Is psychoanalysis still relevant as a form of literary theory and literary criticism? Will it eventually fade out?

expensive indulgence to have

Being a single man nearing 30 lets you be somewhat cavalier with your finances.

You’re retarded and repressed kek

Only confirmed by laypersons whose knowledge of the subject ends with their nonsense line "psychoanalysis was debunked as a pseudo-science"

Nabokov

The funniest thing about pschoanalysis is that its fans are exactly the sort of people who like to use the word pseudoscience for things like IQ

Deleuze

Guattari

I spent an entire semester studying Freud and Lacan in depth and haven't bothered with them once since it ended.
Literary criticism in general is trash though

Honestly this. It was never supposed to be easily verifiable or easily replicable.
>everyone is libidinally tied together even if they’re not conscious of it
Bound to be dismissed by the majority of people in society,because repressing those instincts is what made society in the first place.

Basically if you know, you know. And you should shut up about it and use it to improve your own mental life and contribute to society in meaningful ways.

“And we may well heave a sigh of relief at the thought that it is nevertheless vouchsafed to a few to salvage without effort from the whirlpool of their own feelings the deepest truths, towards which the rest of us have to find our way through tormenting uncertainty and with restless groping.”

>It was never supposed to be easily verifiable or easily replicable.
You believe it why then?

it also does more harm than good, probably just a vehicle for control at this point considering the movements to get "therapy for all"

This isn’t something I can help you with. You either read into it and see for yourself,or don’t and call it bullshit. Most of you here don’t even read so I’m not gonna take a chance and try to explain such an important topic to someone who most likely half-asses everything in their life.
Start with the Five Lectures on Psychoanlaysis.

I have read a few of Freud's books and I probably read significantly more than you do. I wonder what your psychoanalyst would say about your immediate defensiveness and hostility over this question of why you believe something lmao

Not him, but I'd question whether there's anything to 'believe' if you take a more pragmatic approach to psychoanalysis. Unlike Freud, many modern analysts don't bill their work as a cure for anything - rather, it's an asymmetrical process (by this I mean it varies a lot between participants) by which one is made to feel mentally 'broken down' and to have experienced some kind of release. The hope is that, through this experience, the subject will experience some kind of subjective insight about himself - one related to behavior, attitude, or some lingering trauma - which is phenomenologically illuminating and has personal value.

Of course, the days of someone like Freud, Lacan, or Jung trading on bold, unverifiable claims about the human mind - all of which appeal to some cultural aesthetic or naturalistic bias for credibility - are over. Modern psychoanalysis is comparable to a more lax study like semiotics, or even (if you'll permit me) to an amorphous one like ayahuasca shamanism. I'm sure /many/ will disagree, but that's how I've come to see it.

>I'd question whether there's anything to 'believe'
If there is a method to psychoanalysis it has to be predicated on beliefs about how the mind works. These can be very instrumental beliefs, just 'doing x seems to have y effect sometimes' but it's still beliefs.

Fair enough. I'm beginning to regret my previous post - I'm pontificating on something which I don't have much knowledge about, which is never good. I think you're right to be skeptical about the whole thing.

How would I know that? Clearly most people don’t do what they say they do. Anyways here is a quote from Freud himself (pic related). I’ve tried before and it’s no use. Thought maybe a thread on psychoanalysis would allow me to discuss such things but I guess not. Well anyways, I’ll continue with my life. Good luck in yours.
>inb4 it’s just a cop out

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Do you realize how cultlike that paragraph is? Explaining why you think psychoanalysis has value should not be impossible. Even just saying 'it helped me realize x about myself' is better than this complete refusal to engage. I question why you would even post about this subject on here if you don't want to talk about it.

btfo

Absolutely fucking this. In a world where mental turmoil is outranking physical safety in the first world, where the fuck do people get the balls to shit on it so much? Wikipedia levels of knowledge? Disgust of learning of the self? That the human mind isn't exactly a precise binary set of 0s and 1s?

>where the fuck do people get the balls to shit on it so much?
the complete lack of evidence that does anything

The belief that the unconcious mind exists,plays the biggest role in mental life, and that it’s driven to seek out pleasure and destroy anything that stops that goal. Also that the only way of understanding and accessing the unconscious’ wishes is through dreams and the method of free association.
I may have missed some stuff but I think generally that is what this is all based on. Still trying to learn more.

Yeah I was gonna say that it helped me but usually people just go “because you’re mentally ill” kek so I just dropped where to go to find more. You do understand I’ve tried this before and although I do want to discuss it, I don’t know exactly where you’re coming from since you straight away were skeptical? I’d rather discuss with someone whom I know has read the important works, and not some complete outsider.

This is why I resisted even entertaining your question. It is the usual first response from people.

Freud is a fucking joke as of now, and psychoanalysis isn't as strong as it used to be perceived, but to dismiss that its existence hasn't lead to developments in therapy, personality psychology and clinical psychology, is absolutely silly. Freud is one of the few who set the cornerstoner for Psychology. Much like how Hippocrates stated - despite obviously debunked today - that the imbalance of bile in the body can cause biological disease, yet despite this he also set a cornerstone for the development of medicine.

certain forms of therapy are inherently middle class, just pure masturbation for everybody involved

>cultlike
>he doesn’t know
Have you interacted with a sciencefag before? Or an engineer? Cultlike behaviour is literally explained by psychoanalysis too (death instinct)

You can make up any number of 'explanations' for cultlike behavior. Evolutionary psychology could provide a dozen just-so stories on short notice

What's lacking is experimental evidence, preferably neuroscientific evidence, which we are far away from at the moment.

Agree with everything. Psychoanalysis just is, if you try to explain it the wisdom gained tends to get clouded. If you're lucky you might end up meeting someone who read it, but for the most part it's entirely for personal use.

If you said psychology in general I might actually agree, but psychoanalysis is a net positive.
As he said, if you know you know. No point in trying to explain why. Read basically anything by Jung and he will tell you why scientific method doesn't work for personality psychology. (and by extent psychology in general)

We can accept that some of his theories have been debunked. Does his lack of scientific credibility mean we should no longer use a psychonalytic framework when engaging with literature?

>if you know you know. No point in trying to explain why.
>if you try to explain it the wisdom gained tends to get clouded

OK fine but you cannot get mad if people call it a religion if you're going to behave like this

See this is where I know you haven’t read Freud enough. Literally Chapter 1 of Civilization and Its Discontents is Freud’s case for the “pictorial” model of the mind necessary leading to absurdities that get in the way of describing religious states of mind (oneness with the world). You have to believe that pasts states of mind can be preserved in people. Have you seen a child and how one with the world they are? You can retain that state of mind and move in and out of it with say, Yoga, religious habits, etc. But also have periods in between in which you feel no oneness with anyone, only to return to the oneness feeling later on.
If you have no profound experience in your life you can’t read Freud my dude. Are you religious?

>IQ
>not complete pseudoscience
Come on man

Was it even ever really considered a science?

Please, O Ascended Ones, guide me! Let the ineffable secrets of this Gnosis be my chaste delight. Perfect me and reveal those dreams to me! May the inner secrets of the Id be laid open to me when I knock. This I beg by our lord, Sigmund Freud, in whom are hidden all treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

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Yes I'm religious and I've had multiple very intense experiences of what Freud called the oceanic feeling though I have a different philosophy than he does to make sense of it.

My point in that post was that any given explanation for cultlike behavior depends either upon unverifiable metaphysical claims which are dependent on your particular philosophy, or empirical evidence.

Absolutely not. It still has its uses. Freud is a founder and much like some, if not, all founders, he didn't make a completely impenetrable structure of what he initially founded. The foundations, though, can be utilised for aid.

>unverifiable metaphysical claims which are dependent on your particular philosophy
>or empirical evidence
Which the gathering and further interpretation of depends on your particular philosophy. Little bit of sophistry in
>my opinion
I think we’re done here.

Freud didn’t call it the oceanic experience, Rolland did.

>the gathering and further interpretation of depends on your particular philosophy.
Yes but it requires evidence all the same. A psychoanalytic theory about something is not the same thing as gathering empirical evidence for that theory.

Surely you aren't this dumb

Freud used that term multiple times in texts I read by him, so yes he did call it that even if he didnt invent the phrase.

>what is phenomenology

correlates with financial and academic success though

It never was in the first place

Doesn't mean it is a measurement of intelligence

What a stupid pedantic argument to even bring up
>water is wet therefore
Take a lap or two

it correlates highly with success in many activities people associate with intelligence, math, physics, law, etc.

It's not pedantic at all, if psychoanalysis doesn't present empirical evidence for its theories, then it has to just be taken as a transcendent kind of truth, similar to other metaphysical systems.

I can tell you guys are extremely unused to having to defend your beliefs

sounds pretty pseudo-scientific to me

the scientific method is about reproducing results. You make a prediction, that high IQ will lead to success in activities requiring intelligence, then you gather evidence to see if the results align with your prediction. You conclude that IQ is related to intelligence, though obviously imperfect and not the whole picture.

Pseudo-science is about making unfalsifiable or extravagant claims

kind of underread in Freud particularly but what are the theories of his that have been so thoroughly "scientifically debunked," as everyone's so fond of saying? I thought you were sort of meant to approach psychoanalysis (and especially Freudian stuff) as a way to coax out intriguing meaning, since it has such a narrative logic to it and seems to deal so well and very cleverly with non-material motivations for behavior. is THAT the stuff everyone is disdainful of after behaviorism came on the scene? the cognitive literary stuff? or is it just about clinical practice (which doesn't seem to have much bearing on us as readers anyway?)?

Science is dumb lads

I’m not antagonizing this stance. I feel similarly, but I’m still trying to figure it out and make sense of it. I guess my question for you would be what should we use from Freud/psychoanalysis and where and how have the ideas been improved upon or how have become more relevant in a contemporary sense?

I feel like this is getting at Freud’s lasting impact and relevancy in a literary theory sense. I would agree with what youre saying.

Yes, and that's the only place where its relevant. Why not? It's not hurting anyone in the literary realm and it enables authors to create complex relationships which are fun to decompose from a reader's point of view.

Now as an actual therapeutic method, it sucks.

Psychoanalysis is about the human experience, which is unique and distinguished from reason. Experience is inherently unreasonable whereas science is a solely reasonable field. The most we can demonstrate about the mind through science is it’s biological behaviors, but not the actual subjective experiences that they create.

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words mean things you pseud

This is a stupid argument. Psychoanalysis employs frameworks too, so that argument applies against it as well.

i'm not claiming anyting. I wanted to get into psychoanalysis but after seeing shit tone of criticism towards this field, i simply lost interest.

The frameworks are metaphorical and are used to approximate the description of experiences.

those were anti-psychoanalysts

Both things are pseudoscience.

A freind of mine once nearly kicked me out of his house because I called Freud a jewish fraud. I even showed him his letters where he admins he never really was an atheist.

Meaning up to interpretation by the people in power who claim knowledge and useless for everyone else.

If you're already dealing with approximations, we have entered the empirical realm, and we should use CBT as it is based on evidence

>We are and remain Jews. The others will only exploit us and will never understand and appreciate us.
>In some place in my soul, in a very hidden corner, I am a fanatical Jew. I am very much astonished to discover myself as such in spite of all efforts to be unprejudiced and impartial. What can I do against it at my age?

it's worthless but popular cuz people still think it makes them sound deep

An individual’s experience is not up to objective interpretation by other people. People can be lead astray by adopting ideology, but psychoanalysis denies ideology.
Subjective experience is not empirical