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/lit/ - Literature

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1223053 No.1223053 [Reply] [Original]

Are Freud's works worth reading?

>> No.1223054

Depends

>> No.1223055

>>1223054
...on?

>> No.1223056

>>1223055
whether you like that dick he's holding

>> No.1223061

>>1223056
made me lol hard

also
No

>> No.1223063

If you feel like reading pseudoscientific nonsense that was made up out of whole cloth.

Freud retains a shred of prestige in academic humanities departments, and (of course) among the organized church of Freudian Psychoanalysis, but nowhere else. No-one who works in psychology or psychiatry thinks that there's any value there, unless they were already a Freudian and then got a medical degree. But it's not science, it's not based on any empirical research, and none of its grand sweeping assertions have ever been backed up by any genuine evidence. In other words, you might as well read "Dianetics" by L Ron Hubbard, with the exception that "Dianetics" didn't have the widespread currency and influence that Freud did. So maybe you could compare Freud in the 20th century to (say) alchemy in the 15th - 16th - 17th centuries. Widespread influence among educated people, but I think you'd be just as likely to discover the philosopher's stone as to derive any actual wisdom from Freud's work these days.

You're looking at something that's more or less in the dustbin of the history of ideas, were it not for the fact that the occasional English professor keeps yanking it out of the dustbin to play with it.

>> No.1223066

Civilization and Its Discontents was an interesting read, actually. He had an interesting thought process and a brilliant mind - he's worth the effort of a few hundred pages.

>> No.1223069

>>1223063
He was a philosopher who had a profound affect on the course of society and culture in the 20th century. He was groundbreaking, and for that reason alone is worth a read.

>> No.1223070

>If you feel like reading pseudoscientific nonsense that was made up out of whole cloth.

You don't know anything about Freud.

>>1223066
>>1223069

are correct.

>> No.1223071

I haven't read much Freud but I LOVE "The Future of an Illusion" Pretty much sums up why people create God, just why they need him.

>> No.1223074

He was a just Jew who ripped off Nietzsche.

>> No.1223077

>>1223063
This

everyone else just doesn't want to accept that their dreams don't have profound meaning

>> No.1223078

>>1223071
oh didn't you hear? it's just pseudoscientific bullshit he made up from whole cloth.

>> No.1223080

>>1223077
you don't know what you're talking about, and probably have a small dictionary entry's worth of knowledge about Freud.

>> No.1223081

>>1223080
I could use the same lame argument against you, but I won't, I'm better than that.

>> No.1223088

>>1223053
Notice how everyone who cites specific works says he's worth checking out, and everyone calling him shit is talking in broad generalizations.

>> No.1223090

>>1223081
Rapier wit, ladies and gentlemen. Rapier wit.

>> No.1223092

>>1223063
What's wrong with alchemy? That stuff set the foundation for chemistry. Also, empirical research? Psssh. So overrated.

>> No.1223097

Answer is yes. Regardless of how much value people actually have in his theories, its an interesting perspective (albeit amusing sometimes).

>> No.1223103

>>Civilization and Its Discontents was an interesting read, actually

Depends what you mean by "interesting". The difficulty with a book like that is that it poses as scientific but it's just simply not. The claims Freud makes are empirically NOT true.

For example, the Primal Horde business in Civilization and its Discontents requires you to believe in a fundamentally Lamarckian view of biology. Apart from Michael Jackson claiming those blonde white children were really fathered by him, I can't think of anyone who is STILL a Lamarckian in this day and age.

There's plenty of other examples from Civilization and its Discontents....Frederick Crews (who called it "the most overrated book of all time") pointed out various generalizations that Freud makes about cultures, which are just empirically false.

As Crews says: "If Freud was right, latecoming centers of cultural achievement such as Paris and San Francisco ought to manifest an especially weak interest in erotic matters, while such ancient societies as Sparta and Israel ought to have been notably sportive and libertine. The idea is self-refuting."

>> No.1223104

So basically, Interpretation of Dreams is absolute thwaddle, while some of his more philosophical works are good?

>> No.1223109

AWW SWEET A TROLL THREAD! Seriously though, no self respecting psychologist thinks Freud is worth anything. He like Plato in political science departments.

>> No.1223116

>>1223109
I'm not a troll -_-

>> No.1223117

Uh, I'd rather keep company with Nabokov---who referred to Freud as "The Viennese Wizard" (der Wiener-Zauberer) and thought the whole thing was a massive cultish delusion---than with....I dunno, who is even a Freudian nowadays? Jonathan Lear?

Even Harold Bloom seems to have quietly sneaked out of the Freudian temple before the blowing of the phallic shofar.

>> No.1223118

>>1223092
Nothing's wrong with alchemy. In fact, Jung studied alchemy extensively. He wrote a book called The Psychology of the Transference, comparing alchemical processes to the psychological phenomenon of transference.

Jung and Freud proposed models: interesting ways to view certain phenomena and predict certain reactions. They were idea people.

Once, a scientist sent Freud a letter. The scientist had just recently confirmed one of Freud's predictions in a rigorous, controlled experiment. He thought Freud would be excited by the news. Instead, Freud wrote back, "I don't give a shit."

Steinbeck didn't do empirical research either, but we don't blame him for it.

>> No.1223130

>>1223118

I didn't claim there was anything WRONG with alchemy apart from the fact that IT DOESN'T ACTUALLY ENABLE YOU TO TRANSMUTE LEAD INTO GOLD.

Likewise: Freud doesn't ACTUALLY describe anything accurately about the operations of the human mind, and Freudian psychoanalysis doesn't ACTUALLY help people who suffer from "neuroses" or "hysteria".

If you care to enjoy it as a sort of massive poetic construct that you think says something "deep" about human life, be my guest. But you could do the same thing by believing in Xenu and Engrams, and you'd get to meet Tom Cruise and Beck rather than (at best) Woody Allen.

>> No.1223131

I guess it's a good thing to read him because he had a big impact on society. But you'll realise that a lot of things he's saying is bullshit. And keep in mind that the guy lied about a bunch patients he pretends ha "cured". Also, Nietzsche had already said some of the things Freud pretend to have discovered.

>> No.1223132
File: 28 KB, 468x305, f.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
1223132

JEJUNE

>> No.1223135

>>1223118
>Jung studied alchemy extensively

Why does this not surprise me at all?

disregard psychoanalysis, acquire empirical evidence

>> No.1223134

>>1223103
There's no need to view things as "right" or "wrong." You read Freud to see the thoughts of one of the most influential (for better or worse) thinkers of the 20th century. It's not a science textbook, it's a philosophical treatise. You follow his thought processes, note how he presents his arguments, see what he thinks is important, try to figure out what he left out - all this represents his state of mind.

No one reads it like a textbook.

>> No.1223144

>>oh didn't you hear? it's just pseudoscientific bullshit he made up from whole cloth.

Freud HIMSELF thought Die Zukunft Einer Illusion was scientifically weak, describing it by noting that "the analytic content of the work is very thin" (quoted in FREUD: A LIFE, by Peter Gay, p. 524).

If Freud thought "the analytic content" of that particular work was "very thin", I find your reverence for it quite touching, really.

Although beneath that I can discern that you are clearly an anal-sadistic personality type with a strongly marked penchant towards paranoia.

>> No.1223148

>>1223130
The purpose of alchemy wasn't to transmute lead into gold. For alchemists, it was a process of spiritual transformation. The tools, the elements, the alembics were all part of a process which in itself was purifying. The end result wasn't important. The method was what mattered. It was a sort of wealthy-person's meditation.

No one is seriously using raw Freudian texts as a basis for psychotherapy anymore. It doesn't mean his mind and his writing should be thrown out the window. People still read The Republic even though no one plans on making a country based on Philosopher-Kings.

>> No.1223164

>>1223130
although hysteria did give women vibrators so maybe not all bad?
Beck is a scientologist

>>1223134
>hahaohwow.jpg
>There's no need to view things as "right" or "wrong."
There's your problems right there.

>> No.1223166

>>1223063
>You're looking at something that's more or less in the dustbin of the history of ideas, were it not for the fact that the occasional English professor keeps yanking it out of the dustbin to play with it.

Incidently, why do English professors/teachers do this? I'll accept that Freud was historically important and influental, but in my experience, these professors act like what he said is still true and relevant.

>> No.1223169

>>1223164
Why? Do you read Art of War, The Republic, The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Metamorphoses, Gallic Wars, The Prince, or any other piece of literature as right or wrong?

>> No.1223171

I think if you read "The Alchemist" by Ben Jonson, you'll find that your rather rarefied sense of what alchemy was about is a bit misguided. I think you've been reading a bit too much Jung or Paolo Coelho. Alchemists may have dressed their activities up with grand allegories about spiritual progress and refinement, but at the end of the day they tended to be scamming money off the gullible. Joseph Smith and the early Mormons were engaged in precisely the same alchemical practices, as the "White Salamander" scandal reminded everyone. Does that mean there's a spiritual truth to Mormonism we ought to respect? Horseshit is horseshit, in my opinion.

And Freudian horseshit happens to be a particularly pernicious variety. It's a self-validating belief system, like Scientology (which was inspired by it), although I daresay Freudianism has done more real-world damage than Scientology, from Freud's own patients down to the "Recovered Memory" witchhunts of the 80s and 90s. It's one thing to talk about ideas as though they were purely aesthetic phenomena---but when they actually affect people's lives, that's a different matter entirely. You can compare it to Plato but the simple fact is that nobody who has ever held power was particularly interested in following the more perverse dictates of the Republic. Whereas a bogus idea like "repression" actually caused a lot of people to be sent to prison, only to discover later that their accusers hadn't "recovered" memories but had them fabricated / implanted by idiots encouraged by Freud.

>> No.1223172

>>1223169
Not the same guy but do you read what nonsense you type? There's a huge difference between literature and pseudo scientific, pseudo philosophic texts.

>> No.1223173

>>1223166
Because to many authors of the early 20th century Freud was incredibly important. Many consciously worked Freudian elements into their work. The literature world was abuzz with Oedipus complexes and penis-cigars, and to forget that is to misunderstand much of that time period's work.

>> No.1223182

>>1223172
What's so different about it? Unless you are assigned Freud in a Psycotherapy course there's no reason for you to be upset that it's not all correct.

That's like reading Origin of Species and being angry that he doesn't talk about DNA.

>> No.1223199

>>Incidently, why do English professors/teachers do this? I'll accept that Freud was historically important and influental, but in my experience, these professors act like what he said is still true and relevant.

Because it gives the illusion of depth.
Because it intimidates people.
Because it offers a figleaf for respectability in sitting around discussing otherwise taboo topics.
Because it's claim to universal and scientific truth, while completely fraudulent, at least allows a university professor to change the subject away from nonstop identity politics and why there aren't more black / Asian / female / Inuit writers on the syllabus.

The explanation Frederick Crews gives---and he's just been the most vocal critic of the fact that Freud just won't die in Humanities departments---is that Humanties scholars in the Cold War era and after felt a certain disciplinary inferiority next to the hard sciences, and they wanted to try to bolster their sense of the importance and even scientific element to reading literature. So they turned to Freud as a kind of non-political and pseudoscientific way to establish "depth" and "importance". After all, if you're just reading Hamlet and trying to figure out what happens, that's just faggotry. But if you're reading Hamlet and talking about "the Oedipus Complex" and "the death drive" and "melancholiac defensive splitting of the ego", then you're talking about universal processes that most people are too timid or naive to wish to confront. (Or else they've realized that it's all made-up bullshit, and you might as well talk about Hamlet's inability to achieve theta-clear.)

>> No.1223215

>>1223171
Alchemy was a fad that passed through intellectual circles. For some people it was about charlatanism, for others it was about spirituality. Same thing with religion: to dismiss all religion as "someone trying to trick and subjugate me" is disingenuous. Many people sincerely believe in their religion and aren't trying to trick anybody with it.

That doesn't make alchemy (or religion) true. But it also doesn't mean that all writings should be dismissed out of hand. It's ok to try and understand a belief system from inside of itself, following its own complicated internal logic.

It doesn't mean you have to believe. You are allowed to try and understand it, though, even if you think it's wrong.

>> No.1223220

>>1223199
>All literature professors are insecure, second-rate super-liberal queer theorists who simply weren't smart enough to be scientists
Um you're trolling, right?

>> No.1223229

>>1223220
I think we established earlier that this is a troll thread.

>> No.1223234

>>1223220

Read my post again. I wasn't casting aspersions on English professors in general.

I was trying to explain WHY Freudianism maintains a certain hold over a small number of English professors, despite the fact that everyone else seems to have abandoned Freudianism as bullshit.

I was also offering up Fred Crews's explanation for it, not my own. Considering that he IS an English Professor (now retired) of a generation when Freudianism was even more common than it currently is, I doubt that he was casting aspersions GENERALLY at his own profession or at himself. He just thinks the persistence of humanities scholars presenting Freud as anything other than a charlatan is an intellectual scandal. I agree.

>> No.1223238

>>1223229
It really isn't. He's a pretty talked about guy, and I like to do some research before I invest in a book/author.

>> No.1223247

>>1223234
>Freud as anything other than a charlatan
He wasn't a charlatan. He wasn't trying to fool anybody. He believed in what he taught. Say what you want about the truth of what he wrote, but to call him a "charlatan" is to completely miss the point.

>> No.1223255

>>1223247
and religious people believe the bullshit they spew. belief is no reason to read a book.

>> No.1223266

>>1223255
If you are interested in understanding a writer's thought processes, beliefs, and why those thoughts and beliefs would be influential, you should read that book.

>> No.1223267

>>1223255
Charlatans intentionally deceive for profit. If someone believes what they say, they are not trying to deceive you, though they may do so unintentionally.

>> No.1223278

>>1223238

Well, in that case, you'd be better suited in reading a book ABOUT Freud and his ideas, rather than reading his own stuff.

If you want something that actually takes Freud seriously and could be called "Freudian", read Adam Phillips or Jonathan Lear.

If you want something that is VERY skeptical, then you could look at "Follies of the Wise" by Frederick Crews, or "A Most Dangerous Method" by Kerr, or "Freud's Paranoid Quest" by Farrell.

>> No.1223290

>>1223247
>>1223267

Again, I was quoting Frederick Crews. Here's what he said in an interview---these points are discussed at fuller length in "Follies of the Wise"

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Crews/crews-con3.html

"[Freud] was a charlatan. In 1896 he published three papers on the ideology of hysteria claiming that he had cured X number of patients. First it was thirteen and then it was eighteen. And he had cured them all by presenting them, or rather by obliging them to remember, that they had been sexually abused as children. In 1897 he lost faith in this theory, but he'd told his colleagues that this was the way to cure hysteria. So he had a scientific obligation to tell people about his change of mind. But he didn't. He didn't even hint at it until 1905, and even then he wasn't clear. Meanwhile, where were the thirteen patients? Where were the eighteen patients? You read the Freud - Fleiss letters and you find that Freud's patients were leaving at the time. By 1897 he didn't have any patients worth mentioning, and he hadn't cured any of them, and he knew it perfectly well. Well, if a scientist did that today, of course he would be stripped of his job. He would be stripped of his research funds. He would be disgraced for life. But Freud was so brilliant at controlling his own legend that people can hear charges like this, and even admit that they're true, and yet not have their faith in the system of thought affected in any way. [continued]

>> No.1223293

"He succeeded in presenting himself to the public -- through a highly organized propaganda machine, by the way, which is what he turned the International Psychoanalytic Association into -- he succeeded in presenting himself as the personification of a certain kind of Nietzschean courage combined with scientific rigor, an ascetic responsibility that was attuned to the spirit of the times, namely anti-Victorianism. The Western world was ready to overthrow a very tired-looking, Christianizing moral order and to give more sway to the instinctual side of life, sex in particular. And Freud portrayed himself as a person who reluctantly but courageously faced the twin demons of sex and aggression and, like Prometheus or like some other Greek god who goes into the underworld, he came back to Earth with these pieces of dangerous knowledge and he tamed them and made them accessible to us so that we can now be cured of our neurotic ailments, thanks to him. He turned himself into a god, a kind of man-god, and people fell for it..."

>> No.1223317

wow... people on /lit/ actually DISCOURAGING reading a book. why shit on intellectual curiosity? it's not as if anon is wasting YOUR time, if it could even be called a waste of time.

this board sucks now.

>> No.1223327

>>1223317

I'm not advocating censorship. I'm just saying that reading "Civilization and its Discontents" is more like reading "Dianetics" or "The Secret" than it is like reading Plato or Nietzsche.