Most psychologists don’t care about Freud’s work outside of a historical sense and kinda hate him as a person. His work was quite literally used as an example of pseudoscience by Karl Popper.

And yet for some reason philosophers have an obsession with integrating his views into their work and artists keep using his views as inspiration and analyze existing works via the lens of psychoanalysis.

Why?

  • morrowind@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    They spend multiple weeks on him in Intro to psychology classes. Even though they tell you at the end it’s a bunch of rot (if you haven’t figured it out yourself), if that’s like 1/5 of your psychological knowledge, you’re gonna use it

    • Instigate
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      7 months ago

      His work is important to study from an historical perspective in order to see how psychology grew into what it is today, in the same way that it’s important that we learn about outdated concepts like tabula rasa and phrenology in order to better understand what is correct. The fact that he applied so much of his own subjective thoughts to his brand of psychology shows us how we, as potential future psychologists, also have the same capacity to search for confirmatory evidence and eschew disproving evidence in search of a theory. He’s a great example of what not to do when it comes to psychology.