In the article on “Global Warming, Intelligent Design and the Re-Ascendancy of the pro-Scientific Political Left” you mention a “Barbara Forrester”. Unless you mean somebody unknown to me, I guess you mean “Barbara Forrest”, who participated as expert witness in the Dover trial against the intelligent design movement.
Excellent article,excellent analysis,but I dont agree that the West created the monster of political Islam.This has evolved out of the failures across the arab world and Middle-east.The destruction of political Islam and hence religious Islam should be the immediate task of the 21st century.
“Freud’s contribution has been monumental. Nobody (save the Esterson et al. team of lunatics) demands to burn the books and return to the bliss of ignorance”
I see your habit of making large unsubstantiated claims is still going strong. Do you have any evidence to support your contention that Allen esterson is a lunatic and that he “demands to burn the books” ?
Paul, I wouldn’t bother to ask Ovidiu to provide a justification for his claims.
Admirers of Freud are not into providing explanations or justifications. They are into twisting facts, statements, opinion and behaviour, to fit around some arcane, baroque, unfalsifiable theory of mind.
Ovidiu really comes across as someone who always wants to be right without any need for an explanation.
At the beginning of most of his public lectures Freud was on the defensive against those who asked him to substantiate his claims. And he never managed to do so. His successors and admireres are still play the same game. All they need to say is ‘Freud was a genius’ and we are supposed to believe it without hesitation.
Freud was in fact, a charlatan. An accomplished and sophisticated one, to be sure, but still a charlatan.
Ovidiu, you must be joking surely! Science is about systematic observation and measurment!
Psychoanalysis is about untestable, unfalsifiable concepts and theories (the unconscious, transference, id-ego-superego, oedipus complex etc.). Not a single one of Freud’s concepts and ‘discoveries’ has been scientifically validated. Not one in over 100 years! And despite the claims by Mark Solms and his crew, neurobiology is moving ever further away from psychoanalysis.
Don’t let your admiration for the master blind you to the fact that psychoanalysis is a belief and nothing more than that. You might choose to believe that your neurosis was caused by you witnessing your parents having sex when you were two (or some other fanciful theory) but that does not make it true.
I’ve said before I have no desire to get into an interminable exchange with Ovidiu, but his propensity to chuck around statements as if they were they were unchallengeable is just too much on this occasion!
> Not at random now but nevertheless I’ve picked up “The scientific credibility of Freud’s theories and therapy” by S.Fischer and R.Greenberg, 1977, Basic Books NY. It gives 1280 of academic papers as references for their conclusions on what and what not from Freud’s hypotheses have withstood the test.<
That Ovidiu thinks the conclusions of Fisher and Greenberg in their 1977 volume are to be taken seriously is a measure of his credulity in the face of psychoanalytic claims. The book is an object lesson in flawed studies. As Frank Cioffi’s review of the volume concluded: “What these studies really show is that there are psychologists who would sooner part with their own penises than with the concept of castration anxiety” (Times Higher Educational Supplement, 12 August 1977).
Ovidiu writes
>Allen…displays his beloved “willful ingnorance”… because he… must have known when he wrote his last article at B&W that Freud changed his mind and revised his theories as new observations were made or he found better conceptualizations for the old material.<
I deal with the *false* claim that Freud revised his theories in the face of fresh ‘observations’ in chapter 11 (“Theoretical Revisions”) of my book *Seductive Mirage*, pp. 191-204. I suggest Ovidiu reads it before coming up with specific claims, as I really do not want endless sessions with him. Try reading my chapter first. (The critical word in Ovidiu’s statement is ‘observations’, for which in Freud’s writings you should almost invariably replace with the word “interpretations”. When Freud came up with fresh ideas, he simply *re-interpreted* the original analytic material to fit his new versions.)
>But the unfalsifiability principle (of Popper and, historically, a late spasm of what was known once as “the Vienna analytical philosophy”-school) if taken seriously would dismiss Darwin and evolution as well, not only Freud.<
I already dealt with Ovidiu’s mistaken notions about Popper and Darwinian theory in a previous letter, but it must have passed him by. If he wants to understand Popper’s position on evolutionary theory I recommend the first Darwin Lecture at Darwin College Cambridge in 1977, which Popper was invited to present. It has the title “Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind”, and is reprinted in *Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge*, eds. G. Radnitzky and W. W. Bartley III (Open Court, 1987), pp. 139-153. Popper’s final sentence reads:
“It is thus the entire range of phenomena connected with the evolution of life and of mind, and also of the products of the human mind, that are illuminated by the great and inspiring idea that we owe to Darwin.”
This whole business about Freud plays out at a fairly high intellectual level. I have been thinking about how a spectator of the controversy might react to the two sides, given that most people do not have enough time to go deeply into the question. Then I noticed that in general Ovidiu has a tendency to make claims without offering any support . Rather than getting bogged down in the minute details of the Freud question I decided to try to get him to justify two sets of claims he has made about other issues. That would, I thought, allow us all to see his thought processes, good or bad. After all, a lot of the time Ovidiu is asking us to put our trust in him, so how he thinks is central to his argument. I am disappointed, but not too surprised, that he has not responded.
As I said, Ovidiu, you cannot back up your claims. You are a also a world-class avoider of the question.
As for Popper and the theory of evolution, I already pointed you to a link showing that (1) the theory is falsifiable and (2) Popper accepted that is falsifiable. So your other claim that ‘the unfalsifiability principle (of Popper and, historically, a late spasm of what was known once as “the Vienna analytical philosophy”-school) if taken seriously would dismiss Darwin and evolution as well, not only Freud’ is just flat-out plain wrong.
Perhaps this is what happens to the mind after prolonged exposure to the Freudian nonsense.
It is ironic a site that prides itself on discerning sophistry from reason accepts the Manmade Global Warming argument which is mainly unsubstantiated hypotheses and logical fallacies. And then congratulates itself on its scientific understanding.
For example, the “overwhelming scientific consensus” argument. Leaving aside whether there really is consensus or not, as proof of any scientific claim it is meaningless. This argument is an appeal to the popularity of belief, a logical fallacy. Scientific truth is not determined by popular opinion or vote, no matter how overwhelming the majority, but by factual evidence. Popularity of belief proves only that it is widely believed, not that it’s true.
The history of science has examples of overwhelming consensus about theories which were proven wrong. In the 20th century scientists widely believed the Bernoulli principle generated lift on an airfoil. Even Einstein believed this theory and designed a wing based on it. This theory of lift is totally debunked. The accepted explanation of lift is the Lancester-Prandtle hypothesis of flying. A good explanation can be found at See How it Flies. http://www.av8n.com/how/
This article cites genuine experts in their fields and provides real, scientific evidence and laboratory experiments indicating the inadequacy of the MGW hypothesis. The side in this debate that is being scientific are the deniers examining the evidence, all the evidence, and not the side claiming the debate is closed and their evidence, scant as it is, is the only evidence that should be considered.
Ana, put it down to discrimination… It’s because I am a psychoanalyst, isn’t it?
Joking aside, as I mentioned in a previous message, there are still people out there who take psychoanalysis seriously. Therefore, it is not terribly difficult to come up with an extract from an academic paper exposing the theory of psychoanalysis as a science. You can probably find dozens of them filed away in academic libraries around the world. But, they are still irrelevant against the volume or research in medicine and psychology which completely ignore psychoanalysis, or treat it, at best, as a pre-scientific historical curiosity.
The truth is that without significant experimental or epidemiological support for any of its notions, psychoanalysis has been left behind by mainstream psychological research. If you study citations in key medicine and psychology journals you will find that psychoanalytic research has been virtually ignored over the past several decades.
There is no debate over this, Ana you can go to various libraries and check this for yourself.
The truth is that the ‘clinical validation’ of Freudian theory is an epistemic sieve and psychoanalytic notions are so vaguely formulated that they are compatible with almost any outcome. Not to mention the fact that, as a means of gaining knowledge, psychoanalysis is tainted by the inclusion, among its working assumptions and its dialogue with patients, of the very ideas that supposedly get corroborated by clinical experience.
Let’s take the concept of repression which is central to psychoanalysis. Freud considers the repression of traumatic experiences into the unconscious to be the cause of neuroses and claims that psychoanalytic interpretation can dig out these memories and deal with them in the appropriate fashion. In later works, Freud distinguishes between repression (unconscious and healthy) and suppression (conscious and neurotic). But which is which and when is forgetfulness a source of disease or a healthy strategy?
To Freud, in this case as in many others, the answer did not matter much. The vagueness of the concepts served his purpose perfectly. If repression can be both conscious and unconscious, healthy or neurosis-inducing, normal or deviant, than no one will focus on the concept of repressed memory or the unconscious itself and refute their existence. It’s a neat trick but it doesn’t work. And of course it’s a scientific disgrace and you can see why some people go as far as calling Freud a quack.
The truth is that if you strip psychoanalysis of its ‘unique’ theoretical premises and techniques, which remain very definitively outside the realm of scientific exploration (id-ego-superego, interpretation, free association, projections, the stages of infantile libidinal development, repression, Oedipus complex etc.) what you are left with are some pretty bland concepts such as the fact that human mental development is significantly affected by childhood experiences. You don’t need Freud for this; the Jesuits claimed ‘give me the boy at seven and I will show you the man’ or something along these lines.
Arash has rationally and correctly thought this issue out.
He deserves credit for being one of the most astute thinkers today about the issues surrounding the HIV/AIDS crisis, the causes of it’s spread and how to disable that spread.
His article is a meaningful tract describing the reasons for the spread of HIV/AIDS among the sexually unprepared and why religion has became irrelevant when dealing with health.
Very interesting. I notice that my students cannot imagine a religion whose primary purpose would not be to regulate sexual behavior. This makes me think their idea of religion is rather shallow, but then again, they disagree with me on this.
But when it comes to AIDS, this and other religious moral prove deadly and play a direct role in humans’ deaths.
There are certain known facts. The continent with the highest incidence of AIDs is Africa. The incidence of AIDS varies within Africa – Islam is very low compared to Animist and Christian communities. Catholic countries are lower than Protestant. The ability of agencies to distribute condoms forms an exactly opposite picture.
I’m not going to make a case that condom don’t save lives – it’s obvious that they can but to claim that religion is THE impediment to combatting AIDs is not supported by the evidence. One is forced to acknowledge that the lack of AIDS in Muslim countries must owe at least something to the religious morality that is enforced in those countries.
Religion is not the solution but neither is it the problem
Howard Gardner has been peddling his own theory of multiple intelligences for, what, 30 years? without producing anything that can be tested. So why shouldn’t he speak in defence of the Viennese quack, as Nabokov called him?
Part One of your posting reminded me that something similar went on in Nova Scotia, Canada. They were called Training Schools.
Frontier University had two Training School ‘graduates’ from Bible Hill, Miles and Bev. They had about a grade three [nine years old] level of education.
Bev was intelligent and Miles was a slowlearner. They had both been in the Training School for ten years. We finally refered Beth and Miles to Adult Education in Truro.
Part Two about education at Industrial Schools is interesting too, especially since your writing is so literate and knowlegeable.
Please give more definitive information on the Three Rs you received at the Industrial Schools.
Mitchell Slutzky betrays the unwillingness to deal with unpleasant realities common to defenders of Freud.
His particular take is :
1) The failures of psychoanalysis are not so fatal to it because no medical treatment is sucessful in every application
2) Failure can be down to the lack of motivation to change on the part of the analysand
3) An expert analyst can help the analysand to change
4) The analysand needs emotional strength to be able to change and it may be necessary to wait for that strength to develop.
5) The expert analyst will know when to wait for that strength
6) We can see changes in brain activity as old bad habits are abandoned or replaced by good new ones during analysis.
7) All this proves Freud right.
A medical doctor reading this will be thinking about placebo effects and the waxing and waning of organic diseases.
He will be surprised to find the abysmally low rate of cure from psychoanalysis compared with the failures of antibiotics, which have a high success rate and which can be individually matched to an illness, time permitting.
He will be aware that given enough time many illnesses just disappear, so the fact that an analysand is cured may have nothing to do with the analysis, making double-blind trials against a control group not being analysed a necessity.
To ensure the absence of a placebo effect causing the neural changes, he will want to see what happens when other treatments are tried.
Indeed, that neural patterns reflect behavior and habits of thoughts is unobjectionable, as is the notion that as the latter change so will neural patterns alter accordingly. However people change all the time without psychoanalysis , examples being giving up smoking or drinking. So their neural patterns will change accordingly. The problem with Freudianism is that it is for the mind a “Theory of Everything”. There is no room for alternatives beside it. Therefore it alone must be in accord with experiment and observation. It is not enough for it to have supporting evidence – the other approaches must fail. Record the neural patterns of people about to be treated by Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, for example, then repeat after successful cures and one may find similar alterations to brain activity. This would mean all Shore’s work is in vain, at least as far as supporting Freud’s theory of the mind is concerned.
Re: > Part Two – about education at Industrial Schools is interesting too, especially since your writing is so literate and knowledgeable. <
Time spent receiving education in Goldenbridge was very minimalist.
Educating Goldenbridge children was not a precedence of the Sisters of Mercy, notwithstanding the piece of information that their philosophy was/is “to educate” the most ignorant, {their lingo not mine} and marginalized. The construction of ROSARY BEADS in a schoolroom, turned surreptitious mini-factory was albeit of much more magnitude. The little bit of education I did take delivery of was at the hands of two untrained
“Jam” teachers in the internal so-called Industrial School. I did not know how to create an apposite sentence – nor was I ashamedly and sadly to say acquainted with where to put a full stop, comma, semicolon, you name it – when I first left, but with sheer resilience and mental fortitude I ultimately somewhat skilled myself. I am still learning. OB of B&Ws has also given me new buoyancy to articulate things, and it is brilliant to be in the B&Ws midst of those of who were providential enough to be educated. As one continues to learn – even more!
Thank you for your contribution. I CERTAINLY DO NOT TAKE EDUCATION FOR GRANTED AS IT IS INDEED – POWER! POWER! POWER!
In the absence of empirical evidence, I don’t believe in any of the freudian theories. Freud and his followers have always been extremely adept at obfuscation and at shoring up empirical failures with alternative theories.
It would be easier to accept psychoanalysis as an erroneous but ultimately marginal and irrelevant belief system if it did not persist with its scientific claims.
People can believe what they want: god, homeopathy, crystal healing or the fact their unhappiness is dictated by castration anxiety with oedipal complex origins. Whatever. Just as long as they don’t make claim that their belief is ‘truth’, is fine by me
‘there are thousands of studies documenting the oedipus complex’
Yeah… right! In the psychoanalytic journals perhaps!
As I wrote in my previous message Freud and his followers have developed a remarkable expertise in confounding their critics. And still those critics will not go away. Damn!
I suppose you ignore evidence of the unconscious, repression, and emotions guiding our behavior? You ignore neuroscience findings confirming these tenets of Freudian thought? Or do you ignore so much evidence that our thoughts and feelings continually wire and rewire the brain? There is also much support for the concept of transference as the shorthand each of use to view all relationships in the context of ones that came before. Clearly there is support for benefits of analysis of the transference; doing so helps reduce distortions in one’s interpersonal relationships. Would you like me to turn this into a paper where I cite sources? Your polemic belies your ignorance of a large body of research from the field of neuropsychoanalysis, itself a colaboration between many prominent hard neuroscientists and psychoanalysts.
Not a piece of Freudian theory has ever met with any scientific validation. Not a single one in over 100 years; despite the many claims put forward by the believers.
So, the best that can be said is that psychoanalysis is a pseudo-science.
It could also be said that psychoanalysis belongs with such ‘disciplines’ as palm-reading, fortune telling, astrology, divination and various other forms of quackery.
However, there are still some people who believe in it and psychoanalysis is a very lucrative business. An analysit with a full practice can become a millionaire in a few years.
Jung did not try to destroy Freud’s theories. In fact, Jung improved on some poorly formulated aspects of the Freudian constellations and rightly shifted the balance of psychoanalysis (which he renamed Analytical Psychology) to the realm of the spiritual and the philosophical rather then the scientific.
This is why Analytical Psychology is far superior to Freudian Psychoanalysis in the healing of souls. And this is why it has become vastly more popular than psychoanalysis with the general public.
Freud’s insistence on sexuality as the alpha and omega was plainly wrong.
This is not a forum. It’s not a discussion board and it’s not a forum. B&W doesn’t have a forum. This is a Letters page, not a forum. It is not intended to be dominated by interminable wrangles over Freud. It is intended as a place to comment briefly on anything that appears on B&W.
The arguments put forward by *some* of the critics of Freud in this forum are not very good. And even if they were good, it wouldn’t change anything.
Telling a follower of Freud that there is nothing to psychoanalysis is a bit like telling a convinced practicing Christian or a Muslim that there is a very strong possibility that god doesn’t exist, after all. There is no argument against strongly held convictions.
In addition, psychoanalysis has always been a pastime for the intelligentsia (just to prove that gullibility extends to all sections of society), and the educated middle and upper classes can put forward very erudite defences of their pursuits. Organised religion has been around for thousands of years and it is still going strong. Granted, psychoanalysis is not as big as, say, Catholicism. But that is one further reason to let it be.
In any case, where is the problem if some wealthy people want to belong to a private circle with its own rituals and way of life? Why the animosity? Is not as if psychoanalysts eat babies.
Large body of research? Where? In ‘Neuropsychoanalysis’ perhaps? A pro-Freudian journal which appears twice a year and consists of about 10 per cent new articles and 90 per cent letters and conmments.
There is no scientific evidence for any of Freud’s ‘discoveries’. Nada, zero, zilch, niente.
OB, you cancelled the psychoanalytic meeting! For that don’t expect me to ever set foot again here! I could comment briefly on some articules, but for that I won’t.
‘We live in a time when… governments and religious movements are busy rewriting history as they would wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was.’ B.Lewis
To repeat: this is not a forum, it is not a discussion board, it is not a place to post unrequested articles on Freud or anything else; it is a Letters page, a place for brief comments on material at B&W. Articles on Freud or anything else should be submitted to the editor for consideration. Note: not publishing an article is not censorship; no magazine of any worth publishes everything it receives.
Secular Islamic Summit Conference of Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents.
The Conference will be held on March 4th and 5th in St Petersburg, Florida at the Hilton Hotel. The dissidents are planning to issue a Declaration for freedom throughout the Islamic world.
The discovery is an example on how to proceed at deconstructing the Christian narrative by using the tools of postmodern archeotheology and critical theory.
It not only proves that the resurrection didn’t happen but also that Derrida was right in his atheism.
God is dead, never to be resurrected. Politics pretends that God is on its side. Neuroscience can be used both in support and in refutation of Freud. All theories are simply models to enhance understanding of the world. Treating models as Truth leads to catastrophic consequences. Censorship only intensifies philosophical diametrics. Ideologues beware.
Judging by the number and topics of the articles posted here one can conclude that Freud is dead (or at least censored) while religion (islam, xnity, designers) is the all the passion (and much rage) at the start of 21th century.
Point well taken! It is your choice to structure this section anyway you’d like. Down with anarchy! Comments directly on your published articles will suffice. I’ll take my marbles and go. It stopped being fun anyway.
“Environmentalism as a meta-physical ideology and as a world view has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or the climate itself. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with social sciences either. Despite these facts, it is getting fashionable and this process scares me. The second part of the assertion should be: we also have plenty of reports, studies, and books of climate scientists whose conclusions are diametrically opposite.”
In the article on “Global Warming, Intelligent Design and the Re-Ascendancy of the pro-Scientific Political Left” you mention a “Barbara Forrester”. Unless you mean somebody unknown to me, I guess you mean “Barbara Forrest”, who participated as expert witness in the Dover trial against the intelligent design movement.
Political Islam
Excellent article,excellent analysis,but I dont agree that the West created the monster of political Islam.This has evolved out of the failures across the arab world and Middle-east.The destruction of political Islam and hence religious Islam should be the immediate task of the 21st century.
Ovidiu wrote:
“Freud’s contribution has been monumental. Nobody (save the Esterson et al. team of lunatics) demands to burn the books and return to the bliss of ignorance”
I see your habit of making large unsubstantiated claims is still going strong. Do you have any evidence to support your contention that Allen esterson is a lunatic and that he “demands to burn the books” ?
Ovidiu:
you used the phrase “the Esterson et al. team of lunatics” so you called Allen a lunatic.
You also wrote than this “team of lunatics” “demands to burn the books ” – which means that you think Allen has demanded that Freud’s books be burned.
I want you to provide some justification for both these claims.
Marie O Loughlin
I have an old photo of you if your interested
Paul, I wouldn’t bother to ask Ovidiu to provide a justification for his claims.
Admirers of Freud are not into providing explanations or justifications. They are into twisting facts, statements, opinion and behaviour, to fit around some arcane, baroque, unfalsifiable theory of mind.
Ovidiu really comes across as someone who always wants to be right without any need for an explanation.
At the beginning of most of his public lectures Freud was on the defensive against those who asked him to substantiate his claims. And he never managed to do so. His successors and admireres are still play the same game. All they need to say is ‘Freud was a genius’ and we are supposed to believe it without hesitation.
Freud was in fact, a charlatan. An accomplished and sophisticated one, to be sure, but still a charlatan.
Toni
Ovidiu wrote: ‘Doing good science, as Freud did,’
Ovidiu, you must be joking surely! Science is about systematic observation and measurment!
Psychoanalysis is about untestable, unfalsifiable concepts and theories (the unconscious, transference, id-ego-superego, oedipus complex etc.). Not a single one of Freud’s concepts and ‘discoveries’ has been scientifically validated. Not one in over 100 years! And despite the claims by Mark Solms and his crew, neurobiology is moving ever further away from psychoanalysis.
Don’t let your admiration for the master blind you to the fact that psychoanalysis is a belief and nothing more than that. You might choose to believe that your neurosis was caused by you witnessing your parents having sex when you were two (or some other fanciful theory) but that does not make it true.
Zapper
I’ve said before I have no desire to get into an interminable exchange with Ovidiu, but his propensity to chuck around statements as if they were they were unchallengeable is just too much on this occasion!
> Not at random now but nevertheless I’ve picked up “The scientific credibility of Freud’s theories and therapy” by S.Fischer and R.Greenberg, 1977, Basic Books NY. It gives 1280 of academic papers as references for their conclusions on what and what not from Freud’s hypotheses have withstood the test.< That Ovidiu thinks the conclusions of Fisher and Greenberg in their 1977 volume are to be taken seriously is a measure of his credulity in the face of psychoanalytic claims. The book is an object lesson in flawed studies. As Frank Cioffi’s review of the volume concluded: “What these studies really show is that there are psychologists who would sooner part with their own penises than with the concept of castration anxiety” (Times Higher Educational Supplement, 12 August 1977). Ovidiu writes
>Allen…displays his beloved “willful ingnorance”… because he… must have known when he wrote his last article at B&W that Freud changed his mind and revised his theories as new observations were made or he found better conceptualizations for the old material.< I deal with the *false* claim that Freud revised his theories in the face of fresh ‘observations’ in chapter 11 (“Theoretical Revisions”) of my book *Seductive Mirage*, pp. 191-204. I suggest Ovidiu reads it before coming up with specific claims, as I really do not want endless sessions with him. Try reading my chapter first. (The critical word in Ovidiu’s statement is ‘observations’, for which in Freud’s writings you should almost invariably replace with the word “interpretations”. When Freud came up with fresh ideas, he simply *re-interpreted* the original analytic material to fit his new versions.) >But the unfalsifiability principle (of Popper and, historically, a late spasm of what was known once as “the Vienna analytical philosophy”-school) if taken seriously would dismiss Darwin and evolution as well, not only Freud.< I already dealt with Ovidiu’s mistaken notions about Popper and Darwinian theory in a previous letter, but it must have passed him by. If he wants to understand Popper’s position on evolutionary theory I recommend the first Darwin Lecture at Darwin College Cambridge in 1977, which Popper was invited to present. It has the title “Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind”, and is reprinted in *Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge*, eds. G. Radnitzky and W. W. Bartley III (Open Court, 1987), pp. 139-153. Popper’s final sentence reads: “It is thus the entire range of phenomena connected with the evolution of life and of mind, and also of the products of the human mind, that are illuminated by the great and inspiring idea that we owe to Darwin.”
Thanks Toni Ton for your kind comment.
This whole business about Freud plays out at a fairly high intellectual level. I have been thinking about how a spectator of the controversy might react to the two sides, given that most people do not have enough time to go deeply into the question. Then I noticed that in general Ovidiu has a tendency to make claims without offering any support . Rather than getting bogged down in the minute details of the Freud question I decided to try to get him to justify two sets of claims he has made about other issues. That would, I thought, allow us all to see his thought processes, good or bad. After all, a lot of the time Ovidiu is asking us to put our trust in him, so how he thinks is central to his argument. I am disappointed, but not too surprised, that he has not responded.
As I said, Ovidiu, you cannot back up your claims. You are a also a world-class avoider of the question.
As for Popper and the theory of evolution, I already pointed you to a link showing that (1) the theory is falsifiable and (2) Popper accepted that is falsifiable. So your other claim that ‘the unfalsifiability principle (of Popper and, historically, a late spasm of what was known once as “the Vienna analytical philosophy”-school) if taken seriously would dismiss Darwin and evolution as well, not only Freud’ is just flat-out plain wrong.
Perhaps this is what happens to the mind after prolonged exposure to the Freudian nonsense.
Folks, this page is not meant to be a discussion board, much less a place for wrangling and name-calling. Enough already.
It is ironic a site that prides itself on discerning sophistry from reason accepts the Manmade Global Warming argument which is mainly unsubstantiated hypotheses and logical fallacies. And then congratulates itself on its scientific understanding.
For example, the “overwhelming scientific consensus” argument. Leaving aside whether there really is consensus or not, as proof of any scientific claim it is meaningless. This argument is an appeal to the popularity of belief, a logical fallacy. Scientific truth is not determined by popular opinion or vote, no matter how overwhelming the majority, but by factual evidence. Popularity of belief proves only that it is widely believed, not that it’s true.
The history of science has examples of overwhelming consensus about theories which were proven wrong. In the 20th century scientists widely believed the Bernoulli principle generated lift on an airfoil. Even Einstein believed this theory and designed a wing based on it. This theory of lift is totally debunked. The accepted explanation of lift is the Lancester-Prandtle hypothesis of flying. A good explanation can be found at See How it Flies. http://www.av8n.com/how/
If anyone with an open mind wants the scientific evidence about global warming and how truly unproven and weak the proposition of MGW is, they can see the National Post ten part series, “The Deniers” at http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=22003a0d-37cc-4399-8bcc-39cd20bed2f6&k=0
This article cites genuine experts in their fields and provides real, scientific evidence and laboratory experiments indicating the inadequacy of the MGW hypothesis. The side in this debate that is being scientific are the deniers examining the evidence, all the evidence, and not the side claiming the debate is closed and their evidence, scant as it is, is the only evidence that should be considered.
No scientific evidence for psychoanalysis
Ana, put it down to discrimination… It’s because I am a psychoanalyst, isn’t it?
Joking aside, as I mentioned in a previous message, there are still people out there who take psychoanalysis seriously. Therefore, it is not terribly difficult to come up with an extract from an academic paper exposing the theory of psychoanalysis as a science. You can probably find dozens of them filed away in academic libraries around the world. But, they are still irrelevant against the volume or research in medicine and psychology which completely ignore psychoanalysis, or treat it, at best, as a pre-scientific historical curiosity.
The truth is that without significant experimental or epidemiological support for any of its notions, psychoanalysis has been left behind by mainstream psychological research. If you study citations in key medicine and psychology journals you will find that psychoanalytic research has been virtually ignored over the past several decades.
There is no debate over this, Ana you can go to various libraries and check this for yourself.
The truth is that the ‘clinical validation’ of Freudian theory is an epistemic sieve and psychoanalytic notions are so vaguely formulated that they are compatible with almost any outcome. Not to mention the fact that, as a means of gaining knowledge, psychoanalysis is tainted by the inclusion, among its working assumptions and its dialogue with patients, of the very ideas that supposedly get corroborated by clinical experience.
Let’s take the concept of repression which is central to psychoanalysis. Freud considers the repression of traumatic experiences into the unconscious to be the cause of neuroses and claims that psychoanalytic interpretation can dig out these memories and deal with them in the appropriate fashion. In later works, Freud distinguishes between repression (unconscious and healthy) and suppression (conscious and neurotic). But which is which and when is forgetfulness a source of disease or a healthy strategy?
To Freud, in this case as in many others, the answer did not matter much. The vagueness of the concepts served his purpose perfectly. If repression can be both conscious and unconscious, healthy or neurosis-inducing, normal or deviant, than no one will focus on the concept of repressed memory or the unconscious itself and refute their existence. It’s a neat trick but it doesn’t work. And of course it’s a scientific disgrace and you can see why some people go as far as calling Freud a quack.
The truth is that if you strip psychoanalysis of its ‘unique’ theoretical premises and techniques, which remain very definitively outside the realm of scientific exploration (id-ego-superego, interpretation, free association, projections, the stages of infantile libidinal development, repression, Oedipus complex etc.) what you are left with are some pretty bland concepts such as the fact that human mental development is significantly affected by childhood experiences. You don’t need Freud for this; the Jesuits claimed ‘give me the boy at seven and I will show you the man’ or something along these lines.
Arash has rationally and correctly thought this issue out.
He deserves credit for being one of the most astute thinkers today about the issues surrounding the HIV/AIDS crisis, the causes of it’s spread and how to disable that spread.
His article is a meaningful tract describing the reasons for the spread of HIV/AIDS among the sexually unprepared and why religion has became irrelevant when dealing with health.
Very interesting. I notice that my students cannot imagine a religion whose primary purpose would not be to regulate sexual behavior. This makes me think their idea of religion is rather shallow, but then again, they disagree with me on this.
Re: Religion’s Role in the Expansion of AIDS
But when it comes to AIDS, this and other religious moral prove deadly and play a direct role in humans’ deaths.
There are certain known facts. The continent with the highest incidence of AIDs is Africa. The incidence of AIDS varies within Africa – Islam is very low compared to Animist and Christian communities. Catholic countries are lower than Protestant. The ability of agencies to distribute condoms forms an exactly opposite picture.
I’m not going to make a case that condom don’t save lives – it’s obvious that they can but to claim that religion is THE impediment to combatting AIDs is not supported by the evidence. One is forced to acknowledge that the lack of AIDS in Muslim countries must owe at least something to the religious morality that is enforced in those countries.
Religion is not the solution but neither is it the problem
Howard Gardner has been peddling his own theory of multiple intelligences for, what, 30 years? without producing anything that can be tested. So why shouldn’t he speak in defence of the Viennese quack, as Nabokov called him?
Dear Marie Therese:
Part One of your posting reminded me that something similar went on in Nova Scotia, Canada. They were called Training Schools.
Frontier University had two Training School ‘graduates’ from Bible Hill, Miles and Bev. They had about a grade three [nine years old] level of education.
Bev was intelligent and Miles was a slowlearner. They had both been in the Training School for ten years. We finally refered Beth and Miles to Adult Education in Truro.
Part Two about education at Industrial Schools is interesting too, especially since your writing is so literate and knowlegeable.
Please give more definitive information on the Three Rs you received at the Industrial Schools.
Sincerely
D. Nigel Kilbey
Registrar
Mitchell Slutzky betrays the unwillingness to deal with unpleasant realities common to defenders of Freud.
His particular take is :
1) The failures of psychoanalysis are not so fatal to it because no medical treatment is sucessful in every application
2) Failure can be down to the lack of motivation to change on the part of the analysand
3) An expert analyst can help the analysand to change
4) The analysand needs emotional strength to be able to change and it may be necessary to wait for that strength to develop.
5) The expert analyst will know when to wait for that strength
6) We can see changes in brain activity as old bad habits are abandoned or replaced by good new ones during analysis.
7) All this proves Freud right.
A medical doctor reading this will be thinking about placebo effects and the waxing and waning of organic diseases.
He will be surprised to find the abysmally low rate of cure from psychoanalysis compared with the failures of antibiotics, which have a high success rate and which can be individually matched to an illness, time permitting.
He will be aware that given enough time many illnesses just disappear, so the fact that an analysand is cured may have nothing to do with the analysis, making double-blind trials against a control group not being analysed a necessity.
To ensure the absence of a placebo effect causing the neural changes, he will want to see what happens when other treatments are tried.
Indeed, that neural patterns reflect behavior and habits of thoughts is unobjectionable, as is the notion that as the latter change so will neural patterns alter accordingly. However people change all the time without psychoanalysis , examples being giving up smoking or drinking. So their neural patterns will change accordingly. The problem with Freudianism is that it is for the mind a “Theory of Everything”. There is no room for alternatives beside it. Therefore it alone must be in accord with experiment and observation. It is not enough for it to have supporting evidence – the other approaches must fail. Record the neural patterns of people about to be treated by Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, for example, then repeat after successful cures and one may find similar alterations to brain activity. This would mean all Shore’s work is in vain, at least as far as supporting Freud’s theory of the mind is concerned.
Dear Dr. Nigel Kilbey,
Re: > Part Two – about education at Industrial Schools is interesting too, especially since your writing is so literate and knowledgeable. <
Time spent receiving education in Goldenbridge was very minimalist.
Educating Goldenbridge children was not a precedence of the Sisters of Mercy, notwithstanding the piece of information that their philosophy was/is “to educate” the most ignorant, {their lingo not mine} and marginalized. The construction of ROSARY BEADS in a schoolroom, turned surreptitious mini-factory was albeit of much more magnitude. The little bit of education I did take delivery of was at the hands of two untrained
“Jam” teachers in the internal so-called Industrial School. I did not know how to create an apposite sentence – nor was I ashamedly and sadly to say acquainted with where to put a full stop, comma, semicolon, you name it – when I first left, but with sheer resilience and mental fortitude I ultimately somewhat skilled myself. I am still learning. OB of B&Ws has also given me new buoyancy to articulate things, and it is brilliant to be in the B&Ws midst of those of who were providential enough to be educated. As one continues to learn – even more!
Thank you for your contribution. I CERTAINLY DO NOT TAKE EDUCATION FOR GRANTED AS IT IS INDEED – POWER! POWER! POWER!
In the absence of empirical evidence, I don’t believe in any of the freudian theories. Freud and his followers have always been extremely adept at obfuscation and at shoring up empirical failures with alternative theories.
It would be easier to accept psychoanalysis as an erroneous but ultimately marginal and irrelevant belief system if it did not persist with its scientific claims.
People can believe what they want: god, homeopathy, crystal healing or the fact their unhappiness is dictated by castration anxiety with oedipal complex origins. Whatever. Just as long as they don’t make claim that their belief is ‘truth’, is fine by me
‘there are thousands of studies documenting the oedipus complex’
Yeah… right! In the psychoanalytic journals perhaps!
As I wrote in my previous message Freud and his followers have developed a remarkable expertise in confounding their critics. And still those critics will not go away. Damn!
So John,
I suppose you ignore evidence of the unconscious, repression, and emotions guiding our behavior? You ignore neuroscience findings confirming these tenets of Freudian thought? Or do you ignore so much evidence that our thoughts and feelings continually wire and rewire the brain? There is also much support for the concept of transference as the shorthand each of use to view all relationships in the context of ones that came before. Clearly there is support for benefits of analysis of the transference; doing so helps reduce distortions in one’s interpersonal relationships. Would you like me to turn this into a paper where I cite sources? Your polemic belies your ignorance of a large body of research from the field of neuropsychoanalysis, itself a colaboration between many prominent hard neuroscientists and psychoanalysts.
Not a piece of Freudian theory has ever met with any scientific validation. Not a single one in over 100 years; despite the many claims put forward by the believers.
So, the best that can be said is that psychoanalysis is a pseudo-science.
It could also be said that psychoanalysis belongs with such ‘disciplines’ as palm-reading, fortune telling, astrology, divination and various other forms of quackery.
However, there are still some people who believe in it and psychoanalysis is a very lucrative business. An analysit with a full practice can become a millionaire in a few years.
Now… that is something worth defending!
On the apartheid issue you ought to have a look at the report by a South African Law Professor on the situation in the occupied territories.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2019547,00.html
You might also have seen the recent story of the Arab couple within Israel who were refused permission to move into a town because they were Arab.
Jung did not try to destroy Freud’s theories. In fact, Jung improved on some poorly formulated aspects of the Freudian constellations and rightly shifted the balance of psychoanalysis (which he renamed Analytical Psychology) to the realm of the spiritual and the philosophical rather then the scientific.
This is why Analytical Psychology is far superior to Freudian Psychoanalysis in the healing of souls. And this is why it has become vastly more popular than psychoanalysis with the general public.
Freud’s insistence on sexuality as the alpha and omega was plainly wrong.
Sandra
This is not a forum. It’s not a discussion board and it’s not a forum. B&W doesn’t have a forum. This is a Letters page, not a forum. It is not intended to be dominated by interminable wrangles over Freud. It is intended as a place to comment briefly on anything that appears on B&W.
The arguments put forward by *some* of the critics of Freud in this forum are not very good. And even if they were good, it wouldn’t change anything.
Telling a follower of Freud that there is nothing to psychoanalysis is a bit like telling a convinced practicing Christian or a Muslim that there is a very strong possibility that god doesn’t exist, after all. There is no argument against strongly held convictions.
In addition, psychoanalysis has always been a pastime for the intelligentsia (just to prove that gullibility extends to all sections of society), and the educated middle and upper classes can put forward very erudite defences of their pursuits. Organised religion has been around for thousands of years and it is still going strong. Granted, psychoanalysis is not as big as, say, Catholicism. But that is one further reason to let it be.
In any case, where is the problem if some wealthy people want to belong to a private circle with its own rituals and way of life? Why the animosity? Is not as if psychoanalysts eat babies.
Large body of research? Where? In ‘Neuropsychoanalysis’ perhaps? A pro-Freudian journal which appears twice a year and consists of about 10 per cent new articles and 90 per cent letters and conmments.
There is no scientific evidence for any of Freud’s ‘discoveries’. Nada, zero, zilch, niente.
OB, you really like spoiling people’s fun, don’t you?
OB, you cancelled the psychoanalytic meeting! For that don’t expect me to ever set foot again here! I could comment briefly on some articules, but for that I won’t.
Goodbye.
Fabulous article.
Religion IS politics. In fact, it’s fascism, theo-fascism.
Thank you for articulating it for me.
y (and xyz too, no doubt), you seem to be having trouble with the transference. That is a great pity.
Religion cannot “deal” with the corperal (bodily) reality.
This is a/the basic psycholgical aspect of religion. Religion is in the business of denying the corperal!
Of couse it cannot deal with AIDS!!
(Just as a mind first presumption, is a basic philosophical – ontological if you will – aspect of all religion(s))
David Thompson profiles Islamic apologist Karen Armstrong:
http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2007/02/islams_hagiogra.html#more
‘We live in a time when… governments and religious movements are busy rewriting history as they would wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was.’ B.Lewis
To repeat: this is not a forum, it is not a discussion board, it is not a place to post unrequested articles on Freud or anything else; it is a Letters page, a place for brief comments on material at B&W. Articles on Freud or anything else should be submitted to the editor for consideration. Note: not publishing an article is not censorship; no magazine of any worth publishes everything it receives.
Azar Majedi’s article
Secular Islamic Summit Conference of Muslim and ex-Muslim dissidents.
The Conference will be held on March 4th and 5th in St Petersburg, Florida at the Hilton Hotel. The dissidents are planning to issue a Declaration for freedom throughout the Islamic world.
Jesus’ bones
The discovery is an example on how to proceed at deconstructing the Christian narrative by using the tools of postmodern archeotheology and critical theory.
It not only proves that the resurrection didn’t happen but also that Derrida was right in his atheism.
God is dead, never to be resurrected. Politics pretends that God is on its side. Neuroscience can be used both in support and in refutation of Freud. All theories are simply models to enhance understanding of the world. Treating models as Truth leads to catastrophic consequences. Censorship only intensifies philosophical diametrics. Ideologues beware.
God is dead
Judging by the number and topics of the articles posted here one can conclude that Freud is dead (or at least censored) while religion (islam, xnity, designers) is the all the passion (and much rage) at the start of 21th century.
The future of the illusions is bright.
OB:
Point well taken! It is your choice to structure this section anyway you’d like. Down with anarchy! Comments directly on your published articles will suffice. I’ll take my marbles and go. It stopped being fun anyway.
Václav Klaus, the president of Czechia, on the fashionable nonsense of global warming :
http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/02/vclav-klaus-about-ipcc-panel.html
“Environmentalism as a meta-physical ideology and as a world view has absolutely nothing to do with natural sciences or the climate itself. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with social sciences either. Despite these facts, it is getting fashionable and this process scares me. The second part of the assertion should be: we also have plenty of reports, studies, and books of climate scientists whose conclusions are diametrically opposite.”