I took several Psych classes in HS and in College. And we were all taught just how “revolutionary” and “amazing” this guy was, to be revered, respected and his theories put up on a pedestal to be taught worldwide. This “Father” of Psychology / “Father” of Psychoanalysis.
When in reality he’s a junkie who was addicted to cocaine for more than a decade and did a bunch of questionable and morally bankrupt things. Died at age 44, so how much actual “research” did the guy actually do? They cherry picked all the so-called “good” things he did and conveniently left out all the “questionable” things. And this was a time before the internet became a thing so we couldn’t just look up stuff ourselves on Google to find the truth. Hell, Google didn’t even exist yet. The “truth” was whatever our teachers told us and whatever our textbooks said. Not that the people who have a monopoly in the textbook industry have an agenda to push. Naw.
I swear, every day I learn that everything I learned in school were either lies, propaganda, or convenient omissions of truth to push an agenda. Perhaps the “smartest” people were the people who never paid attention in school.
Like how we were all taught that Columbus sat with the Indians and had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner together rather than the genocide he committed on the Native people. Or that we would be totally fine if we simply ducked underneath our school desks during a NUCLEAR fucking attack. Yeah, we had dozens of those “safety drills.” Or the food pyramid, which was a total lie funded by Big Agra. Or any of the other million lies we’ve been “taught” in schools.
Anyhow,
Sigmund Freud Was Paid By Big Ph*rma To Push Cocaine
5 comments
heh, and that’s just a drop in the bucket of all the screwed up things in the early years of psychology. Which is what my degree is in. Well, my degree is in psychology, but I had a senior level class on the history.
Freud had great PR. That’s pretty much it. He popularized psychoanalysis, but he wasn’t the first one to do talk therapy which is the actual thing that endured. Psychoanalysis evolved into psychodynamic therapy, and I’ve never found someone that actually practices it.
But I could write pages on psychosurgery (usually lobotomy), forced sterilization, implicit racism in pretty much all research pre 1950, and some very sad and silly people who were incredibly screwed up, and yet got a prominent role.
It’s also a good bet if you meet someone quoting research on the really nutty stuff, they’ll be talking about Adler, who was kind of Freud’s successor.
Skinner did some good work, as did Rogers and Maslow (who had the unfortunate legacy of having his heiarchy of needs overshadowing most of his best work). I was trained in a rare subset; descriptive psychology. The premise is that if you could really accurately describe something, it would be an accurate scientific approximation of the behavior. It’s beautiful.
Look into Wilhelm Reich if you want to really get into how insane Freud’s time was. The guy couldn’t stop having sex with his patients, and he developed this bananas theory about how that was actually the therapy. Anyway, he fled the Nazis (as did Freud), and ended up in the United States and building a psuedoreligion on his unscientific dreck. He ended up developing delusions of granduer and going to prison for running afoul of the FDA.
Oh, but when they asked Freud about Reich, he called his sexual preoccupation his “hobby horse”…… granted he was probably high out of his mind at that point.
I also think a lot about L. Ron Hubbard, when I think about the early years. I think he was stuck in the first half of the 20th century in behavioral “science”…. he would have done well in that era when all it took was confidence and the ability to say stuff with a straight face. By the time he was influential though, there was actually some science being done and what he was, a fraudster, was pretty clear to everyone involved.
There are and were good scientists, but their work never gets the headlines. Right now most of the best work is being done in cognitive psychology and neurology.
but then I wonder; how will people in a hundred years look at our primative and barbaric time?
Phrenology…. that’s what I think we’ll look like. “Oh you’re skull is shaped in a certain way, that must mean you feel this way”….. and don’t get me started on the fraud that is constant in personality testing, positive psychology and “brain training”
You can 100% be too good at math to succeed in psychology, I’m convinced that was my trouble. That, and 30 years of knowing how the system looked to the people unfortunate enough to be test rabbits for random and often uneffective therapy.
sigh, everything is a fucking sham. everything is a fucking lie. and is it a wonder that the ones smart enough or awake enough to see the truth are utterly depressed?
it’s insane how we take the most crackpot ideas and teach ppl as if it was truth. take something that is just an “idea” and tell school children they’re “facts.” everything we’ve ever been taught are all fucking lies. everything that is cultural, political, economical, financial, etc.
how does one stay sane in an insane world? is the cynical depressed person the crazy one, or is the clown world we live in that’s insane?
everyone calls me too jaded, too cynical, too negative. but what if we’re seeing reality and the happy happy think positive folk are the delusional ones? bc you’d have to be delusional to think we live in a great world and that things for the average common man is so great and that we should all be grateful for.
After flunking mathematics in shcool I believed for years that I had an inferior intelligence. Never sitting well with it I sat one day, I did a kind of math for dummies consulting those genius indian guys who broke it down in some of the most brilliant ways. 2 hours! 2 hours and I had the principles of algebra down…enough to – if not well – but at least pass an exam say 60-70%…2 hours of videos and a handful of rigour on paper to practice…that’s all.
I’m drawn to believe they deliberately teach math (and other subjects) in an obtuse way, with uninspiring progression, intimidsating quantities of uncontexualised and boring rigour… in a high stress environment. All to botch most people’s chances in excelling at the subject. Thus people are made to think they are dumb and are fast booted from the scientific/academic arena while the lucky few who were good at following protocol and rules get by.
I can say with a certain confidence that anybody can master complex mathematics and understand some of the most abstract scientifc concepts if only taught in a way that is human, and not for drumming people into factory workers.
As time goes by I HATE school more and more, I see kids being tossed in there every day to have their dreams cookie cut into profitable behavior. “obey the police, do as you are told, wait for instruction from your nearest authority figure, never learn how to be independent…the system will provide for you (the bare minimum to keep you coming to work and by so doing make your slavemasters richer.)”
F*** school.
oh no, the ones that did well in school, like me, also got shafted in life. trust me in that.
in a way, the younger generation are “lucky” in that you get to live in the internet age, where you can look up everything. Back in the day, you *couldn’t* object to anything you were taught, bc you had no way of looking up any information that was contrary to what your overlords told you, via school, media, etc.
While I did extremely well academically, so much of the stuff that were “taught” to us never sat well with me. When I brought it up to teachers and to my classmates, all I got was ridiculed for asking questions that questioned the narrative taught to us.
This was my ENTIRE early life, from K-20 (Uni). I was made to believe that there was something wrong with ME that found that things didn’t make sense, got told there was something wrong with ME for questioning what was standard knowledge and “fact.”
*I* was the one made to look insane for thinking critically about things, bc NO ONE else was thinking critically, let alone questioning things that were handed down to us we’re just supposed to accept and believe as fact. It was just insane. I was literally all alone bc NO ONE else bothered to THINK on their own, bc they literally couldn’t.
Anyhow, I did extremely well in school but that doesn’t mean jack shit when 1- none of that helped me in life and 2- learn that everything taught to us were lies and propaganda to benefit the wealthy