• Question: Have you ever psychoanalysed Freud and if you have would you diagnose him with anything like a complex or something? And is he a reliable psychologist

    Asked by anon-328472 on 6 Jun 2022.
    • Photo: Maria Uther

      Maria Uther answered on 6 Jun 2022:

      No I haven’t not analysed Freud. That would in my view be outside my boundary of practice. Freud is a somewhat controversial figure. Not all of his theories have been embraced universally, but without a doubt, he has influenced modern psychology.

    • Photo: Jake Sallaway-Costello

      Jake Sallaway-Costello answered on 6 Jun 2022:

      There is a branch of psychology – “psychohistory” – that tries to make sense of the behaviour of people in the past. But it’s quite controversial, because we can’t ever ask dead people if our theories about their behaviour are correct! Lots of people have tried to use psychodynamic methods to make sense of Freud, but we’ll never know if they’re accurate.

      I teach Freudian and other psychodynamic theories, applied to food and health. I think Freud’s ideas are very important. Even though lots of his ideas aren’t really used any more, it’s important to know the history of psychological thinking so you can question current psychological theories and practices. Psychodynamic theory ultimately questions how behaviour is driven by a difference between what we want and what we need, and those questions will be important whether Freud’s answers were right or not.

    • Photo: Garrett Kennedy

      Garrett Kennedy answered on 7 Jun 2022:

      I would love to sit down with Freud and have a session with him. I am not sure we would agree on much, but he would be fascinating to talk to. He introduced a lot of ideas that were very novel at the time, such as:

      – the idea that we have an unconscious part to ourselves, and we are not 100% aware of who we are.
      – that relationships have unseen dynamics, so we can be influenced by other people’s unconscious motives.
      – the way we behave in relationships can be influenced by our life history (like parents).
      – that sexual drives/interests are actually a normal part of being human, and it is worth understanding them. (*definitely not something that people would talk about in the 1900s).

      Although we do not use a whole lot of his ideas anymore, there are some that are actually really useful. In my branch of psychology train in the more modern version of psychoanalysis, called psychodynamic therapy, and it is full of ideas that are really useful when therapy gets stuck, like:

      – how people ‘manage’ their own emotions: Do they have an instinct to hide them, crush them, give them away, or do they want to listen and understand what their emotional self is telling them? This kind of thing can help a person understand how they are trying to manage something like depression or anxiety, like “these emotions are not part of me and I should get rid of them” – which can just make painful emotions worse.

      – transference – the idea that the relationship with me in the session can be influenced by their own history. So someone might behave in a mistrusting way with me after only having met me for ten mins, and when we explore it turns out I have a faint similarity to a parent who hurt them. Once we acknowledge the reason then we can check whether there are similar patterns in other relationships, and help someone be more aware of how they behave and whether they let other people get close.

      Freud is definitely worth reading just for the history of it. As his books are so old now I’m sure they are available for free online somewhere.

      Hope this is helpful,
      -G

    • Photo: Jasna Martinovic

      Jasna Martinovic answered on 7 Jun 2022:

      Freud’s contributions to science (psychological or otherwise) are historic, in a similar way to many of his contemporaries. Nowadays, his overarching theory is more famous for the therapeutic approach it produced, but research-wise it has inspired and/or provoked many to ascertain if the concepts he proposed as explanations for human behaviour are valid and thus forms an integral part of the history of psychology. His work on the unconscious was based on case studies rather than quantitative data, but one could argue that this was an approach he was already familiar with, having published patient work in the field of neurology prior to shifting to psychiatry. of course, with clinical case studies a lot is in the eye of the observer and one could argue that clinicians from different schools of thought would use very different concepts to explain the observed behaviour. this is why a science needs strong methods, so that it can differentiate between different theoretical explanations (think higgs boson).

    • Photo: Cody Porter

      Cody Porter answered on 8 Jun 2022:

      As far as reliable psychologists go we have to remember the era in which Freud’s work was produced. By today’s standards his work might raise a few eyebrows but historically he was an incredible man who really pushed for talking cure – without him I’m not sure how advances Psychology or Psychotherapy would be!

      I have never tried to psychoanalyse Freud but if I could sit down with him I would be very curious to know why he placed so much importance on the unconscious mind. He was ahead of his time and I would live to know what got him thinking about this.

      The thing to remember is that although some of his works and theories are questionable – he is key to modern Psychology.

Comments