnum opus, THE STRUCTURE OF VALUE,

pHILOSOPHY is the continuous clarification and analysis of vague concepts - while

SCIENCE is the continuous clarification and analysis of pprecise concepts.

The latter concepts are terms in a framework, in a systematic theory.

Questions? Comments?