For Shame: Why Americans Should Be Wary of Self-Esteem (1992) | Hacker News Reader

For Shame: Why Americans Should Be Wary of Self-Esteem (1992)

newrepublic.com

81 pointschesterfield27 comments

Although I agree with comments that this particular article meanders and could have been more focused, what stunned me was not the idea presented by the article, but how much more verbose and lengthy articles like this were 25 years ago.

I am all for brevity and often skip to the TL;DR summary of long posts, but sometimes I think we have taken brevity too far. Not all ideas can be distilled into PowerPoint bullets.

I don't know... you can still find a lot of writing like this today. It just doesn't usually make its way to a viral spread. Lots of long-form articles exist that go on and on and on.

I don't think the New Republic or Current Affairs have changed massively in terms of the verbosity of their articles.

Fair point. If the New Republic still publishes articles this long perhaps they feel shorter because the language is less dense? Maybe it is just my perception then based on how the writing style has changed.

There are still articles like this. Time and Newsweek regularly have 10+ page articles that go in depth.

I don't think much has changed. You might just be looking at different kinds of sources now.

Powerpoint is a different kind of hell.

I think the rise of brevity comes out of the move from paper to screen for reading.

where before we had a defined page, with defined columns of text to read, and thus felt a kind of progress as our eyes scanned up and down each column and page, now we only have a single long column of text. And our eyes only wander the height of the screen at best, repeatedly.

I have tested various browser extensions aimed at paginating longer articles, and i have found myself enjoying the experience more.

The total amount of verbosity honestly felt like the author was trying to superficially pad the article... It's an interesting topic, but I couldn't bear to read it any more. I had to check the comments to see if anyone else was put off by the writing style.

“the vast symbolic fields of the humanities no longer form the shared matrix in which psychoanalytic work is organically embedded...owe very little to the best psychoanalytic tradition and suffer accordingly."

Sorry, no. Study after study is demonstrating that any one of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Mindfulness practice, mediation, or even exercise benefits patients more than psychotherapy. There is truly no point in marinating a patient in past traumas or broken modes of thoughts - for years - expecting awareness alone to produce useful behavioral change.

> Study after study is demonstrating that any one of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Mindfulness practice, mediation, or even exercise benefits patients more than psychotherapy.

First, CBT is also psychotherapy. Secondly, many newer studies have demonstrated the efficacy of psychodynamic therapy as equal to or better than CBT. One study even shows how CBT's efficacy has declined over time.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/07/therapy-wars...

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0081246316653860

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-65-2-98.pdf

https://uit.no/Content/418448/The%20effect%20of%20CBT%20is%2...

Meant to say psychoanalysis. You have a point.

Hmm, this "article" (let's be charitable and call it that) should probably be named "For Shame: Example of Bad Writings that Make You Want to Hurt the Authors."

I still am at loss of what is the message (which someone insists to be too simple for such long writing). The article/random-musing/writing/thing starts with history of treatment of Shame, then crosses over to self-esteem, then switches back to warnings of something with Freud last name (who's Anna Freud?), then links the failures of heeding that advice with some political failures (apparently), then makes some weird assertions about democracy (somehow, magically, Democracy becomes single standard; since WHEN did Democracy mean single standard, three fifths a person notwithstanding?), then it jumps to comparison of psychology treatments and something about deep understanding, and finally ends with how good religions are.

Phew. I hope I collected all the main points of the writing piece. At some point, my eyes glazed while words and paragraphs floated around without really making any sense.

Can somebody help with how this pops on Hacker News' front page?

For precisely the reason I said in my comment elsewhere here; people are attributing meaning to the linked title without reading the article, and upvoting it for that reason.

I am equally perplexed.

It's also odd that the comments criticizing the quality of the article are being downvoted, while there are no comments praising it.

Anna Freud was ostensibly Sigmund's doctrinary heir. Whereas Jung, Adler, Reich and others started developing their own ideas.

Jacques Lacan later claims to be a "return to Freud" too, but is entirely different.

----

The key thing to realize about psychoanalysis is that it's a sham psychological treatment in utter opposition to current scientific practices. As far as psychotherapy goes, it's basically fraudulent -- at least in the light of today's knowledge.

However: in the process of building psychoanalysis, many interesting ideas about society and language and even politics were floated. These ideas are salvageable in part, IF one keeps in mind that their original goal (building a psychotherapy oriented by leading patients to sudden insights) has long been known to be a dead end.

So... stop thinking psychology, the good parts in Jung and Lacan etc. are not the psychology.

So psychoanalysis is not dissimilar to a startup.

> These ideas are salvageable in part, IF one keeps in mind that their original goal (building a psychotherapy oriented by leading patients to sudden insights) has long been known to be a dead end.

^^^ Yes. My favorite example is that Freud's original name for "The Oedipus Complex" was "The Nuclear Complex" -- it demonstrates that he came up with the idea by noticing an interesting pattern in contemporary society (relating to the nuclear family). My speculation is that he renamed it because he believed himself to be doing Science and Medicine, rather than pure Philosophy or Sociology, and wanted the theory to be seen as more serious (and what could be more serious than invoking the ancients?).

In particular, reading Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams" after having read Foucault's "History of Sexuality", a lot of the issues and commonalities Freud identifies are not so much medical conditions as they are deep insights into how living in modern society shapes us.

It's interesting to see how much of the rhetoric around "mental health" still directly stems from his writing. Such as, specifically and most controversially today, the idea that mental illness is a strictly physiological illness requiring medical treatment, rather than a set of patterns emerging from our shared social and developmental conditions.

Dream analysis is also a fun hobby, and a lot of his ideas about free association seem interesting and personally useful, although they are certainly not serious science.

41 Points and no comments? That's a really rare phenomenon around here...

I refuse to give it my point. It's too long of a read for a simple message.

It's because people are voting up the title thinking it is an anti-American article, without reading it; but actually it's a long strange article without much coherence about anything, including America, and the title is rather misleading to boot.

It's because people are voting up the title thinking it is an anti-American article,

It seems like you are projecting here. Do you have evidence to support this belief?

Nope, no evidence at all. Instinct, yes. Am I wrong? Maybe. I don't think so.

I think your comment would be much better without the first part. Just say,

It's a long strange article without much coherence about anything, including America, and the title is rather misleading to boot.

And then add, "I don't know why it's being up voted but surmise...." The way you wrote it, to me, seemed like you are looking for an excuse to make some political point about Hacker News.

Thank you for your time and dedication to edit my comments here.

Hacker News lacks bookmarking functionality, so upvotes are used as "save for later read" feature.

err, one can favorite articles and comments...

That used to be true but HN has had a bookmarking feature for a while now.

The article was written by a historian, someone who either reads or writes for a living. Yet, this article is practically illegible. The longest sentence is over 80 words long. As one example, readable.io gives this text a D for readability.

If an author cannot write clearly on a subject, that author is likely not an authority on the subject.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com