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 various theories about its causes, its transmissibility, and its treatment, but today we can do a definitive PCR test and we know the root cause is an infectious bacteria (though even so, we are still not really sure why, in a cohort of exposed individuals, some immune systems are capable of defeating the microorganism and others are not). Doctors could fairly reliably diagnose it, but that was about it.
Similarly, today there are no definitive tests for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, ADHD, depression or anxiety, and it really just comes down to the opinion of the psychologist/psychiatrist. 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. The two most prevalent approaches to treatment are therapy vs. a collection of drugs with problematic side effects, and even there, the psychedelic class of drugs has largely been banned though they do show promise in controlled treatment (this is changing, but slowly).
Obviously the whole mental illness field has a long way to go if it wants to catch up to the infectious disease field (and even there, we're seeing a lot of recent failures of public health goals, be it from the rise of antibiotic resistance or reckless gain-of-function research).
"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 ADD/ADHD.
What makes psychological disorders difficult to understand is not a mysterious hidden biogenic causation. We know at least in terms of percentage contributions, quite a bit about the involvement of physical processes and systems in psychological disorder, from the gut microbiome to inflammation.
If psychological disorders were essentially diseases, with prognosis, a set of distinct aetiologies etc, psychology would just be a branch of medicine with poor data. Unfortunately mental illnesses are profoundly unlike physical illnesses in numerous ways. For example their symptomatology is usually culturally determined - e.g.: things we associate with depression in the West (dysphoria, anhedonia, melancholy etc) are quite different from the symptoms of epidemiologically similar disorders in other cultures (e.g.: pre-westernisation China).
There's a lot to unpack here, but psychological disorders are profoundly more complex (ontologically) than physical disorders. Often the medical lens isn't particularly helpful. For example we see rates of disorders like anxiety and depression rise under stressful socioeconomic conditions. These are often disorders of meaning and the persons understanding of the world. There are also a host of 'culture bound' syndromes - from anorexia to folie a deux to koro, that make no sense to think of in terms of 'illness'.
So it's as likely that the medical model is holding back understanding of these often sociological, psychological and cultural phenomena as helping. That said it's not nearly as simple as that, since there are genetic components to so many disorders!
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.
Freud was an optimist, and when I read his works, I catch a bit of his enthusiasm and imagine that one day I might be healed, regardless of the clear intractability of my mental problems, so I keep coming back to him and others who followed in his wake. If that makes me a cultist, well, so be it.
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 leading to positive outcomes. Jung even had a falling out with him. But the author is also a neurosurgeon, quite a brilliant one at that. It sounds like a cyclical review in itself. Almost like a modern version of the exact book he is reviewing given his own relationship as a neurosurgeon potentially being forgotten alongside Freud.
"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.
“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]
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:
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!
> 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).
Evil has no place in any psychological context. People who commit these crimes ARE sick. Whether or not they're evil is up to you, but its not a question for psychology
Even if this was the explanation, it doesn't explain why specifically Freud and not <insert another jewish psychologist> didn't become the authoritative source right?
[+] [-] objections|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|2 years ago|reply
For example, compare the understanding of tuberculosis in the 1850s to the understanding of today. Then it was called 'consumption' and there were various theories about its causes, its transmissibility, and its treatment, but today we can do a definitive PCR test and we know the root cause is an infectious bacteria (though even so, we are still not really sure why, in a cohort of exposed individuals, some immune systems are capable of defeating the microorganism and others are not). Doctors could fairly reliably diagnose it, but that was about it.
Similarly, today there are no definitive tests for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, ADHD, depression or anxiety, and it really just comes down to the opinion of the psychologist/psychiatrist. 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. The two most prevalent approaches to treatment are therapy vs. a collection of drugs with problematic side effects, and even there, the psychedelic class of drugs has largely been banned though they do show promise in controlled treatment (this is changing, but slowly).
Obviously the whole mental illness field has a long way to go if it wants to catch up to the infectious disease field (and even there, we're seeing a lot of recent failures of public health goals, be it from the rise of antibiotic resistance or reckless gain-of-function research).
[+] [-] dbspin|2 years ago|reply
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 ADD/ADHD.
What makes psychological disorders difficult to understand is not a mysterious hidden biogenic causation. We know at least in terms of percentage contributions, quite a bit about the involvement of physical processes and systems in psychological disorder, from the gut microbiome to inflammation.
If psychological disorders were essentially diseases, with prognosis, a set of distinct aetiologies etc, psychology would just be a branch of medicine with poor data. Unfortunately mental illnesses are profoundly unlike physical illnesses in numerous ways. For example their symptomatology is usually culturally determined - e.g.: things we associate with depression in the West (dysphoria, anhedonia, melancholy etc) are quite different from the symptoms of epidemiologically similar disorders in other cultures (e.g.: pre-westernisation China).
There's a lot to unpack here, but psychological disorders are profoundly more complex (ontologically) than physical disorders. Often the medical lens isn't particularly helpful. For example we see rates of disorders like anxiety and depression rise under stressful socioeconomic conditions. These are often disorders of meaning and the persons understanding of the world. There are also a host of 'culture bound' syndromes - from anorexia to folie a deux to koro, that make no sense to think of in terms of 'illness'.
So it's as likely that the medical model is holding back understanding of these often sociological, psychological and cultural phenomena as helping. That said it's not nearly as simple as that, since there are genetic components to so many disorders!
[+] [-] DiscourseFan|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sonorous_sub|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thenerdhead|2 years ago|reply
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 leading to positive outcomes. Jung even had a falling out with him. But the author is also a neurosurgeon, quite a brilliant one at that. It sounds like a cyclical review in itself. Almost like a modern version of the exact book he is reviewing given his own relationship as a neurosurgeon potentially being forgotten alongside Freud.
Great article!
[+] [-] coldtea|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marc_io|2 years ago|reply
[1] https://aras.org/concordance/content/logos?back=concordance&...
[+] [-] badrabbit|2 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] shortrounddev|2 years ago|reply
Evil has no place in any psychological context. People who commit these crimes ARE sick. Whether or not they're evil is up to you, but its not a question for psychology
[+] [-] sohkamyung|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gray6|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] snapcaster|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mouse_|2 years ago|reply