The Cult of Sigmund Freud

You know I've spent a lot of time studying Freud, and yes I have to admit that he is on his own bullshit A LOT, but you can't deny many of the things he argues without seeming ridiculous yourself. Our parents are the beginnings of our social world, and structure our relations even down to the most intimate. Human culture supersedes human nature to the point where sexual fetishism completely overrides "natural" sexuality. And related to the last two points, our social mode of being is deeply interrelated with our sexuality, and ones emotional problems are always part and parcel of the very language they use to describe them.

It's not just "mommy milkers," Freud describes in his writings the entire structural order of being and the interrelation between our actual experience of reality and our mode of describing it as being deeply intertwined. How can someone trump such a claim with regular "empirical" findings, such a notion of empiricism from some pure, privileged stand point is already infected with a set of presuppositions which make it impossible to question the very social norms which structure their perspective. Freud is still so popular, so well-read, because for all his kookiness, his coke-addiction, his authoritarianism and his cult of personality, he still made pathbreaking discoveries about the structure of the human psych. You can shit talk him all you want, but people really do want to fuck their therapists, and it was only Freud who was first able to formally theorize why.

Freud did also directly credit Schopenhauer as his philosophical antecedent, so there's not even any controversy there. Just like Plato, he made up his own myths, doesn't mean they weren't practical. The trouble is not his mythology, its everyone else's, and everyone who fails to recognize the mythological origins of their own empiricism and notions about the world.

>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.

No, they didn't. Here's how Heraclitus used Logos (as I described it above): https://chs.harvard.edu/chapter/17-the-heraclitean-logos/

And here's how Aurelius used it: "Marcus Aurelius uses logos to refer both to the divine that infuses and directs all things in nature and to the “fragment” of God, the rational mind, that is found in every person".

Nothing to do with the subconscious in either case.

"just a description of some symptoms."

Yes - all psychological disorders are syndromal. None are purely genetic or environmental, in fact the DSM and and ICD explicitly rule out psychosis or positive schizophrenic like symptoms caused by say toxin poisoning from their diagnostic criteria.

What we can do is heritability studies on those who do fit the diagnostic criteria. We can test their relatives on neurocognitive batteries, including twin studies and get quite an accurate picture of the level to which genes contribute on a population level. Here's one review - https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/43/4/...

So you're right in asserting that schizophrenia likely isn't one clearly delineated disorder, but this is less due to an unclear 'medical definition', and more due to the fact that it's not entirely endophenotypic. It has sociogenic and psychogenic elements too - as do ALL psychological disorders.

We diagnose from symptoms, but symptoms too are culturally mediated. We can never have a simple 'medical definition' of schizophrenia, because it's not only genetic, or only environmental, or only behavioural. It exists on the line between the creation and performance of personhood, and the biological mechanisms that make that possible.

Put another way - if schizophrenics behaved 'normally' we wouldn't have a disorder at all. We deduce an internal experience of suffering, based on what they tell us of their inner experience (delusions and hallucinations), and the ways in which their behaviour departs from normative. We see a disease course, because many patients also have physical symptoms over the life course (like catatonia), although this is complicated by the brain damage caused by long term use of antipsychotics. A disorder of perception, selfhood and behaviour isn't reducible to a biological mechanism gone wrong - any more than joining a cult, following an extremist belief, or committing an act of terrorism would be. Those behaviours too could be said to have a genetic component - in so far as there are measurable aspects of impulsivity, neuroticism etc that can be used to explain them. But they're clearly not a disease in the conventional sense of the word.

There are many interpretations of said "fragments" that exist. Even in the article you link, there are plenty of interpretations extending the logos to the idea of both a personal unconscious (freud) and collective unconscious (jung).

I don't care to argue. I believe everyone is right in their own interpretations. It isn't unheard of for something that predated an idea to then be interpreted as an extension of said contemporary idea.

That's my disagreement, they are not sick. They made a choice. Sickness is something harmful to that you can't help and don't want. Esentially what you are saying is a belief you disagree with can be a sickness. If someone believes stealing is fine how is it in the purview of psychology to tell them otherwise? Why is that different for mass murder?

You're saying psychology cares about evil just prefers to use the term sickness. Or maybe I misunderstood and you were really saying psychology does not consider analysis of why people do evil something worth studying.