Freud a psychopath? Certainly!
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Re: Freud a psychopath? Certainly!
ATM I'm following a course called Sexual Health, and today we had a lecture from a researcher and sexologist. He gave a very interesting lecture, which helped me understand the differences between men and women regarding sex. Anyhow, it was refreshing to hear he wasn't particularly pro-Freud, he said: "Freud says that people who can't orgasm are psychotic, but we know [based on research] that's just nonsense!'' Just saying here that there are open-minded researchers out there, really trying to get to the truth in things without being influenced by nutcases such as Freud :)
ATM I'm following a course called Sexual Health, and today we had a lecture from a researcher and sexologist. He gave a very interesting lecture, which helped me understand the differences between men and women regarding sex. Anyhow, it was refreshing to hear he wasn't particularly pro-Freud, he said: "Freud says that people who can't orgasm are psychotic, but we know [based on research] that's just nonsense!'' Just saying here that there are open-minded researchers out there, really trying to get to the truth in things without being influenced by nutcases such as Freud :)
davey72 said:
I've read a bit of Jung and don't get the same impression I do for Freud. He seemed more human to me. However, I don't think I've come across his views on sex (and I haven't read any biographies on him, just Gieser's book about him and Pauli). Anyone have any more data?
Memories said:
In these few paragraphs from Jung’s autobiography, we find the heart of the matter. Freud was a materialist. He was unable to conceive man more than animal instinct or the repression of animal instinct. Man’s yearning for communion with the eternal seemed to Freud, the fevered imagination of a sexually repressed ape. He suffered the psychopath's inability to understand the emotional and spiritual life of normal men and women.
Freud was an authoritarian seeking to censor and destroy the higher aspirations of mankind by creating a vile dogma that denies the soul and humanities higher potential. Jung's dream; juxtaposing Freud as a petty customs official with Jung called to be a Knight of the Grail, illustrates the profound difference of these two major figures of the Twentieth Century. Freud was a force of dogma and authority and Jung a force for reconciliation of our higher potentials with our human life. Jung parted ways with Freud after the above mentioned dream exposed Freud as a little man, willing to sacrifice truth for power.
I recommend reading Memories, Dreams, Reflections to further explore a fundamental division of humanity; that has plagued us for millennia, by comparing the lives and views of C.G. Jung and Sigmund Freud as they exemplify the struggle between men and women with spiritual potential and those whose world view and experience is literal and material. It is Jung the mystic, who duels Freud the psychopath.
obyvatel
The Living Force
davey72 said:
I am curious as to whether you have any information that led you to this question. The following are the quotes from a book "Modern Man in Search of a Soul" which is basically a compilation of essays written by Jung and published as part of his collected works. He talks about his views of psychology as well as his differences with Freud.
[quote author=Jung]
For the purposes of psychology, I think it best to abandon the notion that we are today in anything like a position to make statements about the nature of the psyche that are "true" or "correct". The best that we can achieve is true expression,. By true expression I mean an open avowal and a detailed presentation of everything that is subjectively noted.
...........
What Freud has to say about sexuality, infantile pleasure, and their conflict with the "principle of reality", as well as what he says about incest and the like, can be taken as the truest expression of his own psychic makeup. He has given adequate form to what he has noted in himself. I am no opponent of Freud's; I am merely presented in that light by his own short-sightedness and that of his pupils.
....................
Our way of looking at things is conditioned by what we are. And since other people are differently constituted, they see things differently and express themselves differently. Adler, one of Freud's earliest pupils, is a case in point. Working with the same empirical material as Freud, he approached it from a totally different viewpoint. I know that the followers of both schools flatly assert that I am in the wrong, but I may hope that history and all fair-minded persons will bear me out. Both schools, to my way of thinking, deserve reproach for over-emphasizing the pathological aspect of life and for interpreting man too exclusively in the light of his defects. ..
For my part, I prefer to look at a man in the light of what in him is healthy and sound, and to free the sick man from that point of view which colors every page Freud has written. Freud's teaching is definitely one-sided in that it generalizes from facts that are relevant only to neurotic states of mind; its validity is really confined to those states. Within these limits Freud's teaching is true and valid even when it is in error, for error also belongs to the picture, and carries the truth of a true avowal. In any case, Freud's is not a psychology of the healthy mind.
[/quote]
By the way, Jung freely admits that his psychological teaching is also subjectively colored and when he deals with empirical data, he is also speaking about himself. He accepts this as inevitable and armed with this realization has gone on to draw from diverse fields like mythology, history, religion, alchemy, and art as well as engaging in intense self-analysis to bolster his psychological teachings to serve the cause of "man's knowledge of man". He attributed a positive value to the empiricism of natural sciences in which he saw "Herculean attempt to understand the human psyche by approaching it from the outer world" ; he also regarded Gnostic religions as an "equally prodigious undertaking in the opposite direction - as an attempt to draw knowledge of the cosmos from within".
[quote author=Jung]
In my picture of the world there is a vast outer realm and an equally vast inner realm; between these two stands man, facing now one and now the other, and , according to his mood or disposition taking the one for the absolute truth by denying or sacrificing the other.
[/quote]
On his views about sexuality
[quote author=Jung]
I see in all happening the play of opposites and derive from this the conception of psychic energy. I hold that psychic energy involves the play of opposites in much the same way as physical energy involves a difference of potential, which is to say, the existence of such opposites as warm and cold (which is kinetic energy at its basic level), high and low (potential energy). Freud began by taking sexuality as the only psychic driving power, and only after my break with him did he grant am equal status to other psychic activities as well. For my part, I have subsumed the various psychic drives or forces under the concept of energy in order to avoid the arbitrariness of a psychology that deals with drives or impulses alone. I therefore speak, not of separate drives or forces, but of "value intensities". By what has just been said I do not mean to deny the importance of sexuality in psychic life, though Freud stubbornly maintains that I do deny it. What I seek is to set bounds to the rampant terminology of sex which threatens to vitiate all discussion of the human psyche; I wish to put sexuality itself in its proper place. Common sense will always return to the fact that sexuality is only one of the life instincts - only one of the psychophysiological functions - though one that is without doubt very far-reaching and important.
“Beyond all question, there is a marked disturbance today in the realms of sexual life . . . The sexuality that Freud describes is unmistakably that sexual obsession which shows itself whenever a patient has reached the point where he needs to be forced or tempted out of a wrong attitude or situation. It is an over-emphasized sexuality piled up behind a dam; and it shrinks at once to normal proportions as soon as the way to development is opened. It is being caught in the old resentments against parents and relations and in the boring emotional tangles of the family situation which most often brings about the damming-up of the energies of life. And it is this stoppage which shows itself unfailingly in that kind of sexuality which is called “infantile.” It is really not sexuality proper, but an unnatural discharge of tensions that belong to quite another province of life. This being so, what is the use of paddling about in this flooded country? It is important to open up drainage canals. We should try to find, in a change of attitude or in new ways of life, that difference of potential which the pent-up energy requires. If this is not achieved a vicious circle is set up, and this in fact is the menace which Freudian psychology appears to offer. It points no way that leads beyond the inexorable cycle of biological events. This hopelessness would drive one to exclaim with Paul: “Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from the body of this death”. And our man of intellect comes forward, shaking his head, and says in Faust's words: "Thou art conscious only of the single urge", namely of the fleshly bond leading back to father and mother or forward to children that have sprung from out flesh - "incest" with the past and "incest" with the future, the original sin of the perpetuation of the family situation. There is nothing that can free us from this bond except that opposite urge of life, the spirit. It is not the children of the flesh, but the “children of God” who know freedom."... That is what Freud would never learn, and what all those who share his outlook forbid themselves to learn.
[/quote]
davey72
The Living Force
obyvatel said:
No, I was just thinking. Wondering how much of psychology has been bull. I was wondering if they could both be psychopaths, and if not, does the favoritism of one over the other tell us anything about the given psychiatrist?
Edit=got rid of dangling quote tag
cubbex
The Living Force
davey72 said:
Or psychologist? The point is not which favoritism you have to someone, but what we take from their contributions. Freud psychopath or not basing on Charcot discovered the subconscious, and Charcot based on a con-man Anton Mesmer created the hypnotism.
Look, no offense, but this thing about psychopathy is important, really important, but there's a point when we start being a little paranoid about everyone that commits a mistake, I like to remember that this is a STS world, errors could be made towards someone causing them pain, like the useful idiot or like the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Physicians from the past didn't believed to Semmelweiss that without washing their hands they caused diseases to a woman giving birth, I'm sure they were just ignorant and not "psychopaths".
davey72
The Living Force
Ya, I really had no information to base this question on. I have not had much schooling in regards to psychology in general, or the Founders of such, in particular. I was just interested in some opinions, as i seem to get quite a bit out of them, and it gives me not only something to think about, but new questions to pose to myself for further study. Thank you Obyvatel, and Prometeo.
Happyville
Jedi
Laura said:
This is interesting - esp when considering the fact that they say psychopaths don't respond to psychotherapy - how could they when they are being psychoanalyzed by one?
