Taking the Psycho's out of Psychoanalysis



Reading an article, is psychoanalysis still relevant today? I pretty much answered in the negative and left it at that. Then I was pushed to actually 'read' the article and it's still a no, but, I do feel it fair to develop my answer just a tad for the uninitiated, so here goes.

 

So Sigmund Freud, a Victorian, invents an 'idea' (And remember ideas can become memes and once they go viral, are bulletproof, even with no primary evidence to support the idea), were talking 1910 here and he calls it, 'Psychoanalysis'.

 

So you have a problem, lets say depression, so Freud starts digging around in your head planting whack job ideas in your unconscious mind and magically, like a magician pulling the white rabbit out of his hat, finds that not only do you want to kill your father, but you also want to make babies with your mother! To be honest I think Freud was having some client projection problems in reverse and he was getting all his mental health issues out there, not the other way round.

 

Now thanks to Freud and his 'Oedipus complex', it is difficult to enjoy Sophocles trilogy: The Theban Plays the way I used to, despite the fact Freud just made up a complete load of crap, but I digress.

 

Freud is a lot like Karl Marx, in that Marx claimed to be compiling a 'scientific approach' to economic understanding. In fact Karl Popper thoroughly debunked the works of Marx and Engels as pure bunk because their works failed the falsifiability test. This he also applied to Psychoanalysis:

 

'As Popper represents it, the central problem in the philosophy of science is that of demarcation, i.e., of distinguishing between science and what he terms ‘non-science’, under which heading he ranks, amongst others, logic, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, and Adler's individual psychology... Popper accordingly repudiates induction and rejects the view that it is the characteristic method of scientific investigation and inference, substituting falsifiability in its place.

 

It is easy, he argues, to obtain evidence in favour of virtually any theory, and he consequently holds that such ‘corroboration’, as he terms it, should count scientifically only if it is the positive result of a genuinely ‘risky’ prediction, which might conceivably have been false.

 

For Popper, a theory is scientific only if it is refutable by a conceivable event. Every genuine test of a scientific theory, then, is logically an attempt to refute or to falsify it, and one genuine counter-instance falsifies the whole theory.'

 

Freud's Psychoanalysis was not, has not and likely never will be able to withstand the rigorous testing of the scientific method. It was a great idea that has stood the test of time to the Nth degree, he has his devoted disciples, in the same way Marx has his followers and neither party can ever be shown evidence to falsify the ideas of Marx or Freud, because the whole point of their work is the ideas are not falsifiable, the facts are shoe horned to fit the belief system of the acolytes.

 

Which brings me to the point of despair that in the 21st Century, even PhD professors still lack the most basic critical thinking skills or even a working knowledge of the scientific method. I can imagine the uneducated, and especially students, following the Dogma of Marx and to some degree Freud, but to expect normally intelligent and matured adults to swallow the dogma wholesale is ludicrous.

 

Try Cognitive behavioural therapy if you must try anything, it's based on Ancient Greek Philosophy, not plays, it works mostly by not telling you subconsciously you want to stab your father whilst raping your mother, rather it makes you in to an Ancient Greek Philosopher by telling you to question your own beliefs! You know that little voice that's always talking to you, question the validity of it's arguments, ask for evidence, that sort of thing. It works almost immediately and it's something, critical thinking skills, that should be drummed in from primary school upwards, that way I wouldn't have the need to write these articles!