Live data from Hacker News

The Cult of Sigmund Freud

newstatesman.com

11–20 of 38 posts

Re: The Cult of Sigmund Freud

#11
post #10

I think it's fair to compare modern psychological knowledge and treatment strategies to mid-19th century medical approaches to infectious disease, in that root causes of mental illness are poorly understood and diagnosis is based more on opinion than on irrefutable tests. For example, compare the understanding of tuberculosis in the 1850s to the understanding of today. Then it was called 'consumption' and there were…

"It's clear a history of trauma of various sorts increases the risks of developing mental illness, but nobody can say with much certainty if there are genetic predispositions or not." This isn't accurate. As far back as my psych degree in the late 2000s there were clear estimates of the degree of heritability of various psychological disorders - especially disorders with strong organic elements like schizophrenia and…

>For example their symptomatology is usually culturally determined

Could you expand on that? How is depression different in China?

Re: The Cult of Sigmund Freud

#12
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It's clear a history of trauma of various sorts increases the risks of developing mental illness, but nobody can say with much certainty if there are genetic predispositions or not." This isn't accurate. As far back as my psych degree in the late 2000s there were clear estimates of the degree of heritability of various psychological disorders - especially disorders with strong organic elements like schizophrenia and…

>For example their symptomatology is usually culturally determined Could you expand on that? How is depression different in China?

So I have no idea what the current state of the research on this is, or how depression manifests in contemporary (culturally Westernised) China, but historically there was quite a bit of research indicating it was more somaticised. People suffering from a depression like disorder were more likely to feel physically exhausted and weak than sad or hopeless. Something more like what we'd today refer to as chronic fatigue in the West.

This study (from the 80s) looks like one of the origins of that idea - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00051427

Bear in mind my degree is quite old at this point, but a reference point for me during my undergrad was Malcolm MacLachlan's brilliant book Culture and Health A Critical Perspective Towards Global Health.

https://brownsbfs.co.uk/Product/MacLachlan-M/Culture-and-hea...

Here's a quote from the book (which I was lucky enough to receive as a PDF preprint in college)

"The experience of depression within an individual can vary over time – commonly referred to as the disease course – and, as already noted, it can vary between individuals of the same culture – commonly referred to as a disease syndrome. Kleinman’s suggestion that depression can also vary across cultures and across different historical epochs is quite consistent with a biologi- cal view of depression. He has also studied a condition known as neurasthenia. This condition, commonly reported in China, is characterised by a lack of energy and physical complaints such as a sore stomach. Klein- man has suggested that, although depression and neurasthenia are different illness experiences, they are both products of the same underlying disease processes – depression. In other words, neurasthenia is the Chinese version of western depression."

It's obscenely expensive, but you may hypothetically be able to find other ways of reading the book online.

Re: The Cult of Sigmund Freud

#13

Very interesting book review. I think popularizing the unconscious is different than coming up with it. It’s like when the Greeks would use the word “logos” to refer to it. Many around the timeframe of Freud popularized it. Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, Janet, etc. From my studies it just sounds like people didn’t like how authoritative Freud was. Which is funny given the line about the necessity for a confident doctor lea…

“Unconscious” in ancient Greek would be better translated as ἀνεξήγητος (unspeakable, ineffable). They are related, sure, but not the same. In fact, “Logos” quite opposes the Unconscious in Jungian Psychology. [1]

[1] https://aras.org/concordance/content/logos?back=concordance&...

Re: The Cult of Sigmund Freud

#14
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For example their symptomatology is usually culturally determined Could you expand on that? How is depression different in China?

So I have no idea what the current state of the research on this is, or how depression manifests in contemporary (culturally Westernised) China, but historically there was quite a bit of research indicating it was more somaticised. People suffering from a depression like disorder were more likely to feel physically exhausted and weak than sad or hopeless. Something more like what we'd today refer to as chronic fatigu…

Thank you for the detailed response!

Re: The Cult of Sigmund Freud

#15
I wholly distrust anything freudian. Every major claim he made I keep finding serious flaws in it.

Freud did not popularize the unconscious or thinking about how you think. Basic children's sunday school at a Church even talks about how you think. Major religions from Christianity to Buddhism talk about how the thought life of a person affects everything and the split and conflicted nature of humans. They just don't use post-freudian terms like conscious and unconscious.

What freud popularized was a secular way of coping with how humans think, analyzing it in a purely secular context and considering thousands of years of knowledge on the subject as childish fairytales and defining a framework by which a modern secular world can explain the actions of people and respond to them.

Socially, I have seen horrific impacts of his work from criminal punishment to people attempting to understand and help people who have chosen to be evil (worst examples being child rapists, school shooters,etc... not sick, evil! But evil has no place in a freudian context).

This documentary shared on HN a while back was eye opening for me, how almost every aspect of modern capitalist life was influenced by freud:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s&feature=youtu.be (Century of the self). Worth watching the whole thing.

I don't discount psychoanalysis as quackery but I am very hostile to it. I would need to filter any attempts of psychoanalytical thinking with a ton if critical analysis, taking it with buckets of salt!

Re: The Cult of Sigmund Freud

#16
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Logos" meant a few different things in ancient Greek (or later philosophy), but never the unconscious: divine/cosmic end reason of things, philosophical discourse, rationality, and so on.

Not sure where GP got that, either. There was no term for "consciousness" in ancient Greece, but perhaps psyche (soul) gets closest. And logos is far, far older than ancient Greece... In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. (Hope you know I'm kidding)

John wasn't kidding.

Re: The Cult of Sigmund Freud

#17
post #10

I think it's fair to compare modern psychological knowledge and treatment strategies to mid-19th century medical approaches to infectious disease, in that root causes of mental illness are poorly understood and diagnosis is based more on opinion than on irrefutable tests. For example, compare the understanding of tuberculosis in the 1850s to the understanding of today. Then it was called 'consumption' and there were…

"It's clear a history of trauma of various sorts increases the risks of developing mental illness, but nobody can say with much certainty if there are genetic predispositions or not." This isn't accurate. As far back as my psych degree in the late 2000s there were clear estimates of the degree of heritability of various psychological disorders - especially disorders with strong organic elements like schizophrenia and…

>there were clear estimates of the degree of heritability of various psychological disorders - especially disorders with strong organic elements like schizophrenia

How can this be stated with any certainty when we don’t even have a medical definition of what schizophrenia actually is, just a description of some symptoms. What are these genetic components, and how can we be at all sure it isn’t a behavioral transmission?

Re: The Cult of Sigmund Freud

#18
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure where GP got that, either. There was no term for "consciousness" in ancient Greece, but perhaps psyche (soul) gets closest. And logos is far, far older than ancient Greece... In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God. (Hope you know I'm kidding)

John wasn't kidding.

Usually it's translated as "Word." And it's very true that language created the world.

Re: The Cult of Sigmund Freud

#19
post #7

Very interesting book review. I think popularizing the unconscious is different than coming up with it. It’s like when the Greeks would use the word “logos” to refer to it. Many around the timeframe of Freud popularized it. Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, Janet, etc. From my studies it just sounds like people didn’t like how authoritative Freud was. Which is funny given the line about the necessity for a confident doctor lea…

"Logos" meant a few different things in ancient Greek (or later philosophy), but never the unconscious: divine/cosmic end reason of things, philosophical discourse, rationality, and so on.

Heraclitus, Aurelius, etc all use this in a similar way to how Freud and Jung extended it. You’re allowed to interpret it however you please just like I have. I believe they all are the same abstract concept. The dao, the logos, the divinity, the unconscious, etc.

Re: The Cult of Sigmund Freud

#20
post #13

Very interesting book review. I think popularizing the unconscious is different than coming up with it. It’s like when the Greeks would use the word “logos” to refer to it. Many around the timeframe of Freud popularized it. Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, Janet, etc. From my studies it just sounds like people didn’t like how authoritative Freud was. Which is funny given the line about the necessity for a confident doctor lea…

“Unconscious” in ancient Greek would be better translated as ἀνεξήγητος (unspeakable, ineffable). They are related, sure, but not the same. In fact, “Logos” quite opposes the Unconscious in Jungian Psychology. [1] [1] https://aras.org/concordance/content/logos?back=concordance&...

That’s an interpretation. There are plenty of others regarding the integration of opposites, transcendence, and unconscious archetypes to name a few.
Post reply on HN