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?
I blame their mothers.
I blame the mother fuckers.
I blame the cigars
They want to kill their fathers and talk about Freud to their mothers?
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.Thesis envy
Probably because his ideas is what made popular psychology known to the world. His ideas have largely been debunked but there are nuggets that have been developed and become something different, rather than abandoned.
His ideas about ego, id superego etc are more commonly understood than the current psychiatric terms.
So, just like we call it pop culture, pop psychology is well known and he’s the head.
I get that for the artists, but what about the philosophers? Are they not big dick academics who will lose their standing if their ideas are nonesense?
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
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
Because “hehehe penis” is more fun than an actual understanding of psychology.
It’s a way of framing discourse, ideas, and concepts. In the most general sense, id, ego, and super ego descibe that which is fundamental and can not change, that which can change but is not known at hand, and that which is presently known and can be actively changed. Try applying this framework to current events and you’ll see why people still discuss it.
Police brutality is a good example. What is fundamental to a police officer and drives them? What more maleable mindset does this create? What conscious decisions and actions does an officer take?
Obviously, this framing doesn’t perfectly capture the issue, but it does set you on a structured path to addressing it. If having an authoritative personality is what drives a police officer, how might we instill a more positive mindset when they are on patrol? How can the actions of a police officer negate that mindset?
And so on, but sometimes a cop is just a cop…
It’s the only psychologist who has a name known to the bulk of laymen, so he’s quoted for the sake of sounding educated. And more often than not, entirely misquoted to produce a “credible” argument.
The thing is, he wasn’t even a psychologist.
Well I know for sure he was a coked up one. And if he’s not a psychologist, then he was just cokehead.
That’s about what I was thinking, the self-perpetuating fame. The general population just doesn’t know the names of many psychologists, but they’ve heard of Freud and a handful of Freud’s ideas.
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.
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.
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, philosophy 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 their own thing.
It’s much easier for an overworked academic to take this wrong but much-used system that everyone already knows.
Not true in Argentina and France, both infected by psychoanalysis and in particular by Lacan.
Your psychologists are Lacanian? And I thought it couldn’t get any weirder after being told you fellows get blue dollars from caves.
This gets at the history of literary and art theory in the 20th century. The basic answer is that people in the arts adopted psychodynamic frameworks from Freud, Lacan, etc, while actual psychologists moved on.
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
deleted by creator
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.
