/lit/ - Literature

At the penis.

>>4083045
Don't bother he's been debunked.
Also
>social sciences

By smoking cigars.

>>4083045

>21st century
>Freud

by raping yourself

I don't know enough about Freud to know if it's the best, but I found the Pelican "Freud and The Post-Freudians" by J.A.C. Brown helpful for a basic understanding. I've only read small excerpts of Freud, but he is quite interesting, if dense, reading in and of himself.

Read books written by Sigmund Freud.

>>4083045
He isn't really used so much in modern psychology (ie his outdated theories have been replaced/expanded), but I still think he provides some interesting food for thought. His writings influenced the course of 20th century psychology greatly, so even if he has been "debunked", as another anon put it, he's still important from a cultural/historical standpoint. Once you read Freud you sort of see him everywhere, and realize just how deeply steeped into modern culture he was/is.

Anyway, I'm no psychologist, but I found him to be a great introduction to the field (which has since, obviously, grown and become much more of a science in its own right). I would check out Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, which he edited (and I believe published) during his lifetime. They were given as a series of lectures (duh) to a group of young psychoanalysts wayyyy back in the day, right when the science (or field, whatever) was only just getting on its feet.

If you're still interested, check out Interpretation of Dreams, which is his Big Book That Everyone Knows. It's pretty cool, expands on some theories brought up in Introductory Lectures. And if you're interested in other psychology beyond Freud, I'd definitely check out Jung. He was Freud's student and friend. A lot of people prefer his theories to Freud's (they're a lot less sexy, but still kinda sexual, if you get my meaning), plus he addresses things which Freud never really gets to, sorta opening up psychology to a whole new side of human nature (ie paranormal phenomena, deja vu, prophetic dreams, that sort of thing).

Far too many writers of the Frankfurt School, not counting pretty much every*fucken*one else at the time, draw on Freud for me to ignore him. Studying Marcuse and Adorno, should I go ahead and start with Civilization and its Discontents? There's still Ego and the Id, The Interpretation of Dreams, Introductory Lectures, Totem and Taboo, and so on. Someone here must have read this guy, where should I start?

>>4083101
Thanks, I appreciate this. I just bought the Freud Reader edited by Peter Gay which has some 900-odd pages a material to slosh through. I'm down for some depth psychology, but can't just jump into the deep end like that. I'll start with those introductory lectures and probably move from there, flipping through whatever seems interesting. Jung is super trippy. When I'm in that kind of esoteric mood its always a toss-up between picking up Jung or Schopenhauer.

Everything is sexual and introverts are evil.

>>4083061
>>4083066
Idiots denying his literary influence

>>4083061
>>4083796
All this shit that comes up in every thread on Freud, that he is not worthwhile because he's "debunked" or that he's only worthwhile because he's had "literary influence" or provides some "food for thought" is extremely stupid. Barthes and Wittgenstein both "debunked" themselves and their own work in their own lives, Barthes frequently from one publication to the next, but that doesn't mean his development of structuralism and semiotics and contributions to criticism aren't extremely important to understanding their respective fields, weren't and are not still visionary, enlightening and applicable.
Plato has been debunked too, you fuckwads. I really don't know what image Freud has developed that attracts so many teenagers to try and position themselves above and beyond him. Is it just that you think pyschologists are a scam or you think automatic writing is some sort of pretentious "modern art" prank?

>>4083127
I'm actually reading his 'An Outline of Psycho-Analysis' right now. It's pretty gud. However, the translation of 'Id, Ego, Super-Ego' isn't very accurate. By "Ego" Freud meant the "I" or consciousness. Thus, for an English speaker, it can become a bit confusing as "Ego" is typically used to signify that part of the self which is self-centered, narcissistic, e.g. "He needs become less egoistical".

>>4083820
>I really don't know what image Freud has developed that attracts so many teenagers to try and position themselves above and beyond him. Is it just that you think pyschologists are a scam or you think automatic writing is some sort of pretentious "modern art" prank?

I think that the true motivation behind this anti-Freudianism is primarily a reaction to how arrogant Freud and his followers were, and the fact that many aspects of his theory can make people uncomfortable. For example, Freudian psychologists in the past have been quick to call people out for "projecting", "repressing", "displacing", etc., and I think that this attitude can become a bit tiring for some people who don't accept Freud's theories.

As a result, they reject his thinking out-right, so not to influence anyone to possibly become one of those pesky psychoanalytically inclined people; who are obsessed with the unconscious and all it's mystery, etc.

However, as other posters have noted, Freud's theories were extremely influential; to reject reading him out-right is a bit stupid in my opinion. I think that it is the same with the Bible, really. You should not rejecting a reading of the Bible only because you dislike Christians or their tradition. That's terribly simple minded.

>>4083796
lol. any idiot can be influential to literary figures.

>>4083857
You seriously shouldn't be on /lit/ if you think you can discuss 20th century literature in depth without knowing Freud.

>>4083847
>have been quick to call people out for "projecting"
sounds like 4chan to me

>>4083119

Civilization... is short and sweet. It's the only Freud I've read but I'd say it's pretty accessible.

>>4083820
I think psychologists are a scam.

>>4083866

>implying you need Freud if you've understood Nietzsche and Schoppy

>>4083874

Former psychology major here,

I understand that sentiment, but it really depends on the individual writer/therapist. There are a lot of charlatans out there but also a lot of truly wise men/women in the psychology biz. And then there are the harmless "hire a friend" types.

>>4083836

And the everyday use of 'cynical' is nothing like the sense of the Cynic philosophers of ancient Greece. Language changes. Deal with it pleb.

>>4083880
I think psychology is right on the boundary of where the amount you get paid to obtain accurate results starts to be overshadowed by the amount you get paid to satisfy the prejudices of customers/professors/supervisors/yourself. As one crosses over from neurology, "accurate" results start to become too scarce, too subjective, or too expensive to find and use. And all the other crestfallen social sciences build off psychology, of course.

Can anyone shed some light on why so many people discredit psychology? Don't they make all sorts of useful studies and stuff?

>>4083903

actually*, fuck it.

>>4083897

Me again,

1. What do you mean by 'crestfallen'?

2. Do all the other social sciences necessarily build off psychology? I wasn't aware that this was the case.

3. Do we have reason to believe without doubt that accuracy of science will automatically equal success in treatment? Even Lacanian psychoanalysis, as loopy as his theories were, has been reported to achieve progress with regard to the mental health of patients.

>>4083899

It's because very few people know what 'psychology' actual is, and have the impression that it is a pseudoscience like tarot card reading or palmistry.

>>4083899
Not so much for Freud, but for the DSM. In its first iteration, Homosexuality was considered a mental illness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry

>>4083913
>>4083899

Just a note to anybody reading this who wants to explore critical psychology/anti-psychiatry further: thelastpsychiatrist.com is a fucking treasure trove.

>>4083899
because hard science master race XD

>>4083919

Duh, STEM is the dominant discourse and STEM gets the moniez. That's why you go into neurology and use that as a basis if you're serious about doing psych. Fuck, even Freud was a hardcore STEMfag years before he started publishing (he was one of the original discoverers of the neuron, but nobody ever seems to remember that.) Nigga spoke like 5 languages too.

>jpg
>moving
>4kb

how

>>4083930
this

>>4083926
Don't go into neurology without a degree in computer science

>>4083045
ur mum

>>4083976

Why not?

>>4083903
>1. What do you mean by 'crestfallen'?

I'm unable to convey language correctly today. What I mean is that they have generally less credibility then other sciences because it's more difficult to conduct/interpret experiments in those fields, interpretations are muddled by human bias (politics, general perception, etc.), and because social sciences are usually not "opt-out" - you can choose to postpone a construction project if you're unsure about which design to use, but you can't do the same with a federal budget or, you know, thinking and behavior.

>2. Do all the other social sciences necessarily build off psychology? I wasn't aware that this was the case.

That's not their only source, but it's a common nexus. If it involves people, psychology is going to be involved.

>3. Do we have reason to believe without doubt that accuracy of science will automatically equal success in treatment? Even Lacanian psychoanalysis, as loopy as his theories were, has been reported to achieve progress with regard to the mental health of patients.

It's just frustrating to see such fields continuously getting stuck in an Aristotelian funk with every major revision. But, again, it's the nature of the beast; the world demands action, and thus application. It's better than looking for constants just to have something to show off.

>>4084000

>I'm unable to convey language correctly today.

You've got that right. I don't really think I can respond to anything you've just said, simply because you're being so damn vague I don't even know what you're trying to say.

>>4083913
I don't think that was extremely relevant except to the gay rights movement, and today in gender politics, more as a measure of historical perceptions of homosexuality than a critique of the psychiatry industry. Autism and pedophilia are still considered mental illnesses as well, I believe.

>>4083976
hue

>>4083045
>.jpg
>moves
2creepy4me

>>4083866

>Freud in charge of not ripping all his major ideas straight out of the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche

top kek. everything interesting he stole from them; everything he added on his own was dross

>>4083930
dafuq?

This post has been linked to in /g/ on the subject of the OP's moving and tiny image.

a 4kb animated jpg?

>>4083061
>argue from a position of authority
>proceed to deride the position of authority from which you argue.
Pick a point, scrub.

>>4083045
The Interpretation of Dreams includes a pretty reasonable overview of his theoretical framework for clinical psychology. Civilization and Its Discontents is perhaps his most coherent work, and does a better job of summarizing his whole philosophy late in his career. If you're just starting out and don't want to invest a whole assload of time and energy on him, you can get a pretty good idea of his work from an essay reader. I haven't actually read any Freud readers, but Peter Gay's is the first result on google?

>>4083899
I spent way too long on this post and may not be around to respond.

There are a lot of reasons. The first thing to understand is that people take issue with different things. Some take issue with the social science, Psychology. Others take issue with the practice of clinical psychology/psychiatry/psychotherapy, and still others have a problem with the sociopolitical institution represented by both.

The most general is that psychology is a social science, with all the baggage that carries. It employs empirical methodologies and peer review in good faith, but like all social sciences it uses almost exclusively statistical/inductive methodologies and the variables it measures are highly abstract, allowing experiments to be "stacked" by the preconceptions of the researcher. This, combined with the speed and lack of a strong "mainstream" of development in the area has made Psychology feel like pseudoscience to a lot of academics, especially those in disciplines with what must be acknowledged as a great deal more concreteness (i.e. maths, physics). This argument is a lot bigger than just psychology, though. Maths and physics types often have the same problem with, for example, biology, that they do with social sciences, and even within psychology there are 10-20 sub-disciplines, all asserting their own validity. What the conversation comes down to is which you value more when drawing conclusions, accuracy, or strength.

>>4084585
In terms of the clinical areas of psychology, a lot of people are concerned by how new the science is. Psychiatry isn't like engineering and it isn't like medicine. There isn't an extensive regulatory body governing it, new methodologies are being introduced constantly, and the basis for their use is (for reasons discussed above) often in contention. This isn't to say that psychotherapists just make shit up or that they are actively attempting to scam people. In fact there are legal, ethical and practical (funding) prohibitions against it. But there's less social infrastructure in place to stop them.
What's more, though there's plenty of evidence to indicate that therapy works, there isn't a lot of explanation for why. Practictioners aren't taught any secret knowledge. Most therapeutic interventions rely on the therapist to make a lot of judgments and interpretations specific to the client, and there are real limitations on the ability of outcomes measures to accurately predict future results.
Finally, there's that lack of a strong central mainstream of thought again. The truth is, we don't have a fully consistent account of human cognition and behavior, much less explanations for all the phenomenological experiences that give meaning and individuality to people's lives. Without that theoretical unity, we get disparate practice theories, which lead to disparate treatment modalities, which lead to the strange situation of having mutually exclusive therapies which both produce results and no particular explanation for why.

>>4084588
Finally, there are the social dimensions. As mentioned above, an argument can be made that therapy really isn't like medicine or hard science, but it's incorporated into the social structures associated with those things. People pay for therapy with health insurance, and the social place of therapists is an uncomfortable in-between between doctors and spiritual advisors. Further complicating matters once again is the disparity in theoretical basis between accepted best-practice models. Different practitioners communicate different assumptions about what mental disorders are and how the client should react to them. The result is a confused social notion of what mental disorders are and what they mean, as well as the pervasive sense that psychotherapists are deliberately obscurian or manipulative. People don't know if they should treat their mental disorder as a disease to be cured, an obstacle to be coped with, something that's their responsibility to resolve, etc., and when they ask practitioners, they get a variety of answers.
Finally, there's the sordid history of psychiatry to take into account. There are more protections for psychiatric patients now than at any time in history, but the memories are still fresh of forced commitments, unsanitary conditions, straitjackets and psychiatric support for "rest cures", prefrontal lobotomies, hydrotherapy and various other techniques varying from the exploitative to the outright inhumane. Even in the absence of such dramatic measures, psychology is given the social and governmental blessing/responsibility of defining abnormality and disorder of thought and feeling. Thus, unavoidably, the institution of psychiatry is a force of social normativity. The line between that and opression is thin, and politics constantly encroach on the discipline, so it's not surprising that in spite of the legal and ethical frameworks touting self-determination and deinstitutionalization, people are a little uncomfortable with the ways that psychiatry's social power can be used to bypass law and suppress vulnerable populations.

>>4084585
>>4084588
>>4084591
Im crying. Well done Anon.

>>4084441
>Gay
lol

>>4083101
yeah, no, psycho-analysis =/= psychology
that's part of the point