Thoughts on this guy

I'd take out the scientist part. Freud was a great thinker, I'll give you that. But his methodology was really flawed. Psychoanalysis is more like interpretive hermeneutics than a science.

up there with Copernicus and Darwin, in terms of improving our understanding of what it means to be human

A huge chunk of feminist theory is based on Freud. They're certainly not against psychoanalysis as a theoretical base, well at least certain sizeable segments aren't.

Freud himself recognized the shortcomings of his method, which he assumed (rightly) would be eclipsed when neuroscientific technology was developed. He was always a staunch naturalist about what underlied the psychological processes. He tried to come up with his theories based on experience with patients his clinic. I'd say he did as well as one could have done in establishing a new science with no relevant technical apparatus. His later "successors" (LACAN) are definitely interpretive hermeneuticists, if not outright onanists.

Where neuroscience has not eclipsed Freud though, or Lacan and other successors, is in their ability to have a discourse on the relationship between the human psyche and how it relates to culture and our collective identities.

fuck off jungian

I studied Psychology in college, and we had to read a ton of Freud. I was a natural rebel, so I rejected him. I raised my hand in class nearly every day to give Freud shit. That was years ago. Since then, I've read a lot more and thought a lot more, and by God, Freud was right about literally everything.

His emphasis on unconscious psychological processes was of profound importance, especially in light of the the contrary views psychology has inherited from the Cartesian, phenomenological, ad behaviorist traditions. That being said, most of his particular theories and claims are both demonstrably false and outright implausible. Tbqh though, people like William James and Edmund Husserl were doing better work at the time. Overall, I'd say that nobody should actually waste their time studying his work. You'd be better of reading contemporary [empirical] psychology textbooks or journals, or studying shit like generative grammar, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. E.g. reading something by Stephen Kosslyn, Thomas Metzinger, Ronald Langacker, or Norbert Hornstein would be a better way to spend your time.

Not sure if this is trolling, but this is bullshit. Maybe you met to say you studied literary theory?

Never bothered reading him because a lot of people i Iook up to say he's all mostly full of shit. I get his influence tho.

>Thoughts
Heh.

Since when someone saying someone else was full a shit a legitimate criticism, or a legitimate REASON, not to read a work?

>which he assumed (rightly) would be eclipsed when neuroscientific technology was developed.

This is pathetic. He didn't assume any of this. No surgical trauma will help neurotic anxiety I'm afraid. It's just not so easy. If you want to see the results, Google cases of lobotomy and be horrified.

You're dumb user. I'm sorry to tell you but you don't know what Freud is about other than grotesque inherited tropes.

Genius, and his work is still used today, and is in fact the best treatment. No matter how many times vested interests from drug cartels proclaim it's dead via. spokespeople for the media, you can't kill it, because psychoanalysis is the king.

>He listens to Graham Harman

Incestuous

>his method, which he assumed (rightly) would be eclipsed when neuroscientific technology was developed

I was talking about method. His method was supplanted when we developed tech for neurological investigation, and, for that matter, more tightly controlled empirical psychology. I wasn't talking about treatment at all. Learn how to read, retard.

Again, his method is unsurpassed. Only a serial assburger would think you can learn more about a subject's life by divining the meaningless hum of electrodes rather than speaking to them in the analytic relation, show me absolutely any neurological research more detailed than a long-term psychoanalysis.

Only a True Believer would think you can learn more about a subject's psychology by listening to their meaningless babble of fabricated rationalizations and assigning it to an arbitrarily constructed Procrustean symbolic framework than going where the action is. Why don't you read up on scientific psychology and evidence-based therapy instead of worshipping at the altar of Analysis?

>reminds me of my mom

lol

Evidence-based therapy...

user, you realise that's a marketing term, not a scientifically determinable property?

>meaningless babble in the medium of meaning itself, speech
>all that bullshit about symbols
I don't think you know what analysis even involves. It takes years of training and an analysis yourself to prepare you. It's a practice with proven results which has been perfected for a century.

Compared to this new technique of... a few neuro-markers being arbitrarily tagged as 'The Happiness Transmitter' and bankrolled by billionaire pharma companies into the press... Yeah user, ok. Call 'believers' religious when you're literally jumping on the biggest scientific bandwagon of the decade...

>women will be the next Freuds
lmao

Sorry user, but I have to speak from authority here given my knowledge.

Psychoanalysis is not a hermeneutic.

Psychoanalysis is a science of man as a speaking subject.

>interpretive hermeneutics

As opposed to what other hermeneutics?

...

>>>/reddit/

Biblical Hermeneutics.
Black Hermeneutics.
Phenomenologico-Ethological-Uekullian Dance Hermeneutics
Biosemiotric Hermeneutics
Cyber Hermeneutics
Translinguistical Interpretive Transgender Papyrus Hermeneutics
Fluid-mechanical Hermeneutics
Translogical Hermeneutics
Dialetheist-Pantheist-Spinozist Hermeneutics
Derridean-Derivative Hermeneutics of the Trace
Feminist tap-dance Hermeneuticophenomenological Studies

They're all interpretive, dumbass.

Erm. Tell that to the administration team at my University. Douchebag.

Not an argument.

Ad abominem.

Sweet dreams are made of these
Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world by the seven seas
Everybody's lookin for somethin

(awoooooooooo oooooooooo)

>going where the action is
You mean where the action is spread across the whole brain in a complex interrelated process that doesn't seem to conform to theories of localisation, where a single neurotransmitter is "responsible" for seemingly oppositional mood states and ideas? You clearly don't know what you're talking about. Psychoanalysis has more reliable theories and interventions than neuropsychology.

>women will be the next frauds
ftfy

yeah, psychoanalysis and other social/human sciences should work together. I don't think there's a conflict between Freud and Malinowski for instance. What Bourdieu says about psychoanalysis is relevant ("let's not forget that Oedipus was a king too" ).

Just gross ignorance here. Study Freud first. Also the relationship between psychoanalysis and phenomenology is just like the relationship between psychoanalysis and social sciences. There's no reason why you should "choose" between them.

He assumed that later sciences would plausibly confirm some of his claims. He writes it clearly, for instance, when he asks : should we say that every single pleasure is sexual ? Is pleasure inherently sexual ? His answer is that he cannot prove it but that it will maybe be proven one day.

This makes no sense but it's what happens when you read Freud from a strictly scientific point of view. You should definitely start with the Greeks.

Does "hermeneutics" have several meanings ? I always find it weird when it's used to coin a kind of "subject" in itself. You can very well say that psychoanalysis is "hermeneutic" (what's the adjective ?) in that it involves interpretation.

One of the reasons I respect Freud a lot is that he didn't simply dismiss the objections. He's always saying "Now, I know what I claim is hard to believe, and you could say that...". I even wonder if some of the strongest objections against psychoanalysis are the ones he formulated himself. That's fucking honest. That's what every thinker should do.

Also guys, don't forget to watch the movie by John Houston, it's great.

Not to even say that the brain is constantly changing itself so much that to even claim you can abstract a few movements into a scientific paper so easily is pretty bizarre.

A hermeneutic would be about what things mean for a particular subject's lifeworld, for instance.
The point is, and I see where you're confused, and this is a harmless enough confusion, from Ricoeur, though it's largely because though Ricoeur earnestly defended psychoanalysis from it's vulgar critics, he made one small mistake in naming it a hermeneutic.

A hermeneutic as I've described above would be more or less in the realm of the imaginary domain of the subject's ego and his world, the unconscious isn't like that, it's what you overlook as not meaningful at all, which you can't interpret yourself as anything of importance, which ends up actually determining your life. This 'knowledge which doesn't know itself' to use Lacan's enigmatic phrase is what the unconscious is all about. So you can see how it's not so simple as a hermeneutic, it's more about the things foreign to the subject's lifeworld, the material which you 'forget' about, the imaginary traces, prohibitions, desires, etc., which you can't absorb into your ordinary hermeneutic being-in-the-world.

On a related note on the last phrase, it's symptomatic that Heidegger doesn't allow any place for madness in his philosophy, there's no dissociation or alienation there. This is because psychoanalysis falsifies Heidegger's thesis that humanity's primordial stance is being-in-the-world, how humanity is maladapted to the world, as we find in anxiety, desire, and every moment of our lives if we take care to notice how unnaturally we adapt to things.

Hope this helps.

Overrated and obsolete

All of his ideas and opinions should be discarded with a "nice projection bro"

That every pleasure is sexual is a structural definition which you can't do without. When you abandon the role of sexuality you end up like Jung where the libido is some oceanic pool of pleasure. Keeping the notion of sexuality as central accounts for everything, take the trauma of seeing somebody raped: you can't reduce this to a natural human response to seeing something violent and unethical. The Freudian answer is that there's a certain unholy pleasure in it, that the enjoyment we see in it is too much, that it's forbidden, and risks the disintegration of our own libidinal stability. Or a child, who hangs around his parents' door listening in to the sounds, trying to imagine what they are doing; this cannot be reduced to simple curiosity, since if it were so, why the extreme pleasure that the child gains in being the voyeur to a forbidden place, why does he hang around so long at the door, if it's just odd sounds he doesn't understand?

Similarly, the role of sexual difference in life is important, without it we throw a whole tradition of good work (Helene Deutsch, Lacan, and others) out of the window out of some politically correct ideal of a unisex and universal sexuality; all these things are pop-cultural Jungian deviations. (just telling you a few things because you seem interested and I'm listless)

>anime reaction image
Yeah... believe it or not, the problem of the analyst's countertransference projections is basically a solved one... since... the early 20th century? You're not being revolutionary there.

t. Sam Harris

Harris doesn't even read neuroscience. He literally paid for a ghostwritten PhD to sell his book...

Well I even wonder if the confusion doesn't have to do with Ricoeur being French and writing in French. I note that you don't use the plural "hermeneutics". Looks like "hermeneutics" is sometimes seen as a subject in itself. I haven't read Ricoeur, but in French I see "une herméneutique" meaning a hermeneutic discourse, which does not imply at all that the whole discourse or theory should be part of "hermeneutics" like mechanics are part of physics.

I'm not too sure I understand what you mean by "realm of the imaginary [Lacan?] domain of the subject's ego and his world". Actually it's probably easier to get rid of lacan's own concept if we're just trying to make things clear regarding Freud. Psychoanalysis tries to interpretate signs or traces of the unconscious ; now if one wants to use, let's say, the adjective "hermeneutic" as a plain synonym for "interpretative", why not. I may still be confused regarding the term "lifeworld" you used - you mean something that is not strictly limited to the singular individual himself, but that is part of culture ? (like, relating the peace symbol to peace itself, or trying to understand why the Genesis puts the origin of evil in the figure of a snake - that would be hermeneutics)

It's a shame that Heidegger himself wasn't as open to exterior enrichments to his own thought (to say it roughly), as other thinkers were. Heidegger kinda enriched Lacan (dunno how often they met though) but heidegger himself was too "anal" to receive.

On whether psychoanalysis of a "hermeneutic of the subject" or "scientific" and whether these are mutually exclusive

my.vanderbilt.edu/williamfranke/files/2014/03/Psychoanalysis20as20a20Hermeneutics20of20the20Subject.pdf

Abstract says it all really

Ah, sorry to sound obscure. And I didn't know that the phrase didn't have the signification of it's English translation: "a hermeneutics of the subject".

What I do know is that throughout his teaching Lacan insisted that psychoanalysis is not a hermeneutics.

By hermeneutics we have to introduce the concept of the imaginary, as in the world of usual concepts, of everyday meanings, of our experience of the self (and all our identifications) and our encounter with the other, of our own personal interpretative procedures... the point I was trying to make was that psychoanalysis intervenes on the symbolic, i.e. structural stage, and the imaginary is at work in the form of traces which have yet to be symbolized, signified, spoken: opaque experiences, etc.

Not to say psychoanalysis just ignores the imaginary, far from it, at a point it was the most important scene in analysis. The danger is that an 'interpretative procedure' or 'discourse' is interpreted as a pregiven world of symbols or mythological identities, of fables like that of Oedipus which can be neatly tagged onto the analysand. As psychoanalysis today starts from the principle of differential signification (that a term only has it's meaning in it's difference from other terms, or even from itself), the structure of the person's life and symptoms and significations is of highest importance, and imaginary ideas are to be interpreted not for themselves but in terms of psychical structure as revealed in speech, the patient's reactions, associations, etc.

A good way to think of the difference here is to imagine an object, any object, and enumerate it's properties: a coin is shiny, it's bronze, it's metallic, and so on. This would be the imaginary meaning of the coin. The symbolic would be the world in which the coin is a part, commodity exchange and fetishism, etc. We can see with a bronze coin that, in fact, it would otherwise perhaps be thrown out as a piece of junk, but its worth (as money in the symbolic realm of society and exchange), then imbues it with another meaning, relative to the field of symbolic exchange and communication: of other people's speech, of our position as speakers, (the position from which we speak), and hence our identities.

If an analyst tries to link someone's experience, say, of a nagging wife, with a 'castrating' experience, he's a bad analyst, because he's inserting his knowledge and hence his projections of himself as being a clever analyst into the picture, rather than being entirely receptive to the speech of the subject, and hence not noticing the subject's symptoms, because he's joining dots together in order to fulfill his own ego ideal.

Completely agree on Heidegger, he was a brilliant thinker but withdrawn, in his country house... walks in the forest...

Don't be under the impression that you're talking to someone who is actually licensed to talk about these things by the way, I'm a student with an amateur interest in psychoanalysis.

>If an analyst tries to link someone's experience, say, of a nagging wife, with a 'castrating' experience, he's a bad analyst, because he's inserting his knowledge and hence his projections of himself as being a clever analyst into the picture, rather than being entirely receptive to the speech of the subject, and hence not noticing the subject's symptoms, because he's joining dots together in order to fulfill his own ego ideal.
I really value this, user, thanks for sharing your thoughts. So in this example, if the patient had said "she's breaking my balls" as a figure of speech, would the analyst be wrong in drawing this connection?

What I'm getting at is... How can you ever know whether the client is being shown accurate elements of their unconscious, or whether they are suffering under the suggestibility of a charismatic, but egoic and biased, analyst?

Thanks, that made it clear, esp. the coin thing. I'm not too familiar with the imaginary / symbolical / real triad from Lacan. But I guess Freud would agree to what you said - "there is no Baedecker's for the unconscious", no dictionary.

Psychoanalytical studies on writers and thinkers are never essential, maybe never rigorous (exactly for the reason we just said - cannot listen to them), and it makes sense that freud refused to interpretate Descartes' dream. However this of study can still be interesting or at least funny, or maybe even enlightening. I heard there was a guy wo wrote a complete psychoanalytical study of Aristophanes. It would definitely be a funny game to do the same with Heidegger. But the result may end up being some comic poetry instead of a scientific study, obviously.

Maybe the Dasein being always out of himself can be related to a cut penis.

What the fuckkkkkkkkkkkk I was just reading Owen Barfield's Romanticism Comes of Age literally 13.5 seconds ago, and he says "I'd have to lend you my Baedeker's," and I was like "what the hell is that?", but before I googled I refreshed Veeky Forums

Goddamnit now I'm going to have another spiral of reading Jung and believing in synchronicity and magic for a fucking year

Magick is as real as my post ending in 7.

I have to say Freud is incredibly interesting to read, and he was a genius. However, some of the analogies and mental gymnastics he makes are quite hilarious.

Phew

idk but is anyone else noticing that incest is becoming more prevalent in pop culture? jokes, fetishes, etc.

maybe i've just been watching too much incest porn, but i feel like my hobby is going mainstream.

Probably not, it's just an expression after all. There would have to be more of a structure to be found in the speech, it's all about the chain of signification, that's what speech is all about really. The individual meanings of each phrase is what you go to a dictionary for, the analyst shows you another path to your speech, another implication that you are usually not aware of. The meant-to-say or communicate and the actually said end up very different. As I said, psychoanalysis is not about these kinds of mythologies, in fact the best analysts are obtuse and opaque, and don't let you simple have a good conversation with them, they're there to put you to work, to let you speak the way you're not socially allowed, to let new things come to mind.

I have experience with other therapies, and am myself in psychoanalysis --- which is a funny situation ... since I can't, though I might try even unconsciously to work out what my analyst is up to, but ultimately it's impossible and if you try that it only reveals your sensitive points even more --- other psychotherapies end in my experience make you feel good for a short while but don't change anything, like counselling for instance (and sadly some bad analysts can fall into this scenario, especially when they're judged by patient satisfaction surveys).

The analysand is always suffering under the suggestibility of a partial analyst. The point of the analyst is not to provide an objective overview of the phenomena at work, but to act as a kind of screen onto which the patient projects his thoughts and desires, and gets a response. The analyst can never be entirely unbiased, but he doesn't need to be for analysis to work, because the patient is ultimately doing the work of analysing, work which he could never be able to do without the supervision and prodding of the analyst, (especially since most unconscious material will never occur to you in common life, but if you're on a couch with a voice which sooths you, or irritates you --- but that's complicated, transference love and hate ---, behind you --- pic related --- the scenario is set for things to come to mind free from the logic of everyday life). What we're talking about is subjective structures, subjective not in the sense of just illusory or fake, but the structure of a subject's life and situation and symptoms, and complaints, and everything else --- for which there can be no objective measure. Certain unconscious patterns insist on being said, and they are said in a confused manner, and they find their meaning ultimately in the patient, the analysand's interpretations aren't gospel, and often they are meant to provoke thought and rather than simple answers, analysts aren't teachers.

Lacan actually grounds this phenomenon of having no outside measure to language or speech, that truth is in language, that desire can only be known as it arises in speech --- in symbolic logic: cahiers.kingston.ac.uk/concepts/metalanguage.html

it will be the next taboo we break, quote me when it happens

the next generation will be fighting for the right to fuck/marry their sister in peace. tumblr will be filled with pictures of brothers and sisters making out with hashtags like #keepitinthefamily

The big taboo today is actually paedophilia, even consensual sex with young teenagers for instance, is devilish.

It's because we feel that we have all these freedoms, we can be as dirty as we like, but this relies on an implicit exception: the gaze of children has to be free from our universal depravity.

This is exactly the logic of signification that Lacan outlined in Seminar 20: a universal rule which requires an exception to ground it, to give it determinacy. We can all be dirty as we like as long as infantile sexuality is disavowed, children have to be kept pure.

Not that this is wrong, or that children should enter the life of sex, but it's an illustration that the signifier's logic is going on even in this unusual place.

It's said exactly the same, and even spelled the same minus the space, you can't fault that.

well, porn definitely helps spreading this.

look at all the websites, 80% is all mom/sister shit even though they are completely regular videos

holy shit lmfao

Thanks for your time, user.

I've reminded myself of Jung's attitude as well, that an "incorrect" interpretation from the analyst would basically not stuck with a patient anyway, he believed there was a sort of filter at work. Anyway, I would like to engage with your ideas more but I am really exhausted, hope the thread is still up tomorrow.

Thanks again.

... Looks like the topic has turned to good ol' fashioned sister fucking anyway.

There was this guy whose wife was mentally slightly retarded, she encouraged him to have sex with their daughters. He fell in love with one of said daughters, wife got angry and left. When the girl turned 18 they stayed together, she said they were in love. They had a baby.
Trial happened a few years ago. The lawyer had this weird phase, "incest can be happy".
The guy served a short emprisonment penalty and then he went back living with his daughter and their kid.
Eventually the girl started dating a co-worker and left her dad. He went mad and killed both of them, that was 2 years ago. I love this story because the words the lawyer had said sounded like some not-so-bad ending, then later events changed the whole meaning of what happened.

>tfw mother---son incest never actually happens though it's fantasized about by the son and in rarer cases sometimes the mother, and can lead to developmentally stunted men and broken marriages

>tfw father---daughter incest is common and often far less harmful as far as incest goes

>tfw the Freudian oedipal logic is proven right every time

He's not wrong, it can be happy. The problem is that as it's so taboo in our society the only people who'll openly engage in it are the already deranged.

user... did the demand emerge from the porn... or maybe the porn emerged from the demand?

idk man.
The main point in his dream interpretation theory is that dreams are wish fulfillment. Since he had a lot of critics and all of his studies were controversial, people always tried to contradict him.
Patients gave examples of dreams where their beloved children would die, and asked Freud how in hell is that a wish? He managed to answer most of those, but when he couldn't:
>your wish was to prove me wrong

I don't know..both I guess, but the porn had a bigger influence imo. The abundance of porn made people bored, so they had to spice it somehow.

It's a crude reading to read his dream theory as a direct wish fulfillment. If you read closely the wish is always something that distorts the clear and direct meaning of the dream. Freud says it's those dreams that seem to have the most obvious and clear meaning ever which are the hardest to crack. You know, patients really do have dreams like that, which are absolutely to do with what they've heard from the analyst.

>the problem of the analyst's countertransference projections is basically a solved one
How is it solved? Not contesting, just asking, if you're willing to explain to someone who hasn't read much on the subject.

user, it takes a mandatory 5 years of training and theory to work out, it's a practical skill which can't really be just told like that.

But the point is it's well documented in the literature and even since Freud dealing with that kind of thing has been of prime importance in training and theory...

So you're saying not projecting (I'm not sure that's the proper term even) what one finds inside oneself onto others is a skill that can be taught? Is this applicable to everyday life too or only in a clinical setting? And how can one, even after years of training, ever be sure? Is there even such a thing as "being sure" in psychoanalysis?

I'm sorry if I have too many confused, beginner's questions.

As a student of literature where should I start with psychoanalysis, especially its application to literature? Would the Dora case study be a good place to start?

I have no clue about it, all I know comes from one chapter I read in a book that was an intro to literary theory.

I like

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

Because something is to understand the Unconscious as a concept, but when you find out how it is messing around every moment of your life it makes more sense.

Thoughts OF this guy:
>"Everyone want's to fuck their mom and take their fathers place"
>"Most people stopped either on their anal stage or their oral stage"
>"Every thing has an unconscious meaning"
>"But hey, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!"

Also:
>"I better stop reading Nietzsche, otherwise I won't invent a thing!"

it really bothers me about Freud that half of the time its just philosophy bs and flat out ridiculousness but everybody still calls it psychology

like using ancient myths to explain human psychology
this isn't what science is okay?
it really just seems like random stuff he thought up one day

Yeah Dora is interesting and quite easy to read. Another starting point would be "On dreams" (100 pages or less).

Or you can pick more general essays like Five Lessons on psychoanalysis or Introduction to psychoanalysis. I also agree with , Psychopathology of Everyday Life would probably fit your purpose.

Total daddy. Wish I was one of his patients :/

the theories have already been scientifically tested, most failed, but a few passed

3 intros to the study of psychoanalysis maybe

just don't get suckered into it to far, don't lose your head

BAHAHAH!!!

FUCKIN EPIC

AND HE WAS A COKE HEAD TOO LOL

I"m pretty sure Freud invented the idea of psychological projection

dumb animeposter

>On a related note on the last phrase, it's symptomatic that Heidegger doesn't allow any place for madness in his philosophy, there's no dissociation or alienation there. This is because psychoanalysis falsifies Heidegger's thesis that humanity's primordial stance is being-in-the-world, how humanity is maladapted to the world, as we find in anxiety, desire, and every moment of our lives if we take care to notice how unnaturally we adapt to things.

I don't understand.

Imaginary is what you think IS (the kantian mini-world of phenomena)
Symbolic is what you think OUGHT to be (the whole world of culture)
Real is the world of things in themselves (spooky)

so all this is to say that a term or a phrase probably means something specific to a specific person, especially if its significant to them

so the guy sayin breakin my balls could be just repeating a vulgar phrase or depending on the clues that accrue, could be more meaningful

sort of like reading a novel for symbols? I can buy that

Wittgenstein said that Freud failed to distinguish between a reason and a cause.

not same guy.

>so the guy sayin breakin my balls could be just repeating a vulgar phrase or depending on the clues that accrue, could be more meaningful

Indeed. it could be nothing, or maybe is meaningful for the guy, and the first thing that comes to his mind is castration. But then thinking more about It could arise new asociations like, breaking eggs for breakfast, and from there to a hidden memory , a trauma and so on.

Is up to the patient.

>sort of like reading a novel for symbols?

Sort of.
The interpretation of your own personal mythology is part of it. As I see it is more than that, is the interpretation of your own personal language, for instance what I call cold, could be warm for you. And what comes to my mind with the word "cold" could be a dead body, whereas it could be an ice cream for another guy.