Most psychologists don’t care about Freud’s work outside of a historical sense and kinda hate him as a person. His work was quite literally used as an example of pseudoscience by Karl Popper.
And yet for some reason philosophers have an obsession with integrating his views into their work and artists keep using his views as inspiration and analyze existing works via the lens of psychoanalysis.
Why?
Most psychologists […].
And yet for some reason philosophers […] and artists […].
Why are you careful/nuanced with psychologists but dump philosophers and artists in the same bag as if they all do the same?
I see this a lot. The other day, I was watching a science video. Same thing: “some physicists believe…”, “other physicists…”, but “philosophers say…”.
Do you think philosophy and art (disciplines that by their very nature are diverse and creative) create only one type of people? I mean, Karl Popper is a philosopher against Freud, you just said it. You could find many philosophers opposed to Freud, indifferent, critical, in agreement, etc. Artists are the same, very different people among them.
Now, the real question should be why is Freud popular amongst some artists and philosophers and other non-psychologists, especially in certain regions like France and Argentina, or certain traditions like old continental philosophy. And that’s probably the beginning of an answer at the same time: a strong tradition of psychoanalysis within certain circles. Also, a matter of coherence or lack of. For example, if you start reading French existentialism and keep reframing certain aspects of reality, you may find yourself inclined to epistemological paradigms that do not oppose psychoanalytical theories, so you could combine them if you want to. If you start denying materialism in some ways, you may end up denying biological explanations of psychopathological phenomena, so Freud could be a good substitute (or not, depending on the person).
I guess if I were to give a psychological reductionist answer, Freud and similar authors appeal to part of the population that is skeptical of conventional models, the status quo, scientism, hard materialism, etc.
Laziness and expediency.
Freud’s theories are pretty simple to understand and easy to map onto. Back when Freud was influential, people were easily able to import and use it in their literary theory etc. Same thing happened with Lacan but since Lacan builds on Freud it’s essentially the same thing.
In order to use an updated understanding of psychology or even better, neurology, people would have to learn a whe lot of much more complex theory and facts, and explain it to their readers, and apply it into literary theory.
It’s much easier for an overworked academic to take this wrong but much-used system that everyone already knows.
Honestly I think it’s as simple as his notariety.
He is one of the most well-known psychologists and is a bit of a pop culture icon.
It’s like how you see most non-physicists talk about Einstein more than they do Feynman or Higgs.I would have thought he exists in pop culture because of his ideas about freudian slips and how easy it is to make fun of.
Freud actually did do something very very important for modern psychology. He popularized the idea of the subconscious: that humans have thought processes they are not aware of and mostly can’t control (actually the more I learn about it the more I feel like a marionette on my gut bacteria’s strings but that’s besides the point). I’ve also heard he did actually nail down the cause of many mental illnesses: child sexual abuse, but that there was some (formal?/ informal?) political pressure to not list that as the actual cause so he caved and said the patients must have made it up. I’m struggling to remember where I heard that but unfortunately given my personal and professional experience with the mental health system (the personal was more than I liked; the professional is getting there), this sounds depressingly familiar.
Modern psychology doesn’t necessarily support a subconscious, either. At best some individual practitioners like the concept.
Freud’s big contribution was therapy, or a “talking cure” as he called it. The rest was cocaine-fueled nonsense
That is bullshit. Everyone with a pulse knows the brain processes information unconsciously. It’s the basis for most of cognitive psychology, in fact.
Unconsciously, sure. Like, it turns three colour channels into a rainbow plus shades. Subconsciously, no, there’s no (measured) suppressed self that wants to fuck mom or whatever.
Of course there is. For example there’s the study where they brushed chairs with testosterone.
The response to that chemical being present demonstrates goal-driven personality operating below the level of consciousness.
Uncovering unconscious motivations is like 95% of therapy. Everything that isn’t yet articulated is the subconscious.
The fact that he caved and jeopardized data cause of public opinion makes me hate him even more
Because his ‘theories’ are easy to understand for the layperson, and have become tropes in our narrative culture. Most people’s understanding of freud is simple ‘blame your parents for your problems.’
You do see a lot of Jung as well, but Jung’s work is more abstract and out there and is often used symbolically, whereas Frued’s is used literally and in sitcoms.
Because they literally don’t know a single other phycologist. Just as most people couldn’t name a modern philosopher so would cite Socrates or Plato.
To be clear, the vast majority of academic philosophers (at least in the Anglophone world) find Freud to be useless pseudoscience. Freud gets taken seriously in literary analysis and continental philosophy. The latter is a minority position (although drawing a hard and fast line between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy is pretty difficult these days).
When I was getting my PhD in philosophy, I would have been laughed out of the room if I wrote a term paper that used Freud in any significant way.
when I think of other famous psychologists my mind goes to people like zimbardo or milgram, because of their attention grabbing studies. but they are not great examples because their work has big problems with ethics and replicability. after that, maybe pavlov or skinner? but their work is most famous for its less ethical uses. harlow? or a bunch of his contemporaries who got famous mostly for torturing monkeys? maybe piaget?
I only did psychology to a college level but I think a lot of 20th century psychologists are famous for the wrong reasons. Freud was full of crap but at least he didn’t torture any monkeys
Dunning-Krueger effect.
I think some of this is also just that pop science often lags years or decades behind real science. Most people couldn’t name another famous psychologist, or an evolutionary scientist beyond Darwin, or a physicist beyond Einstein.
Specifically regarding art and philosophy, even if Freud’s idea were wrong, you can still glean something useful (or at least interesting) from using them as a starting premise.
Most psychologists kinda hate Freud as a person? Do they want to talk about that? Why have hate for a dead person?
Look up “penis envy”. Or “Oedipus complex”. Or some of his views on women.
Recognize him for a different OG status:
His work was so bad that all the “internet nerds” worked overnight trying to disprove him.
Because “hehehe penis” is more fun than an actual understanding of psychology.
They spend multiple weeks on him in Intro to psychology classes. Even they tell you at the end it’s a bunch of rot (if you haven’t figured it out yourself), if that’s like 1/5 of your psychological knowledge, you’re gonna use it
His work is important to study from an historical perspective in order to see how psychology grew into what it is today, in the same way that it’s important that we learn about outdated concepts like tabula rasa and phrenology in order to better understand what is correct. The fact that he applied so much of his own subjective thoughts to his brand of psychology shows us how we, as potential future psychologists, also have the same capacity to search for confirmatory evidence and eschew disproving evidence in search of a theory. He’s a great example of what not to do when it comes to psychology.
