Hacker News Reader

Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand psychologists interest in Freud, someone who was completely and entirely objectively wrong about everything.

It would be like physicists constantly including references/comparisons to Aristotelian Mechanics, or flat Earthers.

Why put any consideration or thought into something known-to-be completely wrong? I can't comprehend it. For me, it completely discredits anything they're trying to say. Maybe there was something interesting, I don't know, I gave up after I saw 25 hits for "Freud". I don't enjoy pseudoscience.

View on HN

You're taking two massive things for granted.

1. Someone else who isn't you figured out how wrong Freud was.

2. What is considered "intuitive" changes over time because of those questions you never had to consider and the answers that you now do.

The less curious you are about the past, the more likely you are to repeat its mistakes. Do not consider yourself immune. It's the people who are as dismissive as you are that are most highly at risk!

This is all a self inflicted wound though. Weeks are still spent on him, and his pseudoscience, in intro psychology classes, and still brought up in higher level courses. People only know about him because psychologists won't stop talking about him. Here's one sentence that could be used to stop the cycle, any time a desire to talk about Freud comes up: Freud introduced the concept of psychoanalysis, but his framework and findings are in no way relevant to science, so will be left to the reader.

And the torture ends!

I don't believe it's necessary to go into depth about all the ideas that were wrong, through all of history.

Physicists and epistemologs do refer to Aristotle and flat earthers all the time. Maybe with more critical mindset and as a will to exemplify what they consider undesirable outcomes, but still they cite them all the time.

It's hard to dodge totally a figure that the discipline itself sell as a founding member or a representative of what is antinomic to these foundations yet enjoy some persistent followers.

> completely and entirely objectively wrong about everything.

You mean things like:

* people not being fully rational, but also having unconscious thought processes

* human mind consisting of multiple sub-agents that sometimes have different goals

* hypnosis not being necessary to cure problems, mere talking can achieve the same effect

* sex being an important force in human psychology

...or something else specifically?

When talking about people in the past, you may want to consider that everything they were right about sounds to us now as obvious (sometimes, thanks to them), so yeah it seems like everyone in the past only had two kinds of opinions: obvious, and wrong.

This.

I just stop reading when I stumble on a piece seriously mentioning Freud as an authority.

Amen. I too am curious (sic) why any rational person would want to bury a fascinating subject like curiosity by entangling it with obsolete fantasy-based sophistry like freudianism. Employing but a wee bit of fair-minded imagination instead would surely yield more fruitful and substantial insights.

And was there a book review hiding beneath all that noxious palaver? TL-DR. I'd genuinely like to know. Curiosity deserves better inquiry and illumination than the few books I've seen on the topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com