/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20493628]

>Psychoanalysis is pseudoscience because it can’t be falsified
>Popper told me so

[Anonymous No.20493746]

>>20493628
Psychoanalysis is masturbating. Pretty sure we just group things as disorders, let patients run their mouths and look for solutions. Self help coach with the field of psychology behind them. Those are the good ones. The rest are patients themselves demon skin walkers that try to lead you down the wrong roads. Especially watch out for so called “forensic psychologists” - fucking niggers the lot of them.

[Anonymous No.20493753]

>>20493746
Jungian Psychoanalysis is still a thousand times better than anything contemporary psychology has to offer

[Anonymous No.20494190]

>>20493753
Jungian Psychoanalysis is a surefire way to detect midwittery, hasn't failed me yet.

[Anonymous No.20494274]

>>20493628
Psychoanalysis doesn't brand itself as science. I don't know where you're going with this.

[Anonymous No.20494478]

gotta agree with rorty here:

It’s a mistake to ask Freud for scientific evidence or confirmations of psychological generalizations. Psychoanalysis is not a science, and you cannot give or find a scientific method which Freud satisfied, or anything like that. I don’t think that matters. In fact, we learn a great deal from figures who offer us distinctions, metaphors, pictures with which to talk about ourselves. Plato didn’t have evidence for dividing up the soul in three parts, Aristotle didn’t have evidence for making all sorts of distinctions which we still take as perfectly commonsensible. Freud cannot be asked to supply evidence for offering us his suggestions about how to think of ourselves. For philosophers, the most important suggestion he made was: “be suspicious of a desire for purity,be suspicious of people who tell you we have to be rigorously apodictic, or rigorously transcendental, or rigorously ontological. Ask yourself: why are they so worried about purity?” This is a helpful contribution. When Freud said “the need for a good conscience and the need for physical cleanliness have the same source”, people realize he has a point. His way of bringing sex and bodily functions together with the rest of life, instead of keeping it at a distance, made a great impact on practically all the intellectuals and most of the public in the 20th century. I just can’t see criticisms of Freud—of the kind that are being made by Karl Popper, Frederick Crews,Adolf Grünbaum, and others—as changing anything, Freud is immune to that.

[Anonymous No.20494505]

>>20493628
National Socialism, the immortal science, on the other hand, is based solely on empirical data and rationality

[Anonymous No.20494534]

>>20494274
>>20494478
Popper criticized Freud's work as unscientific specifically because his acolytes pretended like it was in the early days. He was reacting against that. There's nothing wrong with Freud, Jung, or J.B.P.'s work if it's metaphorical but at that point it's essentially just literature which already has been used for millennia to understand people, history, and life, and not science as people would have it.

[Anonymous No.20494671]

>>20494534
I've had university professors tell me that Jung's work is obsolete because it is unscientific.

[Anonymous No.20494827]

>>20493753
>>20494190

[Anonymous No.20494836]

Popper is retarded. Psychoanalysis is only unscientific in the sense that it's non-empirical. But it's actually quite empirical. Freud listened to people and constructed theories based on what they said.

Until we can somehow look into a person's mind directly (which idea -- making the subjective objective, is philosophically incoherent and thus retarded), honest communication and introspection are the best tools we have.

[Anonymous No.20494844]

>>20493628
I should also add that the unfalsifiability criterion is exactly as arbitrary and unfalsifiable as Psychoanalysis is alleged to be.

Can we falsify the thesis that "If a thesis can't be falsified, we ought not to accept it?"

It would seem that the answer is no. This is what happens when you abandon metaphysics.

[Anonymous No.20494862]

>>20494836
>only unscientific in the sense that it's non-empirical. But it's actually quite empirical
?

[Anonymous No.20494871]

>>20494534
popper's falsification is outdated and widely criticized, and imo psychoanalysis as it is today has a lot of worth

but
>J.B.P.
lmao this fucking board.

[Anonymous No.20494874]

>>20494844
>If a thesis can't be falsified, we ought not to accept it
Well, funny enough, many physicists have no problem in accepting something that is not falsified, see String Theory.

[Anonymous No.20494888]

>>20494871
>psychoanalysis as it is today has a lot of worth
In what way?

[Anonymous No.20494949]

>>20494862
psychoanalysis is as empirical an approach to the study of the mind as it is possible to get. you can't take a reading of the soul except through self-report, and psychoanalysis was built off of transparent self-report

>>20494874
Popper's criterion applies to the physical sciences. I kind of like the LessWrong guy's heuristic of "making your beliefs pay rent."

Basically, if your theory can make predictions, then it's good/true.

That said, fundamental to any science, psychological or otherwise, is the axiom that the human mind can somehow grasp the truth of a fundamentally ordered universe. I only throw that out there because I think there's a kind of autism to rationalism, as if each scientific theory can only be evaluated in an almost algorithmic way. But the greatest scientists have admitted that one quality of true scientific theories is that they all have a certain elegance and beauty to them. In the case of psychoanalysis, unfortunately, we have to lean on that more than in other sciences, because there is no way to actually get into the soul and observe its operations directly.

[Anonymous No.20494986]

>>20494844
>Can we falsify the thesis that "If a thesis can't be falsified, we ought not to accept it?"
well, let's see:
in order to falsify it, we need to find an instance that disproves it
in this case, we would need to find a thesis that can't be falsified, but which we should accept anyway
can you name any such thesis?

do note that is is all with respect to scientific theses, a moralistic platitude doesn't cut it.