Post: #1

Interesting book review :

"I’m about halfway through the 600-page book (with over 100 additional pages of notes) by my friend Fred Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion, which will be formally released on Tuesday. It’s an excellent read: Fred was formerly chair of the English Department at the University of California at Berkeley, and writes clearly and engagingly. If you want to know why Freud was a fraud, and has fallen from grace, read this book, which attempts to answer the question, “How did a poor but ambitious Jewish boy from Vienna turn himself into a renowned doyen of psychoanalysis?” It’s not a full biography, for it concentrates on Freud’s early years when he transformed himself from a failed nobody into a world-famous figure. I’ll give the Amazon summary, which is accurate:

From the master of Freud debunkers, the book that definitively puts an end to the myth of psychoanalysis and its creator

Since the 1970s, Sigmund Freud’s scientific reputation has been in an accelerating tailspin―but nonetheless the idea persists that some of his contributions were visionary discoveries of lasting value. Now, drawing on rarely consulted archives, Frederick Crews has assembled a great volume of evidence that reveals a surprising new Freud: a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who in fact never cured anyone, who promoted cocaine as a miracle drug capable of curing a wide range of diseases, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise. The legend has persisted, Crews shows, thanks to Freud’s fictive self-invention as a master detective of the psyche, and later through a campaign of censorship and falsification conducted by his followers.

This is no exaggeration; Crews’s extensive work has turned up the picture of a fiercely ambitious, self-aggrandizing man who would stop at nothing—including scientific fraud, rewriting his personal history, blatant sycophancy, and even hastening the death of a good friend through misapplication of “cocaine therapy”—to make his name. (Freud’s extensive use of cocaine, which he considered a medical panacea, on himself and his patients is especially disturbing.) He succeeded in his ambitions, of course. But from Crews’s earlier work (reprised in more detail in this book), and the research of others, we now know that Freud carried on his fraudulent “science”—which involved a hefty dose of confirmation bias and simply making up stuff—after he’d become a famous psychoanalyst.

The front-page review of the book in today’s New York Times, by George Prochnik, is largely negative, but Prochnik’s assessment is way off. He decries the book’s negativity, but in fact Freud was pretty much an odious character, and his “science”, and even his insights into the psyche, were largely worthless. (Crews has emphasized here and in his earlier writings that what is seen as valuable in Freud’s ideas was developed by people before him, and Freud added almost nothing except a bunch of specious and now-discredited hypotheses.)

Prochnik:

Yet, confoundingly, Freud “is destined to remain among us as the most influential of 20th-century sages,” Crews writes, claiming that the attention bestowed on him by contemporary scholars and commentators ranks with that accorded Shakespeare and Jesus. Here is a fascinating conundrum: The creator of a scientifically delegitimized blueprint of the human mind and of a largely discontinued psychotherapeutic discipline retains the cultural capital of history’s greatest playwright and the erstwhile Son of God.

Crews is right that the matter demands further investigation, but this is not the book he has written. Instead “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” focuses on the man — specifically how a reflective young scientist with high ambitions and gifted mentors lost perspective on his “wild hunches,” covered up his errors and created “an international cult of personality.” In practice, this translates into 700-plus pages of Freud mangling experiments, shafting loved ones, friends, teachers, colleagues, patients and ultimately, God help us, swindling humanity at large. Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.

But Freud’s character and duplicitous practices were already in place when he was a young medical student, and in that respect he didn’t develop: he remained the same man when he later hit on a set of ideas that were thought to be not only culturally transformative, but personally curative. Freud’s acolytes, as is well known, have bowdlerized his history, censoring letters and documents that make him look bad, and not looking too hard at Freud’s supposed “cures” (which didn’t take). Only now have people like Crews begun to delve into Freud’s archives (his letters to his fiancee, quoted extensively by Crews, are telling), and the results aren’t pretty. I’m not an expert on Freud, but Crews’s scholarship paints a damning portrait of the man—and the scholarship, though conveyed in lively words, is extensive. Tellingly, nowhere in Prochnik’s review does he find fault with Crews’s scholarship and evidence.

Google says this about Prochnik:

GEORGE PROCHNIK’s essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in numerous journals. He has taught English and American literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is editor-at-large for Cabinet magazine, and is the author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise and Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology.

Prochnik hurls this brickbat at the end:

Crews has been debunking Freud’s scientific pretensions for decades now; and it seems fair to ask what keeps driving him back to stab the corpse again. He may give a hint at the opening of this book, when he confesses that he too participated in the “episode of mass infatuation” with psychoanalysis that swept the country 50 years ago. The wholesale denigration of its founder is what we might expect in response to a personal betrayal of the highest order, such as only an idol can deliver. Paraphrasing Voltaire, if Freud didn’t exist, Frederick Crews would have had to invent him. In showing us a relentlessly self-interested and interminably mistaken Freud, it might be said he’s done just that.

This is unfair. Yes, Crews was once taken by Freud’s ideas, and was slowly disillusioned. Given that those ideas dominated much of twentieth-century thought—Freud is ranked with Einstein and Marx as one of the three Jewish men who changed modern humanity’s self image—it’s completely fair to reveal what one found when further digging into Freud’s life and practice. What Prochnik is doing here is psychoanalyzing Crews, and blaming the book’s “negativity” on an intellectual acting-out based on disillusionment. And even if that were true—and I’m sure it’s not—Crews’s scholarship stands on its own, and does indeed show us a “relentlessly self-interested and interminably mistaken Freud”. One could well question Prochnik’s motivations in writing a negative book review while neglecting the facts that the book adduces, but psychoanalysis of an author is a mug’s game.

I’m not writing this defense just because I know Fred, but because Prochnik’s review is unfair and inaccurate. If you have any interest in Freud and psychoanalysis, I highly recommend this book. It’s by no means dull or tedious, for the writing is great and the evidence damning."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc...nd/534231/

Post: #2

I don't have more than passing knowledge of the psychodynamic perspective, since pretty much all my knowledge of psychology comes from a high school course, but I think that Freud's work appeals to the civilization-destroying postmodernists. Unlike the theories of Carl Jung, which seek to better explain and elevate human spirituality, Freudian psychology reduces human thought to sexual instincts and belittles the idea that man is a higher being. It's little wonder that modern education loves Freud so much.

Post: #3

As shown by Enigma in his thread, Jung definitely has more practical relevance for normal people. His stuff on archetypes is really good, but something I think requires a certain maturity, that you have to be self aware enough to see outside your upbringing. That's when his stuff on archetypes and anima/animus is really good. It can help you understand more clearly the motivations in your life and live according to these "inborn" belief systems.

Post: #4

I've seen Freud's ideas dismissed more and more often lately in books I read.

Frankly, I'm glad. Even having never really dug that far into it, his theories never sat right or rang true with me. And it's good to know humans aren't quite as twisted as he imagined them to be.

Beyond All Seas

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.
To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes
frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Kipling

Post: #5

When practically applied, Freud leads to confusion: i.e. self-doubt, skepticism toward's one's parents, and a questioning of your sexual desires. Subsequently, the great man becomes a half-man. He's taught to replace confidence with a befuddled state. In many ways, he becomes a wandering Woody Allen...a pathetic schlub, lost in a cosmopolitan city.

Western civilization was built on a warrior class. The brave soldiers of ancient Greece and Rome that believed in the greatness of their society and were willing to fight to defend it. What would have happened if they were riddled with Freudian self-doubt? They surely would have been overrun by barbarian tribes. The great works of antiquity might never have been known.

Perhaps that was the point as along...have the educational system anoint Freud as a demigod. Afterwards, the Western man will be psychologically weak and subsequently, more easily conquered.

Post: #6

Good thread BB1.

The Freud clan is dodgy. You've got double nephew (a lot of intermarriage in Ashkenazi circles back then) deep state propagandist Edward Bernays, and grandchild British pedophile ringleader Lib Party honcho Clement Freud (who was probably involved with the Madeline McCann kidnapping).

Freud was a bit like Einstein in that he ripped off past research, the concept of id, ego and the subconscious was already developed by the ancient Greeks, Plato had already established that thoughts and impulses remain hidden to the conscious mind.

Einstein's legacy is worth revisiting too, it is even murkier. His most notable works were not his, that's why he did not receive the Nobel for relativity, but rather later in his career, for the photoelectric effect, which he also did not discover (mostly Planck's work IIRC).

Post: #7

Great post BB1, I look forward to more of your writings.

You have it on point MajorStyles. I always felt research based on Freud was missing half of the picture. I can definitely see the various base instincts driving me, but there's always been an other aspect beyond the animalness that had an ability to transcend it. Freud completely missed this aspect.

I hope that for the future that we within western culture re-ignite the passion that drove the enlightenment and move out of this post modernist mire that we've found ourselves in.

Post: #8

(09-16-2017 04:35 PM)Beyond Borders Wrote:  I've seen Freud's ideas dismissed more and more often lately in books I read.

Three-related thoughts:

1) Marxists always attack observable-reality. Discrediting Freud was an obsession of Second Wave Feminists, and they won't stop until Feminist Theories of Psychology dominate.

2) Marxists always use Freudian techniques of social manipulation to gain control.

3) Marxists don't want to share power. This is why, for example, they'll attempt to socially-shame you into believing social-shaming doesn't work.

Now, look at the source: The Fucking Atlantic. Every article they write is designed to destroy the social and sexual functionality of their reader base so they keep consuming status objects of useless beauty and voting Liberal in an attempt to stave off their emotional misery.

Why would they suddenly be telling the truth in this article?

Quote:Frankly, I'm glad. Even having never really dug that far into it, his theories never sat right or rang true with me.

Then you can't comment. The popular conception of Freud is incredibly-dumbed down, and often mistakes psychological dysfunction as being also applicable descriptors of psychologically-healthy people, who worked through these issues in childhood.

There's a very high intellectual barrier to entry that's simply beyond the horsepower of modern midwit university thinkers and the vast majority of the general population. You either possess the capacity to mentally-juggle multiple-advanced abstract thought concepts to find comprehension in psychoanalysis, or you don't. Since most Uni Psych graduates are now female and probably now down around the 90-100 IQ level, Freud might as well be writing in Martian. Their engines are underpowered enough, (over 30 IQ points difference), so they'll think he's insane, and he'd think they were functionally-retarded.

Note that, based upon Freud, I would predict most of these women start in the psych field trying to understand why they're so fucked up, which also matches the observable reality of my lived experience, as they diagnose every man who doesn't conform to their dictated script as a 'narcissist', rather than face the uncomfortable truth that they're not perfect and special enough to walk away from.

Quote:And it's good to know humans aren't quite as twisted as he imagined them to be.

Except they are.

See what I just wrote. The uncomfortable truth always loses out to safer lie. It's never her fault that she's dumped. It was because he was 'X', which absolves her of responsibility. Which means she never examines the uncomfortable realities of her behaviour, then never learns, which means she's guaranteed to be repeatedly-dumped and miserable.

Now, extrapolate denial of observable reality outwards, and you'll understand why so many women choose Marxist lies.

For me, it's a lie to deny that most humans ever amount to any more than animals, and whilst it's noble aim for something higher from ourselves most people who believe the latter fail to take into account the mental weaknesses the former predicts.

This isn't nihilism. It's understanding how to advance beyond the animal state. You can't ever reach greatness - higher functionality - if you learn to control your low animal instincts, lest they control you.

This is why I don't necessarily see The Bible and Freud as being at odds with each other. You can interpret him as speaking of the Fallen Nature of Man, and working towards psychological health could be read as working towards a higher spiritual state. This is probably why so many self-heath books resemble religious texts and their writers often resemble Cult Leaders .

Unless people are capable of admitting the unnerving brutality of their unaddressed animal instincts, all you end up with is a bunch of people running around screaming about how they're such good people making the world better whilst destroying themselves and others in the process.

Freud's theories - whatever his personal failings - are great, reliable predictors of behaviour, particularly for both game and social purposes. This is why Marxists would sell it as a falsehood to the masses, because, if his theories can be used to undo society, they can also be used to rebuild it.

So, when I pointed out on here back in 2013 how the children of the liberal elite aren't 'triggered' but Victorian Sensibles, that touches on Freud. Same with my 2014 prediction that they'll eventually believe in Violent Fascism as Righteous.

So when ugly Lesbians redesign superhero characters to remove all trace of femininity; or a Female Typists with a dead daddy says she 'can't stop fucking Trump supporters'; or I overhear an ad with a woman speaking seductively about how 'decadent' a chocolate bar but that 'you deserve it'; or notice that Lindy West's husband was abandoned by his Father but overprotected by his 400+ lbs mother; or bitchy gays on a political forum are laughing at a porno featuring built redneck guys in MAGA hats spit-roasting a mexican guy whilst chanting 'build the wall' like it's incisive political satire, and they're only ironically-jerking off over the bullies they're eternally-attracted to but can never have; or Laurie Penny's filthy bedroom turns out to accurately-mirror the state of her disordered mind and she admits Roosh isn't unattractive; or a 200 pound fatty cockblocks me from talking to her thin, beautiful friend and tries to set up the love / hate conversational push / pull with me, like we're in a bad romantic comedy and arguing will make me decide to fuck her, and not her prettier, thinner friend; or I hear Lily Allen singing how her boyfriend treats her with respect and tells her he loves her 15 times a day but never makes her 'scream' in bed; or a friend hooks up with a girlfriend with an emotionally-abusive woman who is a perfect-mirror of his emotionally-abuse mother; or a rugby coach I know keeps jokingly-coming onto me and our other mates every time he's drunk, trying to reenact his childhood sexual abuse with a filter of plausible-deniability; or millennials in their twenties are dressing up as sonic the hedgehog and shitting their diaper; well, you can see why society's inability to face harsh truths about itself by ignoring Freud leads to predictable misery and dysfunction.

I was a fat kid, who became a very fit teen, and a built man, because I investigated the reasons why I sought emotional-gratification through food, and, by admitting their was a problem, I got it under control. These sort of investigations are probably why a girl's promise of Anal Sex holds no power over me, and why I've never felt any desire to jerk off over video game characters, superheroines, Smurfette and Transformers. (A Millennial musician I know confessed his undying sexual attraction to me a few years ago because, apparently, I remind him of Optimus Prime. I initially thought he was joking until he showed me his dating profile).

Ignore Freud at your peril, especially when it comes to game. Both are just seizing on seemingly-unrelated snippits of information and being able to understand the links between them and recontextualise them, thereby predicting behavioural outcomes. So, a girl will voice one thought, you keep in it your head as you continue talking, she'll voice another thought, it joins the first piece of information, until you have nine or ten of these ideas active in your mind as you keep talking to her, and see the obvious links.

Put this information together = "OMG, how do you know me?"

There's got to be an easier way to explain this. Let me think on it.

Post: #9

One data point I might add I've mentioned before, but it comes from Edward Wilson's book Consilience: Freud was only able to remain unattacked for so long because biology and chemistry were still in their infancy. When the "hard" sciences started to get their act together and grew capable of launching credible research (i.e. falsifiable experiments) into human activity, Freud's work started to prove unreliable or flat-out wrong.

Consider, for example, the Oedipus Complex. Freud regarded this as a necessary stage of psychosexual development, that literally every kid in the world went through a phase of wanting to fuck their mother. He also held that failing to get through this stage of development resulted in a person becoming a paedophile, a homosexual, or neurotic (a nice little factoid if anyone starts trying Freudian arguments or insults on you, because most leftists don't know that or choose to ignore it).

Either way, the point is that Oedipal Complex is a load of bunk. The Westermarck Effect -- unlike Freud -- has been verified scientifically; in essence, there appears to be an epigenetic rule that if you spend long periods of time from age 0 to age 6 with the same people, you will generally develop an aversion to fucking them.

As said, this presents a massive problem for anyone trying to use Freud's theories more generally, because he based so much of his ideas about human sexuality on this weird-ass model of development. The standard comeback to this will be "B-b-but other stuff he wrote must be correct," to which the reply is the same as for the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, which Michael Crichton summed up rather well:

Quote:“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

Freud was, in my view, similar to Nietzsche: a deeply damaged fuckhead whose disorganised, quasi-religious pronouncements managed to catch the imagination of similarly-damaged fuckheads in influential fields, i.e. psychiatry. Just because a broken clock is right twice a day should never mean that you throw out the working clock for the broken one.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #10

Freud was never taken seriously by the scientific community. Psychoanalysis has had more of an effect on popular culture, because of the always entertaining "sex" angle, and it was popularized by Hollywood and the literary arts. But as far as science, forget it.

"Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department"

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/weekin...ml?mcubz=1

"Madness at the movies: Why Hollywood went crazy for Freud"

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movi...m928k.html

Post: #11

^ Sorry, started typing that hours back and wandered off before posting.

The problem is being able to explain this in relatable way, which means finding the right level to pitch a very complex idea at. Here's my analogy:

Psychoanalysis, Game and Harmonic Theory are all the same thing.

You're listening and extracting the information you need on the fly, and are able to form a richer picture out of it that other people aren't always able to see on their own due to the mind's capacity for maintaining and linking abstract thought construct.

Say I spend a few hours listening to a bunch of old records. I'll retain pieces of information from each one, and notice certain interrelationships and harmonic similarities. Which means, if I'm bored and curious I can sit down, visually read the waveforms, and roughly cut out some loops and see what I can build with it that still retains structure and makes sense, (though sense is dependent on the listener's IQ).

Talking to girls, or talking to a client, all I'm doing is cutting out the required loops of relevant information. The test of validity is their recognition and understanding of my deeper personal insight from the noise that they themselves can't always sift.

So, listen to this. I'd played about an hours worth of records, then messed about a bit to see how the ideas both fit and collided.

http://tinyurl.com/ya8bw8cu

Initially, this is as simple an explantion as I can make it. Pretend each loop is something on interest a girl volunteers to me. So, the first four bars are a drum loop from "Message To My Girl" by Split Enz. The idea is interesting, so I keep it in my head. We keep talking, the girl brings up something else. The bass from Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust". I can juggle these two abstract ideas, keep them in my head.

After 8 bars, another thought. "Under The Milky Way" by the Church. Juggling three simultaneous thoughts. No problem. Sly Stone (funk guitar). 4. The Beatles (lead guitar). 5. Vocal. 6. Chorus 7+8 simultaneous ideas.

I take a swerve. Girls always try and derail you. Can I bring in new information, whilst retaining some aspects of the old and keep going? This is more like game. The constant-juggling of information on the fly.

Does it sound like harmonically-rich music, or does it sound like noise? Well, that would depend on where a listener is in relation to where I pitched the intelligence level at.

By contrast, here's between 10-14 different songs playing together at any one point in time. Music or insanity, all dependent on +- 2 Standard Deviations.

http://tinyurl.com/yd95odrk

Freud is just Harmonic Theory, you still have to know how and when to apply it and when it's destructive rather than constructive. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Para: the Oedipus Complex is much richer a concept than that. Interestingly, I've found it an accurate predictor for what modern social engineering sweeps under the rug about homosexuals and their feelings about incest. If you saw the vile Gay Nazi blogs I linked to a while back, there was the expected family-fucking involved.

Maybe it's simply just too complicated to explain in a society that is a standard deviation south from Freud's time. The pattern of this year seems to be telling me, as a society, we've moved past explanation and comprehension of complex ideas. Soundbytes and off-handed dismal is the new currency. Leaves a guy like me out in the cold, but, being isolated from an increasingly-psychologically-damaged mass isn't the worst idea the world.

Oddly, everyone I've ever met north of 140 gets Freud, despite the criticisms.

Post: #12

Quote:Instead “Freud: The Making of an Illusion” focuses on the man — specifically how a reflective young scientist with high ambitions and gifted mentors lost perspective on his “wild hunches,” covered up his errors and created “an international cult of personality.”

So no actual dissection of Freud's ideas, just attacks on Freud's character and motivations. Huh.

Like AB pointed out, second-wave feminists attacked Freud and they did it in the same exact way this author is doing it: by attacking his grandiosity, drug use and all the collected anecdotes of his deficiencies. Yet, never much an attack on the substance of his ideas. You'd think such a clear fraud would have his ideas get debunked at some point by now.

Freud was brilliant as a scientist and a psychoanalyst, but once you see him primarily as a sociologist of his time, he stands alone as one of the most brilliant men of the West in the past 200 years. He recognized that he and his generation stood between the past -- characterized by what we would term "traditional authority" -- and modern times -- characterized by "liberation." He was conservative, but not the grandiose "conservatism" practiced by modern capitalists like Trump, but conservative in the sense that he understood that all humans possess grave limitations. Grave limitations we all possess as humans in general and, then, our own personal limitations. Our rebellion against this inescapable reality characterizes the modern world. And this rebellion really started gaining steam during his time, hence his focus on happiness, anxiety and sex.

I have little time for yet another character assault on Freud (almost wrote Trump, Freudian slip), but if you want to sack up and take on an intellectual challenge, read the seminal work on him -- Freud: The Mind Of A Moralist. Rep point for any guy that can read it, understand it and post a review.

Post: #13

(09-16-2017 11:24 PM)AnonymousBosch Wrote:  Maybe it's simply just too complicated to explain in a society that is a standard deviation south from Freud's time. The pattern of this year seems to be telling me, as a society, we've moved past explanation and comprehension of complex ideas. Soundbytes and off-handed dismal is the new currency. Leaves a guy like me out in the cold, but, being isolated from an increasingly-psychologically-damaged mass isn't the worst idea the world.

I get a similar feeling thinking/talking about stuff admittedly much simpler than you do.

For instance, why voting is pointless/irrational on an individual level, but it's used to give the masses a *feeling* of control. Or why buying a house in an overpriced market sucks. Or why PUA/game is brilliant, almost regardless of what you do/plan to do in life. Or why vaccines(esp something pointless like the flu vax) are more risky and harmful than they're worth. Or that as of late, casual sex is "dead" in the west for most guys(Most guys cannot reliably bang girls that aren't significantly less attractive than they are, relationships aside).

This sort of analysis seems really simple to me and for a long time I would assume friends, family etc would be smart enough to "get it" with a little explanation or that they would genuinely care what I think. I've realised this is pretty much never true unless it's with a mildly "autistic" guy(or less commonly, girl) but still they would get some topics but never "get" every topic. So I'd learned not to bother for most but every so often the sigma part of me wants to stir shit, so I do.

I'm affected by peer pressure much less than most people and it's overrated in a sense to not succumb to it. If you happen to be wrong, especially if you're proven wrong, you'll be made out to seem really retarded or kooky. Even if you have really good reason to believe what you believed, you're dumb because you didn't understand what "everyone else could understand". If you're right, you'll still be thought of as wrong until you're proven right. When you're proven right, only people with integrity will give you credit, everyone else claims you got lucky and couldn't possibly have known that. In a sense it's better to believe what everyone else believes, if you truly think everyone else is wrong, just quietly adjust your behavior to dodge the consequences but pretend everyone else is right. I don't actually care what people think of me, but it's a screwed up observation nonetheless.

Voting in particular mildly grinds my gears. All the pro democracy people are out in force with their bs arguments about how great voting is, how important it is to have a high voter turnout, how important it is you go to vote, etc etc. Sometimes people say borderline retarded arguments pretty much out of virtue signalling(although I can't understand why being democratic/voting is virtuous at all) and no one calls them out on it and a lot of people actually go along with it almost like the Emperor's new clothes. I try not to get involved and ignore it but often they insist on asking me who I'm voting for. I've really got to learn not to get dragged in the mud about explaining why I'm not voting, but sometimes people are way too zealous and refuse to let me be or understand my point of view.

Post: #14

(09-16-2017 11:24 PM)AnonymousBosch Wrote:  Freud is just Harmonic Theory, you still have to know how and when to apply it and when it's destructive rather than constructive. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

Para: the Oedipus Complex is much richer a concept than that. Interestingly, I've found it an accurate predictor for what modern social engineering sweeps under the rug about homosexuals and their feelings about incest. If you saw the vile Gay Nazi blogs I linked to a while back, there was the expected family-fucking involved.

Maybe it's simply just too complicated to explain in a society that is a standard deviation south from Freud's time. The pattern of this year seems to be telling me, as a society, we've moved past explanation and comprehension of complex ideas. Soundbytes and off-handed dismal is the new currency. Leaves a guy like me out in the cold, but, being isolated from an increasingly-psychologically-damaged mass isn't the worst idea the world.

Oddly, everyone I've ever met north of 140 gets Freud, despite the criticisms.

I'm probably not smart enough to get Freud's full implications, then, and I'll just as readily admit ideas that are plain as day to people with high intelligence are probably really fucked up in execution when they have to be handed down to the just-over double digits crowd. (This same concept is what makes me optimistic that the Jewminati don't have quite the level of control over the world that they are said to; the microchip linking all your life information together still has to be handed over to a code monkey in India to be implemented.)

Either way, I clearly have more reading to do, since I trust the opinions of the guys here. Especially Little Dark. I've no doubt TravelerKai could teach me how to engage six men, but LD could teach me to engage six hundred.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm

Post: #15

(09-17-2017 05:15 AM)Paracelsus Wrote:  I'm probably not smart enough to get Freud's full implications, then, and I'll just as readily admit ideas that are plain as day to people with high intelligence are probably really fucked up in execution when they have to be handed down to the just-over double digits crowd.

Ah, I didn't mean it like that, mate. You're intelligent, and I understand your criticisms of Freud. It's more... there's ideas that are easy enough for everyone to grasp, and others that are too subtly-nuanced to ever hold widespread appeal, particularly if people are deliberately-trying to stop people investigating or understanding them.

It's why, say, I find an album like Prince's 'Lovesexy' fascinating to this day, yet found 'Diamonds and Pearls' (a huge album) incredibly-boring, and doubt I've listened to it since 1993 or so.

It's simply about figuring out how to explain complex ideas in an accessible way, (something I'm not always very good at), so if you found the right teacher, you might be able to fully-comprehend it, even if you don't agree with it. Society seems to have lost all interest in this, almost as if we're being trained to not be able to comprehend complexity by design.

Either way, you're allowed to disagree with Freud. All that matters is you work on any psychological problems you have. Find what works for you to help improve yourself, but the important thing is you need to be able to honestly face your own destructive impulses without excusing them or prettying them up.

Post: #16

Did a reverse search on this pic, seem like I've got a new book on my to-read list.

Post: #17

An excellent book on this subject is: "Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture".

The author believes that Freud was a quack who was promoted by popular culture, but never taken seriously by science.

This is a review taken form the link below. I broke it into paragraphs to make it easier to read.

"'Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture_ by psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey traces the role of Freudian theory (particularly that concerning the role of sex in childhood development) in American culture and thought. Freud postulated that the behavior of children was sexual in nature and maintained a highly dogmatic position about such notions as the Oedipus complex throughout his life. This book examines the harmful role of Freudian theory in American culture. Torrey argues that Freudian theory is not only unscientific but has been harmful leading to a culture of narcissism and irresponsibility.

Torrey begins by discussing Freud's practice as a psychoanalyst. Freud was very influenced by occult ideas, including numerology as well as the idea of his fellow physician Wilhelm Fliess that the nose is linked to human sexuality. This led Freud to operate on the nose of many patients, leading often to permanent disfiguration.

In addition, Freud advocated the use of cocaine as a panacea for all physical and mental ills and took the drug heavily himself. Freud's system also was very denigrating towards women viewing the mother as the source of all mental problems and personal unhappiness. Nevertheless, because Freud openly discussed sex as the source of mental problems he became a favorite among those who advocated sexual liberation during the Victorian era. Prime among these figures was the anarchist Emma Goldman who became enthralled by Freudianism and advocated for birth control and sexual freedom.

In America, Freud's ideas became linked to leftist political thought after the emigration to this country of anthropologist Franz Boas. Torrey contrasts nature and nurture showing how at the beginning of the Twentieth century rightists were associated with the nature side of the spectrum, often advocating eugenics and biological determinism as well as racialism. In contrast, leftists were associated with the nurture side of the spectrum, often appealing directly to Freud to show that social problems were rooted in child rearing methods.

Cultural relativists like Franz Boas came to advocate leftist politics while appealing to both Freud and Marx against rightists such as the racialist Madison Grant. Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, two of the students of Boas, became very famous with their anthropological work supposedly showing that in more "liberated" cultures adolescence was less stressful. Nevertheless, as Torrey shows the work of Mead in particular was heavily biased by faulty methods, she came to see in the cultures she examined exactly what she expected to see because her methods of questioning influenced her informers.

Mead was a bisexual and this may have led to her adoption of Freudian theory. With the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler, the nature/nurture question became settled, making it in bad taste to argue that behaviors could be genetically determined. Torrey next devotes a chapter to the influence of Freud among various political radicals and social elites, particularly among a group of leftists in New York City who openly advocated for Trotsky. Torrey also shows how Freudian ideas became influential in both the nursery and the prison system. In the nursery, the ideas of Benjamin Spock, based on Freudian concepts, came to prevail for an entire generation. It should be remembered that before Spock mankind had been successfully raising children since time immemorial. Nevertheless, Spock would come to take a prime place among a generation of individuals. In the prison system, Freudian ideas were used often to argue that criminals were products of a dysfunctional childhood.

This frequently allowed criminals such as Leopold and Loeb to be given lighter sentences and led to an abuse of the insanity defense. Indeed, the notion of personal responsibility became untenable in the light of Freudian theory. Torrey next turns his attention to the intellectual elite, including individuals like Marcuse, Goodman, and Brown who often advocated a combined Freudianism and Marxism as part of the New Left. It should be noted that although Freudianism was frequently linked to radical politics in America, that Freud himself was an elitist.

Freud looked down upon lower members of society and his services were pretty much uniformly offered to only the wealthy class. Indeed, Freud refused to treat the severely mentally ill. Torrey suggests that Freudianism has led to a massive misallocation of resources, in which the most severely ill are never treated or treated with Freudian nonsense, while those who have only life complaints are given full Freudian analyses. Nevertheless, Freud must be credited for his promotion of the idea of the unconscious. Torrey also notes the similiarity of Freudian analysis to a religion, emphasizing its Jewish influence, something that cannot be overstated. Torrey concludes with two appendices in which he discusses the influence of Freud on intellectuals (...)

After reading this book, I became more convinced than ever that Freudian ideas have been highly harmful to the psychic well-being of many Americans. In addition, the linkage between Freudian ideas and elitist leftist politics has proven disastrous for this country and for man's freedom."

https://www.amazon.com/Freudian-Fraud-Ma...R3KC6Q73PZ

Post: #18

AB is right about this.

The following concepts by Freud are great.


Repetition compulsion is a psychological phenomenon in which a person repeats a traumatic event or its circumstances over and over again. This includes reenacting the event or putting oneself in situations where the event is likely to happen again. This "re-living" can also take the form of dreams in which memories and feelings of what happened are repeated, and even hallucination.

The term can also be used to cover the repetition of behaviour or life patterns more broadly: a "key component in Freud's understanding of mental life, 'repetition compulsion'...describes the pattern whereby people endlessly repeat patterns of behaviour which were difficult or distressing in earlier life"

Psychological Projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.[1] For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting.


Defence mechanisms may result in healthy or unhealthy consequences depending on the circumstances and frequency with which the mechanism is used.[3] In psychoanalytic theory, defence mechanisms (German: Abwehrmechanismen) are psychological strategies brought into play by the unconscious mind[4] to manipulate, deny, or distort reality in order to defend against feelings of anxiety and unacceptable impulses and to maintain one's self-schema.[5] These processes that manipulate, deny, or distort reality may include the following: repression, or the burying of a painful feeling or thought from one's awareness even though it may resurface in a symbolic form;[3] identification, incorporating an object or thought into oneself;[6] and rationalization, the justification of one's behaviour and motivations by substituting "good" acceptable reasons for the actual motivations.[3][7] In psychoanalytic theory, repression is considered as the basis for other defence mechanisms.[3]

These are great descriptors of human psychology, and I'm sure you could find examples of each in the Bible, which I believe was the first 'manual' to explain human behavior, except in story form, which has an advantage in conveying a message in that it is interesting, the disadvantage is the problem of misinterpretation. Freuds clinical descriptions don't leave room for misinterpretation.

A good book for anyone looking into Freud is "A Primer of Freudian Psychology" - https://www.amazon.ca/Primer-Freudian-Ps...0452011833

It's a small book, and covers his main concepts concisely.

I had a friend "Project" onto me what I had accused him of only 2 weeks earlier. It was so obvious. lol. Denial ... I spoke to a girl I knew and stated 'your boyfriends cheating on you', I saw her eyes glass over for a second and she spoke to me about something else, she could not hear what I just told her. It was remarkable to see this, pure Denial. Repetition Compulsion, oh yea, loads of girls I've known chasing after alcoholics and abusers, one girl even boasted to me "... I can pick an alcoholic out of a crowd from one hundred metres". I know she could, it was uncanny.

These terms are fine, like how an IOI ( indicator of interest ) is good. It is a good, accurate and concise description of a behavior. I wonder why these people are going after Freuds ideas? They are common-sense to me.

Prince - Lovesexy - Dance on

Post: #19

Lot of ad hominems in the quoted article in the first post which isn't even the article linked to.

While there have been a few references, a couple direct, and many oblique, to the theories of Freud, I find it fascinating that, even on this forum, no one but Zep has taken the time to list the actual theories of Freud they like or dislike, define them, and then explain why they find them valuable.

It doesn't even seem like this thread is about Freud. It is more like a Rorschach test, where the mere mention of the coke sniffing Austrian leads everyone to go off on their own tangent based on their own unconscious proclivities.

This is one of the oddest threads I have seen here yet.

We are rooting around in his bad habits (psychoanalyzing him!), making appeals to science, explaining that only people with certain I.Q.s will truly *get* it, criticisms of his family tree (!), harmonic theory and Prince songs (!), the effects of Freud's theories on the outrospectionist Marxists/SJWs.

A lot of stuff. Not Freud stuff, just stuff.

Freud would have appreciated the free associating.

Post: #20

Beguiled, in examining Freud's legacy and work, it is pretty useful to look at his personal background, the cultural context he emerged from, and how his theories came to become the foundation of modern psychotherapy. Can one really discuss Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey or Franz Boas who, like Freud, became the modern pillars of their academic fields, without placing these figures into their socio-cultural and historic contexts?

(09-17-2017 11:36 AM)Sherman Wrote:  An excellent book on this subject is: "Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture".

The author believes that Freud was a quack who was promoted by popular culture, but never taken seriously by science.

This is a review taken form the link below. I broke it into paragraphs to make it easier to read.

"'Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture_ by psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey traces the role of Freudian theory (particularly that concerning the role of sex in childhood development) in American culture and thought. Freud postulated that the behavior of children was sexual in nature and maintained a highly dogmatic position about such notions as the Oedipus complex throughout his life. This book examines the harmful role of Freudian theory in American culture. Torrey argues that Freudian theory is not only unscientific but has been harmful leading to a culture of narcissism and irresponsibility.

Torrey begins by discussing Freud's practice as a psychoanalyst. Freud was very influenced by occult ideas, including numerology as well as the idea of his fellow physician Wilhelm Fliess that the nose is linked to human sexuality. This led Freud to operate on the nose of many patients, leading often to permanent disfiguration.

In addition, Freud advocated the use of cocaine as a panacea for all physical and mental ills and took the drug heavily himself. Freud's system also was very denigrating towards women viewing the mother as the source of all mental problems and personal unhappiness. Nevertheless, because Freud openly discussed sex as the source of mental problems he became a favorite among those who advocated sexual liberation during the Victorian era. Prime among these figures was the anarchist Emma Goldman who became enthralled by Freudianism and advocated for birth control and sexual freedom.

In America, Freud's ideas became linked to leftist political thought after the emigration to this country of anthropologist Franz Boas. Torrey contrasts nature and nurture showing how at the beginning of the Twentieth century rightists were associated with the nature side of the spectrum, often advocating eugenics and biological determinism as well as racialism. In contrast, leftists were associated with the nurture side of the spectrum, often appealing directly to Freud to show that social problems were rooted in child rearing methods.

Cultural relativists like Franz Boas came to advocate leftist politics while appealing to both Freud and Marx against rightists such as the racialist Madison Grant. Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, two of the students of Boas, became very famous with their anthropological work supposedly showing that in more "liberated" cultures adolescence was less stressful. Nevertheless, as Torrey shows the work of Mead in particular was heavily biased by faulty methods, she came to see in the cultures she examined exactly what she expected to see because her methods of questioning influenced her informers.

Mead was a bisexual and this may have led to her adoption of Freudian theory. With the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler, the nature/nurture question became settled, making it in bad taste to argue that behaviors could be genetically determined. Torrey next devotes a chapter to the influence of Freud among various political radicals and social elites, particularly among a group of leftists in New York City who openly advocated for Trotsky. Torrey also shows how Freudian ideas became influential in both the nursery and the prison system. In the nursery, the ideas of Benjamin Spock, based on Freudian concepts, came to prevail for an entire generation. It should be remembered that before Spock mankind had been successfully raising children since time immemorial. Nevertheless, Spock would come to take a prime place among a generation of individuals. In the prison system, Freudian ideas were used often to argue that criminals were products of a dysfunctional childhood.

This frequently allowed criminals such as Leopold and Loeb to be given lighter sentences and led to an abuse of the insanity defense. Indeed, the notion of personal responsibility became untenable in the light of Freudian theory. Torrey next turns his attention to the intellectual elite, including individuals like Marcuse, Goodman, and Brown who often advocated a combined Freudianism and Marxism as part of the New Left. It should be noted that although Freudianism was frequently linked to radical politics in America, that Freud himself was an elitist.

Freud looked down upon lower members of society and his services were pretty much uniformly offered to only the wealthy class. Indeed, Freud refused to treat the severely mentally ill. Torrey suggests that Freudianism has led to a massive misallocation of resources, in which the most severely ill are never treated or treated with Freudian nonsense, while those who have only life complaints are given full Freudian analyses. Nevertheless, Freud must be credited for his promotion of the idea of the unconscious. Torrey also notes the similiarity of Freudian analysis to a religion, emphasizing its Jewish influence, something that cannot be overstated. Torrey concludes with two appendices in which he discusses the influence of Freud on intellectuals (...)

After reading this book, I became more convinced than ever that Freudian ideas have been highly harmful to the psychic well-being of many Americans. In addition, the linkage between Freudian ideas and elitist leftist politics has proven disastrous for this country and for man's freedom."

https://www.amazon.com/Freudian-Fraud-Ma...R3KC6Q73PZ

Good find, Sherman, bookmarked. The author E Fuller Torrey sounds like a good purple pilled researcher, he covers many interesting and relevant topics in his other books including homelessness, the (mis-)treatment of mental disorders in the US and more specific topics like the Soviet-style internment of political prisoner Ezra Pound on false charges of mental illness. Torrey establishes that Pound's insanity diagnosis was politically motivated. Pound was a very and early outspoken critic of the Fed system and its bankster owners. His work inspired Eustace Mullins to look into the Fed system, best work done on the subject.

Quote:E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., is a research psychiatrist specializing in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He is the executive director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a professor of psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and the author of twenty books. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

Book TV talk on his book about mental health, homelessness and crime:

Post: #21

With Freud was with Marx, Kafka, Adorno and other jewish intellectuals, the analysis might be correct, but the topic is always the weakness of the European and the teachings are always used by their kinsmen to destroy Europeans.

Post: #22

(09-17-2017 05:18 PM)911 Wrote:  Beguiled, in examining Freud's legacy and work, it is pretty useful to look at his personal background, the cultural context he emerged from, and how his theories came to become the foundation of modern psychotherapy. Can one really discuss Margaret Mead, Alfred Kinsey or Franz Boas who, like Freud, became the modern pillars of their academic fields, without placing these figures into their socio-cultural and historic contexts?

No argument from me on that.

However.

There is close to zero analysis of his actual theories though.

This is not an oversight.

Something psychological is going on here.

Something that, as AB mentioned, might easily be explained by one of his theories.
He didn't have all the answers, but he opened up the world of the unconscious as well as the sexual nature of our motivations to academic discourse.

Dude was a freaking intellectual monster. This is Freud we are talking about.


I don't pretend to be an expert on Freud, but the people I know who are, or at least who should be, namely intelligent and sensitive therapists and psychologists, well, none of them pretend that he has been superseded by science or new theories, despite cultural trends to the contrary.

They actually seem a bit sheepish in their defense of Freud's ideas, knowing, as they do, that it is out of fashion.

What exactly do people have a problem with? The concept of the unconscious? The concept of psychoanalysis? Dream analysis? Defense mechanisms? Projection? What Jordan Peterson, admirer of Freud himself calls the "Devouring Oedipal mother?" The concept of the libido? Of repression and sublimation?

What about the concept of the anal stage of development?

These are just off the top of my head, and the last one is a such common expression that people who have never heard of Freud use it to mean controlling.

Freud is part of the foundation of how any reasonably educated person thinks.

I just can't see how he is being dismissed so easily in such a chaotic way.

It smacks of the displacement activity of deep denial.

Heh.

Post: #23

Let's take Freud, he will say, the boy desires to fuck his own mother, so he grows up to have various perversions because his father does not deal with this and "removes mother from boy".

Jung says, the boy desires to know, conquer and integrate the Anima in his psyche and the father must teach him to do so and not get swept away.

Same concept. Two very different expressions.

Post: #24

Albert Ellis was an experienced Freudian Psychoanalyst who gave up psychoanalysis for one simple reason: it didn't work. He went on to develop rational emotive behavior therapy which was based on the philosophy of ancient Rome and Greece. If the philosophy of ancient Greece is more effective than psychoanalysis that should tell you something.

Psychoanalysis isn't taken seriously by psychology. It isn't science. It is actually better classified as a genre of literary fiction. It is used by some subjectivist writers to explain the behavior of characters in fiction and movies. That's why artsy fartsy types love it but scientists don't take it seriously.

Also, the idea of "repression" has been used in some legal cases to falsely accuse people of crimes, where therapists trained in Freudianism induced false memories of abuse in children. So pseudo-science can really hurt people. Repression has not been proven by science. Pseudo-science is dangerous.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

Post: #25

(09-17-2017 11:36 AM)Sherman Wrote:  In America, Freud's ideas became linked to leftist political thought after the emigration to this country of anthropologist Franz Boas. Torrey contrasts nature and nurture showing how at the beginning of the Twentieth century rightists were associated with the nature side of the spectrum, often advocating eugenics and biological determinism as well as racialism. In contrast, leftists were associated with the nurture side of the spectrum, often appealing directly to Freud to show that social problems were rooted in child rearing methods.

Cultural relativists like Franz Boas came to advocate leftist politics while appealing to both Freud and Marx against rightists such as the racialist Madison Grant. Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, two of the students of Boas, became very famous with their anthropological work supposedly showing that in more "liberated" cultures adolescence was less stressful. Nevertheless, as Torrey shows the work of Mead in particular was heavily biased by faulty methods, she came to see in the cultures she examined exactly what she expected to see because her methods of questioning influenced her informers.

Boas, Benedict, and Mead all are mentioned in Edward Wilson's Consilience. They're the people who brought postmodernist idiocy to anthropology; they're the ones responsible for crusading that there's no such thing as a universal human nature.

God save us from people who mean well. -storm