When You Say One Thing But Mean To Do Your Mother.
By far, Freud poses the most problems for anyone subjected to an introductory psychology class. (Yes, I just made a profoundly generalized statement stemming entirely from my own experience that, very probably, no one else will relate to.) Not in terms of difficulty, but in terms of content. His theories, for the most part, appear ludicrous and bizarre, filled with levity, and with fantastic notions that seem to stem from the warped imagination of a man who, for unknown reasons, has had a huge influence on much 20th century thought, who managed to convince innumerable people to buy into his weird ideas about psychological development and the organization of the brain. The influence of Freud asserts itself in the form of an architectural mystification, an enigmatic edifice that no one in academia appears ready to do away with. Even my psychology teacher, who admitted that Freud has lost much respect over the years, and that his original disciples, people like Jung and Erikson, broke away from him mainly because of his outlandish notions about sexuality (see his oral, anal, and phallic stages), still would not completely dismiss him, would not directly call him inane or irrelevant, for reasons relating to people still following him today, his founding of psychoanalysis and the influential ideas that he introduced, namely the unconscious. Moreover, in the part of the class on personality development, Freud figured prominently in her lectures, so much so that his idea of Eros and Thanatos came up. Why? What for?
It all makes little sense to me considering that the beginnings of modern psychology, or psychology defined as the scientific study of mind and behavior, originate in 1879 with Wilhelm Wundt and not in 1900 with Freud's publication of The Interpretation Of Dreams. Also, if one wishes to adhere to a scientific definition in an even slightly strict sense (a reasonable aim because without that, psychology would have no demarcation from philosophy), Freud should have no business in a psychology class. Sure the school he developed has the name psycho- in it, but it has no basis in scientific study, no links to the scientific method or any other accepted paradigm for attaining scientific fact. He based his theories on a few case studies of hysteria (already a suspect psychological label) from which he wrote at great length about the psyche and how normal heterosexual development occurs in stages that, upon trying to develop them, should have signaled failure when he lacked even a mediocre explanation for how females develop sexually. Where did his sway come from then? I cannot imagine people reading his works like Civilization and Its Discontents or his essays on sexuality and saying to themselves, "Yeah! This guy really knows what he's talking about! I too, as a child, saw my mom and thought, 'She's castrated, her vagina isn't its own mechanism, it's merely the lack of a penis' and then looked at my dad and told myself, 'Wow, if I go through with my sexual desires towards my mother my dad will turn me into a woman by castrating me.'" Any sort-of scenario like that appears absolutely fictional. It would make me doubt every belief I have ever had or every perception of the world that I have ever obtained if someone read Freud, even in the height of his reception, and identified with his theories, or took serious his theories on infant development. I mean, maybe his mom was really hot but the majority of us have no urge to fuck our mothers. So where could his very real popularity and authority come from? The only thing I could really think of would be his notion of the unconscious.
Most future theorists or psychologists that appropriated Freud took from him the idea of the unconscious. Cixous and Mulvey, for two quick examples, find themselves in the same difficulty that my professor found herself in. They both have serious issues with Freud as he relates to women but they never do away with his overall framework of the mind, they never get rid of a psychoanalytic foundation resting upon a suspicious notion of most behavior and thought coming from an unconscious. Disputing his other ideas comes quite easily to anyone with half a pulse but doing away with the unconscious proves a little more difficult. Difficulties first come from not being able to prove it or disprove it using the methodology of science. Right there should be enough to get rid of Freud in any psychology department (he has historical significance, not contemporary relevance); what really makes me wonder why anyone listened to him in the first place has to do with his blatant disregard for proving his theories: he states them as fact despite their consisting of nothing but speculation and his own interpretation of his patients. Why did no one reject him early on? No science should have equaled no audience in the case of Freud. Not that he caused incalculable damage with his ideas, rather, they serve little positive purpose in understanding people. Aside from his dubious beginnings, the unconscious as a concept does very little. What I see it doing or attempting to do mostly is to incorporate irrationality into a description of people. Freud dealt with patients that he could not understand, his previous knowledge and training in neurology did nothing to explain the behavior of his case studies. Hysterical women in his office unable to give him clear explanations for their behavior or to accurately assess themselves and provide lucid descriptions of their motives lead to a quite common impasse. Freud encountered an inability to explain human behavior. So, as a solution he developed the notion of the unconscious. Doing that allowed him to do some work, allowed him to move forward, to try and explain, to conceptualize if you will, the irrationality and incoherence he faced in his patients. By inventing this unconscious, Freud then had a way to pinpoint the unexplainable actions he was paid to correct and normalize.
For Freud, then, the unconscious had a great amount of usefulness, but for anyone not under financial pressures to try and cure someone's psychological or other problems, it does little. When one does something and someone else asks, "Why? Why did you do that?" to say, "Because my unconscious desires prompted me to" answers nothing. Okay, then, so your unconscious did it, so then what? It is then doubtful whether interpreting parapraxis or dreams or free association or whatever will allow one to understand their motives or behaviors. I mean, I suppose the unconscious has some validity if only because people do things for reasons they don't think about. For instance, we all use language unconsciously. Without thinking about grammar, we create syntactically correct sentences with ease, without necessarily being able to label and diagram each part of speech and placement of that part within an acceptable structure--we just sort of do it. Furthermore, it's entirely possible to engage in activities or hold beliefs without realizing where they come from. That I do concede, but what always made me wince in discussions of the unconscious is the question of, if it does exist, how Freud was able to figure it out. He obviously didn't do dissections and map out the hypothalamus, cerebellum, and pons or something like that as the unconscious or other similar ridiculous thing. He didn't perform psychoanalysis on himself and listen to his own words and decode them, or else the therapist would have little use if people could perform therapy on themselves. He did it then by listening to other people, yet if it's unconscious, shouldn't it be by definition beyond the grasp of the conscious mind? Should not the hidden aspects of the mind be unapproachable by reason? How could anyone really discover what's hidden from everybody in Freud's design? What it more accurately seems like is that people are able to function without cognitively working out the reasons for their actions or constantly having to answer the question, "Why?" That instincts and a feeling of naturalness comes across whenever one functions through a structure, which ends up blurring the awareness of a structure but it is always possible at least to trace out a few causes of behavior or thought. Sure, genotypes provide a genetic framework, but much can be apprehended even though it might remain always overdetermined. People do do things unconsciously but in a different way than Freud envisions it. There is more going on than is usually noticed but, if honest, people can explain and understand themselves in ways other than what Freud imagines: it's not all a symbolic existence and mistakes of language and unconscious imagery do not come out to underly all stories and things created by people. In conclusion, I cannot get rid of the unconscious entirely but I can get rid of Freud's notion of it, along with the rest of his thought. Goodbye Sigmund.
It all makes little sense to me considering that the beginnings of modern psychology, or psychology defined as the scientific study of mind and behavior, originate in 1879 with Wilhelm Wundt and not in 1900 with Freud's publication of The Interpretation Of Dreams. Also, if one wishes to adhere to a scientific definition in an even slightly strict sense (a reasonable aim because without that, psychology would have no demarcation from philosophy), Freud should have no business in a psychology class. Sure the school he developed has the name psycho- in it, but it has no basis in scientific study, no links to the scientific method or any other accepted paradigm for attaining scientific fact. He based his theories on a few case studies of hysteria (already a suspect psychological label) from which he wrote at great length about the psyche and how normal heterosexual development occurs in stages that, upon trying to develop them, should have signaled failure when he lacked even a mediocre explanation for how females develop sexually. Where did his sway come from then? I cannot imagine people reading his works like Civilization and Its Discontents or his essays on sexuality and saying to themselves, "Yeah! This guy really knows what he's talking about! I too, as a child, saw my mom and thought, 'She's castrated, her vagina isn't its own mechanism, it's merely the lack of a penis' and then looked at my dad and told myself, 'Wow, if I go through with my sexual desires towards my mother my dad will turn me into a woman by castrating me.'" Any sort-of scenario like that appears absolutely fictional. It would make me doubt every belief I have ever had or every perception of the world that I have ever obtained if someone read Freud, even in the height of his reception, and identified with his theories, or took serious his theories on infant development. I mean, maybe his mom was really hot but the majority of us have no urge to fuck our mothers. So where could his very real popularity and authority come from? The only thing I could really think of would be his notion of the unconscious.
Most future theorists or psychologists that appropriated Freud took from him the idea of the unconscious. Cixous and Mulvey, for two quick examples, find themselves in the same difficulty that my professor found herself in. They both have serious issues with Freud as he relates to women but they never do away with his overall framework of the mind, they never get rid of a psychoanalytic foundation resting upon a suspicious notion of most behavior and thought coming from an unconscious. Disputing his other ideas comes quite easily to anyone with half a pulse but doing away with the unconscious proves a little more difficult. Difficulties first come from not being able to prove it or disprove it using the methodology of science. Right there should be enough to get rid of Freud in any psychology department (he has historical significance, not contemporary relevance); what really makes me wonder why anyone listened to him in the first place has to do with his blatant disregard for proving his theories: he states them as fact despite their consisting of nothing but speculation and his own interpretation of his patients. Why did no one reject him early on? No science should have equaled no audience in the case of Freud. Not that he caused incalculable damage with his ideas, rather, they serve little positive purpose in understanding people. Aside from his dubious beginnings, the unconscious as a concept does very little. What I see it doing or attempting to do mostly is to incorporate irrationality into a description of people. Freud dealt with patients that he could not understand, his previous knowledge and training in neurology did nothing to explain the behavior of his case studies. Hysterical women in his office unable to give him clear explanations for their behavior or to accurately assess themselves and provide lucid descriptions of their motives lead to a quite common impasse. Freud encountered an inability to explain human behavior. So, as a solution he developed the notion of the unconscious. Doing that allowed him to do some work, allowed him to move forward, to try and explain, to conceptualize if you will, the irrationality and incoherence he faced in his patients. By inventing this unconscious, Freud then had a way to pinpoint the unexplainable actions he was paid to correct and normalize.
For Freud, then, the unconscious had a great amount of usefulness, but for anyone not under financial pressures to try and cure someone's psychological or other problems, it does little. When one does something and someone else asks, "Why? Why did you do that?" to say, "Because my unconscious desires prompted me to" answers nothing. Okay, then, so your unconscious did it, so then what? It is then doubtful whether interpreting parapraxis or dreams or free association or whatever will allow one to understand their motives or behaviors. I mean, I suppose the unconscious has some validity if only because people do things for reasons they don't think about. For instance, we all use language unconsciously. Without thinking about grammar, we create syntactically correct sentences with ease, without necessarily being able to label and diagram each part of speech and placement of that part within an acceptable structure--we just sort of do it. Furthermore, it's entirely possible to engage in activities or hold beliefs without realizing where they come from. That I do concede, but what always made me wince in discussions of the unconscious is the question of, if it does exist, how Freud was able to figure it out. He obviously didn't do dissections and map out the hypothalamus, cerebellum, and pons or something like that as the unconscious or other similar ridiculous thing. He didn't perform psychoanalysis on himself and listen to his own words and decode them, or else the therapist would have little use if people could perform therapy on themselves. He did it then by listening to other people, yet if it's unconscious, shouldn't it be by definition beyond the grasp of the conscious mind? Should not the hidden aspects of the mind be unapproachable by reason? How could anyone really discover what's hidden from everybody in Freud's design? What it more accurately seems like is that people are able to function without cognitively working out the reasons for their actions or constantly having to answer the question, "Why?" That instincts and a feeling of naturalness comes across whenever one functions through a structure, which ends up blurring the awareness of a structure but it is always possible at least to trace out a few causes of behavior or thought. Sure, genotypes provide a genetic framework, but much can be apprehended even though it might remain always overdetermined. People do do things unconsciously but in a different way than Freud envisions it. There is more going on than is usually noticed but, if honest, people can explain and understand themselves in ways other than what Freud imagines: it's not all a symbolic existence and mistakes of language and unconscious imagery do not come out to underly all stories and things created by people. In conclusion, I cannot get rid of the unconscious entirely but I can get rid of Freud's notion of it, along with the rest of his thought. Goodbye Sigmund.