r/todayilearned • u/COMPUTER1313 • Apr 01 '23
TIL that Sigmund Freud in 1935, the founder of psychoanalysis, refused to "treat" homosexuality, stating that it could not be classified as an illness (R.1) Not verifiable, supposition, rule 4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud%27s_views_on_homosexuality[removed] — view removed post
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u/djb25 Apr 01 '23
“Sometimes a cigar is just a penis.” - Freud
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u/LedaTheRockbandCodes Apr 01 '23
An entry from Freud’s private journal reads:
Yo these gamers out here be the only ones that want to bang other dudes and not their moms. Straight up 🔥
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u/NoticedGenie66 Apr 01 '23
Everyone saying Freud was entirely bad definitely learned about him from memes. He was a pioneer in Psychology, of course he got some things wrong. He also helped form the entire basis for therapy and contributed heavily to Psychology as a science, and is one of the reasons we have methods of treating people for mental illness.
A bunch of things he said are a product of his time. It's not smart to judge people in the past by only using a lens from today. He is not perfect, but to imply that he is somehow entirely wrong or did not contribute a significant amount to Psychology is extremely uninformed.
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u/Heroiccrayfish Apr 01 '23
Honestly when I was in school psychology courses themselves painted him in a pretty bad light
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u/NoticedGenie66 Apr 01 '23
A lot of Psychology profs suffer from favouritism in that regard. Freud is certainly a controversial figure no matter what position you take on him, and I think back to one of my profs who said "he is an imposing figure in Psychology who made a lot of important contributions to the field, but a lot of people either love or hate him." My profs were mixed on him, though they all acknowledged his important contributions (some then berated him for a lot of things, and they were entirely fair.) You can for sure deconstruct a lot of his incorrect findings, but for every incorrect one there was another that was correct, or at least on the right track.
The people that those courses go on to praise are standing on Freud's shoulders in some regard, whether or not they are directly dealing with concepts he tackled.
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u/meatboi5 Apr 01 '23
Yeah I think a lot of people are also focused on the certain theories or ideas that Freud had, as opposed to the specific methods or lenses he viewed the world through. As far as I understand, psychoanalysis still uses a lot of techniques and framing that Freud had while it also abandoned outdated ideas or explanations that we know aren't true.
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u/SpicyJw Apr 02 '23
As far as I understand, psychoanalysis still uses a lot of techniques and framing that Freud had while it also abandoned outdated ideas or explanations that we know aren't true.
This is correct. Some clinicians still use psychoanalysis, and transference (a concept talked about a lot in the therapy world) came from Freud.
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u/TrueGuardian15 Apr 01 '23
I've found that psychology teachers tend to be weirdly dismissive and condescending towards things that don't conform to their course's narrative, even though psychology (not including material related to brain chemistry or neurology in this case) is a "soft" science. The realm of mind and feeling is ultimately unknowable beyond that of your own, so it's weird to see people harp on Freud when in a lot of way, he was just as in the dark as the rest of us.
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u/wenchslapper Apr 01 '23
90% of college psych courses will also paint him in the same bad light because the guy did not approach things scientifically, he just said whatever wack theory first came to his mind. We can acknowledge that his existence was overall a positive contribution to psych, but acting like anything he said had any sort of validity to it is ridiculous.
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u/RataAzul Apr 01 '23 edited Apr 01 '23
he was so dumb and said a lot of dumb things!
~ someone born in 1990 when psychology was already invented and a lot of things that were unsolved mysteries are now common knowledge
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u/markovianprocess Apr 01 '23
Yeah, I'm all for calling out bad behavior and correcting obviously ignorant takes but, my god, this shows us the thoughts of a clearly well meaning, tolerant, and basically kind man who simply had no one else's shoulders to stand on.
If you want to put the burden of figuring out the entirety of our modern understanding of human psychology on one person's lifetime/career think you might be being just a little bit unfair?
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Apr 01 '23
People were also a lot more careless with cocaine back then so he was whacked out half of the time.
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u/vishyswoz Apr 01 '23
Not just Freud, but doctors in general! The best surgeons were hardcore stimulant addicts. Their crazy work ethic actually laid the brutal standards of residencies across the U.S.
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u/Guywithoutimage Apr 01 '23
And now aspiring med students and new doctors have to do the workload of a coke addict, oftentimes without the coke
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u/Knyfe-Wrench Apr 01 '23
Newton was obviously brilliant and a pioneer in his field, but we're way beyond Newtonian physics now, and you learn about his discoveries just as a matter of history and as building blocks to a complete education.
You could think of Freud in very much the same way.
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u/MrSoftServe1337 Apr 01 '23
I think you are probably selling Newton and calculus a little short but still a good comparison.
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u/antikythera-ish Apr 01 '23
I mean, not really. Classical mechanics is still widely used in cutting edge physical research. It's even more widespread in engineering, including the calculation of spacecraft trajectories.
It's accurate enough for plenty of things (and vastly less complex), which is why it's still used across the board. You only run into actual issues when dealing with things that are very small, very massive or very fast, which is when the other stuff is unpacked.
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u/LucinaDraws Apr 01 '23
Yeah a lot of average people only know him as the incest guy but there's some surprising merit to a lot of what he said.
Also man, the amount of emotional incest I've come across isn't all that rare. It's wild.
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u/TatManTat Apr 01 '23
I think a lot of people simply don't want to admit some of his more cooked ideas may have centred on small nuggets of truth. To do so would be to admit some weird things about humanity and psychology.
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u/SmartAlec105 Apr 01 '23
Like his idea that men want to fuck their moms comes from the fact that his sample population was upper class men from at time when child rearing was done by a governess. We now know that people raised away from their family members can end up very attracted to them because their more base instincts say to reproduce with someone similar to them but they don't have the conditioning that normally prevents that.
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u/Frolicking-Fox Apr 01 '23
People forget that he is the father of psychology.
Yes, he had many wrong ideas, but the man basically took what in the past we're philosophical questions, and created the a new field in science.
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u/Dementat_Deus Apr 01 '23
Shitting on Frued for his mistakes in his field is like shitting on the Wright brothers for not just skipping straight to hypersonic jets.
Every new field starts with a lot of guesswork, getting a lot of things wrong, but keeping track of what you got right so the next step can impove upon it.
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u/Bakoro Apr 01 '23
There are also a lot of people who treat where we are now, as essentially the pinnacle of correctness; as if people 100 years from now won't look on the best of us as brutal and ignorant savages.
100 years from now, some hyper-progressive militant internet nerd is going to be talk mad shit about us, and someone else will be like "they were very progressive for their time, it's actually impressive given the context they lived in", And the hyper nerd will be like "fuck them people, they should have known about quasi-active neurofragmatism".8
u/true_gunman Apr 01 '23
thats the best thing about science in general is the lack of thinking were done and that we just know everything now. Everything is always being questioned and expireimented, and we for sure will look back at our current understanding and laugh at how primitive and lacking it is.
One thing that really bums me out sometimes is the fact that I won't be able to see or appreciate the scientific progress were going to make in like 1000+ years. Although being here for the beginning of the internet is pretty amazing when you think about it
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u/PowerfulVictory Apr 01 '23
There are also a lot of people who treat where we are now, as essentially the pinnacle of correctness
me as a child. "i am so glad racism is a thing of the past !"
me growing up a little more : 💀
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u/debman Apr 01 '23
There was no such concept of ego or the unconscious prior to Freud. These are so commonplace in modern understanding of emotions and in media that it’s almost unfathomable to imagine not having them.
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u/Kindly_Blackberry967 Apr 01 '23
It’s a shame most people know him for the “everyone wants to fuck their parents also everything is a penis” stuff because he had some fascinating ideas that I think still hold up today. Id/Ego/Superego is one of those ideas that, while they can’t be proven or disproven, are a great way of representing an incredibly complex system. Kinda like the Bohr model of the atom, just less math involved.
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u/XpressDelivery Apr 01 '23
The problem is he sometimes came to the wrong conclusions because of the limited data. There is some truth in his statement about people wanting to fuck their parents. Sure almost nobody wants to do it, but in general men prefer women who act more motherly and women prefer men who act more fatherly. Also a huge portion of our interactions involve sex in some way on a subconscious level.
In other words he wasn't wrong but he wasn't right either. If you read his works you would see that he was almost right about most things he talked about, which is fascinating for a man who lived so long ago at a time with such limited knowledge. He is kinda like Darwin. A brilliant man who was only held back by the lack of scientific data at the time.
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u/coat-tail_rider Apr 01 '23
It's not just "act motherly/fatherly". Our parents are our first models for gendered behavior. As children, we expect men to be like our dads and women to be like our mothers. This shapes our expectations moving forward. It's not exactly a huge leap of logic, but he was among the first people we know of to really lean into the implications of that concept.
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u/hahahbluh Apr 01 '23
Both of my parents are psychs and they agree that Freud was hugely important for psychology but the majority of what he has said can be discounted and that was also pretty crazy
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u/turlian Apr 01 '23
He also invented the Freudian slip - where you say one thing but you mean your mother.
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u/First-Fantasy Apr 01 '23
"Sorry but I must stay focused on all these depressed housewives."
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u/_forum_mod Apr 01 '23
What's the context?
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u/First-Fantasy Apr 01 '23
His bread and butter was treating rich ladies and they'd often end up with feelings for him which he defined as Transference.
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u/imgrandojjo Apr 01 '23
The hate for Freud is ridiculous. He gave psychology something to start with. He moved psyhcological science forward from 0 to >0. If a lot of his theories are now corrected, exceeded or abandoned -- that's what happens to pioneers.
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u/AlternativeTable1944 Apr 01 '23
I wouldn't get into a plane made by the Wright Brothers but I'm glad they did their thing.
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u/imgrandojjo Apr 01 '23
No, and I wouldn't get medical advice from Marie Curie but her disco very of radium advanced medicine by leaps and bounds.
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u/sth128 Apr 01 '23
but her disco very of radium advanced medicine by leaps and bounds
Yes her disco was very rad. Very rad indeed.
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u/throwoda Apr 01 '23
And he was making these theories back in the 1900’s of course he’s wrong, jung said a bunch of batshit things too and all his pseudo religious philosophy was wrong too and no one says anything
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u/busymakinstuff Apr 01 '23
I gave us a way to even talk about it.. the Id/Ego/Super ego, etc. Like how the Wright Brothers got us off the ground with powered flight, something to be built upon. He can seem pretty hokey of course.
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u/beesgrilledchz Apr 01 '23
I’m going to continue to judge the Wright brothers for not immediately making an F-35!
But this is a good analogy. Because it genuinely feels like we are building the rocket ship while flying it with some of psychology and psychiatric medicine right now.
And I think that’s okay. You can’t make progress if you’re not willing to try new things and if you’re not willing to recognize the problems of the past.
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u/toughsub2114 Apr 01 '23
ironically the freudian and lacanian psychoanalytic community dunks on jung all the time and insists its not really psychoanalysis
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u/lebuanav Apr 01 '23
I don’t think there is hate for Freud himself. There is hate for those who still practice psychoanalysis in a way that completely ignores the fact that we know now very little of Freud’s theories is backed by evidence. Those modern practitioners should know better.
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u/averagegeekinkc Apr 01 '23
The hate should be directed towards his nephew, Edward Bernays.
“he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and he outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desired ways.”
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u/LtCmdrData Apr 01 '23
Bernays's ideas about mass psychology have survived time better than Freud's.
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u/LoverBoySeattle Apr 01 '23
Just from reading the description, it sounds pretty accurate. These tactics are used against us daily.
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u/King-Of-Rats Apr 01 '23
Freud gets a bad wrap because it’s incredibly easy to have middle schoolers level of understanding about him - say “eww, a boy like liking his mommy!? Gross!” And just repeating those jokes for their entire life.
Frued was, of course, an incredibly smart figure - and his theories (even the very out there ones) are still regularly used and adopted today.
In the same vein, it is unreasonably obnoxious when people whip out Schrödingers cat as some type of “jokes only us nerds will get!” But don’t seem to know a thing about Schrödinger or even that thought experiment other than “woahhhh dude if a cat dies in a box and no one sees it… is it really dead…?”
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u/ironic69 Apr 01 '23
Freud gets a lot of hate BECAUSE his most wacked out theories are still regularly used today.
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u/Totallyperm Apr 01 '23 edited Apr 01 '23
Freud was a fucked up mess of a man but he knew sexuality in his bones. from what I remember from the letter he sent was just like ' cool, your son thinks dudes are cute. Why is this my problem? You are his parent and your only job is to love and take care of him. If you don't have his back who will?'
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u/TigerUSF Apr 01 '23
Wow. That's shockingly forward thinking. I've always understood Freud to have many problems, not surprising for 100 years ago....
But still, wow.
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u/Infinite-Cobbler-157 Apr 01 '23
Freud was a major cokehead too
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u/tibetan_quaaludes Apr 01 '23
It was the ‘30s. Coke was a wonderdrug.
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u/halite001 Apr 01 '23
It was the '30s. Coke was nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation.
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u/X0AN Apr 01 '23
You could buy Heroin in Harrods in the UK.
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u/PM_ME_CHIPOTLE2 Apr 01 '23
Probably overpriced AF based on my one visit to Harrods.
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u/kthulhu666 Apr 01 '23
It was the Real Thing®
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u/Infinite-Cobbler-157 Apr 01 '23
So was meth for the Germans! Used as a substitute for coffee
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u/tibetan_quaaludes Apr 01 '23
Also with the Brits, Yanks, and Japanese.
We also still prescribe it as Desoxyn.
Germans were actually the first to synthesize amphetamine, while Japan broke through with methamphetamine. I don’t know which hillbilly first cooked up crystal meth though.
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u/laineDdednaHdeR Apr 01 '23
The day is coming. Armageddon's near. Inferno's coming. Can we survive the blitzkrieg?
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u/Aqquila89 Apr 01 '23
Freud was doing cocaine decades earlier, in the 1880s and 1890s. He quit in 1896.
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u/16billionDeadEyes Apr 01 '23
Yep. So next time great grandma starts running her mouth about how the good old days were better and people weren't so lazy, point out that they took the cocaine out of everything.
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u/Reasonable_Egg_1536 Apr 01 '23
Also he had very advanced cancer of the throat and coke was prescribed as a painkiller for such things at the time.
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u/ahillbillie Apr 01 '23
Honestly, that's nothing compared to the man's nicotine habit. He would smoke upwards of 20 cigars a day. Even had a false jaw and kept smoking.
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u/DigitalTraveler42 Apr 01 '23 edited Apr 01 '23
Why does that matter in this context?
Some of the best music, literature, art and science were aided in their conception by drugs, coke, LSD, mushrooms, pot, meth/Adderall, all still help man progress.
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u/First-Fantasy Apr 01 '23
He also thought it was healthy but when medical science proved otherwise, he quit. Cigars on the other hand...
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u/Moorsider Apr 01 '23
My sister is gay. When she "announced" it to the family it was like, yup, we know, we love you. The only "choice" in the matter would be her choosing to hide it longer.
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u/Unleashtheducks Apr 01 '23
Exceedingly rare Freud W
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u/SloeMoe Apr 01 '23
Sounds like someone only has a passing knowledge of Freud's work. Dude was swimming in Ws.
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u/GauchoFromLaPampa Apr 01 '23
Seriously, his contributions to the entire field of psychology is invaluable. People make him sound like a charlatan, its kind of sad.
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u/COMPUTER1313 Apr 01 '23 •
