After writing my dissertation on an analysis of mass murderer texts...

After writing my dissertation on an analysis of mass murderer texts, I was told by an English literature MA that they 'just get' psychoanalysis better because they'd read more Victorian novels than I had.

Psychoanalysis, as they brazenly call it, appears to be an off-shoot of schema theory based on the inferences drawn from an ever-changing collective knowledge. Things as dumb as colour connotation. It does not appear to be a science in any manner of speaking, and appears to me an aggrandized means of discussing 'feelings' about literature.

Red pill me on this, please. If I'm wrong, I would love to know why, and better yet, if you could point me towards strong texts to illustrate your point I'd be grateful.

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>96310▶
>After writing my dissertation on an analysis of ma
Anons of lit, help this poor man out. You have nothing to lose, but your virginity.

>if you could point me towards strong texts to illustrate your point I'd be grateful
wat

>Psychoanalysis, as they brazenly call it, appears to be an off-shoot of schema theory based on the inferences drawn from an ever-changing collective knowledge. Things as dumb as colour connotation. It does not appear to be a science in any manner of speaking, and appears to me an aggrandized means of discussing 'feelings' about literature.
double wat

>Psychoanalysis, as they brazenly call it, appears to be an off-shoot of schema theory based on the inferences drawn from an ever-changing collective knowledge. Things as dumb as colour connotation. It does not appear to be a science in any manner of speaking, and appears to me an aggrandized means of discussing 'feelings' about literature.
huhh

Psychoanalysis is mainly well-known because it became the primary trendy form of depth psychology in subjectivity-oriented (and on this note often critiqued as arch-bourgeois by Marxists) mid-century France, just edging out phenomenology, probably because phenomenology is actually difficult and lends itself less well to dilettantism. Although the French did a good job of vulgarizing phenomenology as well. Hegel was the other big mid-century French craze too, a very "French" Hegel (there's actually a good book called French Hegel).

Psychoanalysis can basically be characterized in five subsets:
- Freudian psychoanalysis
- Non-Freudian psychoanalysis
- Offshoot Freudian psychoanalysis
- French vulgar psychoanalysis
- French non-vulgar psychoanalysis
- Marxist psychoanalysis
- Warmed-over Anglosphere academic pseudo-psychoanalysis

Freud is Freud. He has weird theories about the fundamental mechanisms of the deep psyche, he changes these several times as he develops, and to understand these developments properly and why Freud found them plausible you have to know a lot about fin de siecle experimental psychology. At his best Freud is a sort of phenomenologist of the unconscious with very interesting insights, but he also had graphomania and egomania, and it was certainly a cult. Freud's reputation would be better if he were like Husserl instead of like a cult leader whose major epigones were even worse in their aspirations to cult leadership for nearly a century.

Non-Freudian psychoanalysis can be good. Many of Freud's acquaintances and fellow travelers in pioneering "psychoanalysis" are, again, basically interesting depth psychologists and phenomenologists of the unconscious, variously eccentric, banal and forgettable, and/or esoteric. D.H. Lawrence's fascination with not-really-psychoanalysis is a good example. Jung is another.

Offshoot Freudian psychoanalysis are among the worst. Those are the mid- to late-century cults. You can read Christopher Lasch and watch those Adam Curtis documentaries for a glimpse into how they set themselves up as cult gurus, and vulgarized psychoanalysis to work for advertising agencies and the US government. Aside from this major evil, the entire Western world had a kind of post-war diaspora of self-proclaimed psychoanalysts setting up clinics and "schools" that are basically miniature cults and cult-like self-help seminars.

French vulgar psychoanalysis spurred the foregoing offshoots by popularizing it as a trendy form of philosophical sorcery in the era of structuralism and poststructuralism. You can see the connection between the popularizers and the cultists by looking at Lacan, who started out as a cause du jour of the Parisian dilettante reading classes, and ended as a death cult in the '80s and '90s, with deprogrammed Lacanians still periodically emerging to write their tell-alls, 30 years after anybody remembers pretending to give a shit about Lacan for a week to keep up with the latest Parisian trends.

French non-vulgar psychoanalysis is limited to a rare few thinkers who were smart enough to actually do depth psychology or phenomenology proper, but who somehow didn't simply ignore all the vulgar psychoanalysis as obvious dilettantism when seen from their higher vantage. All I can think of is Ricoeur's work on psychoanalysis as a dialogical hermeneutic of the unconscious.

Marxist psychoanalysis is arguably as destructive as French vulgar psychoanalysis. Frankfurt School types, who were extremely dominant in mainstream German academia for a few decades post-war, liked to blend it with Marxism, for whatever reason. Some of these are interesting quacks who fit in the "non-Freudian psychoanalysis" group, like Wilhelm Reich. Reich is probably worth knowing about. Marcuse is another big example, but Marcuse is possibly pure evil depending on your perspective. In any case, the epigones of these people are all much worse, just like the Frenchmen.

Warmed-over Anglosphere psychoanalysis is an offshoot of French pseudo-Hegelian and German-Marxist actual-Hegelian vulgar psychoanalysis, and begins in the late '70s and especially in the '80s as American intellectuals seeking to imitate Parisian dilettante culture and import it to the Anglosphere start doing hilarious dilettante things like taking crash courses in psychoanalysis and using psychoanalytic jargon. This is probably what you're experiencing in college: fading boomers who were 30 year old wannabe trend-setters, 20-30 years ago, when they tried to force as much "look at me, I've read Foucault and appreciate psychoanalytic concepts and jargon even though I don't care about Freudian clinical practice ;)" self-styling into their work as possible, probably in the mid-90s or so. Already the background radiation of the earlier French forms, which were already the background radiation of true psychoanalysis, these American wannabe-French wannabe-sorta-Freudians are no longer productive, but they have made Freudian jargon part of basic academic cant, and now THEIR epigones tend to reproduce the jargon occasionally (and ironically, often unconsciously). These people probably read 100 pages of Freud for a course that re-re-re-appropriates him and "reads him in the light of [something else currently trendy]," but they don't know anything about Freud or even about the complex legacy of post-Freudian thought.

lol

Can i read your dissertation OP? Was it for undergrad, MA, PHD?

lmao

I revised the "five" subsets as I went over it so it doesn't match anymore but this is the basic outline as far as I'm aware of it

The cult thing really can't be emphasized enough, Freudianism basically stops being a concerted theory or philosophical system immediately after WW2 and becomes a diffuse discourse, having porous borders with anything vaguely depth-psychological and tending to pick up cruft from other discourses. People who probably would have joined (or who did also join) "new age" cults often gravitated toward various cult forms of psychoanalysis instead and lingered in them for decades, self-proclaimed psychoanalysts set up actual cults or work for advertising agencies, etc., and all sorts of demi-psychoanalytic discourses like these were unconsciously organized around a core of French and Anglosphere academic tryharding that gave them legitimacy by making it seem to the educated layperson that psychoanalysis is a unitary tradition.

Some of it's benign but a lot of it was very dangerous, and anything calling itself psychoanalytic is very likely to be shallow. At best, it will often be some mid-80s nobody professor of anthropology or history simply keeping up with trends by forcing some of the jargon into his dumb thesis nobody has read since 1986.

Hello.

is this the normal discourse in Alabama or you are just talking out of your pussy?

So this is what it feels like to be 130iq and in academia

>means of discussing 'feelings' about literature
You realize that is a perfectly acceptable, even encourageable, thing to discuss as it pertains to the arts? Specifically the art of writing? Brainlet

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Psychoanalysis is a clinical practice. Opinions of literature students with no clinical experience about psychoanalysis can be safely disregarded.

I fell asleep and woke up to this explanation.

So, if I'm understanding correctly: psychoanalysis is like a premade paradigm for thinking, particularly about emotions, that can then be applied to texts? You've described it as a cult, and I suppose that's what it felt like to me; it felt like a group of people conditioned not to think scientifically, but within a certain box. I'm not keen on that idea - I like pragmatics, and this seems to be the antithesis of all pragmatic approaches.

I suppose even if I think it's ridiculous, I need to garner an understanding for why people flocked to these mentalities (and you've given a good account thus far; people wanted to intersperse the knowledge of others in their work to look more intelligent), but I suppose I need to engage with that literature to really critique the methodology with appropriate venom. I know a little about Freud, but very rudimentary content, like the case of the boy scared of horses - I dare say enough to be very skeptical. But look, what would you recommend as a primer for this content? I can't say I'm heavily subscribed to the idea, but just enough to have an understanding.

Undergrad, but truthfully, it shouldn't have been; I should have saved the topic for an MA. It ended up way too big to be manageable. To be fair, part of it was my fault; I analysed 7,000 words of text for an 8,000 word dissertation. I chose a scientific path, though, because the previous studies had all been in the psychoanalysis of these texts rather than the textual properties. (I had consistent findings; weirdly enough, not all of them even outright express they're going to be violent.) But no, I'm not posting it here.

>So, if I'm understanding correctly: psychoanalysis is like a premade paradigm for thinking, particularly about emotions, that can then be applied to texts? You've described it as a cult, and I suppose that's what it felt like to me; it felt like a group of people conditioned not to think scientifically, but within a certain box. I'm not keen on that idea - I like pragmatics, and this seems to be the antithesis of all pragmatic approaches.
>I suppose even if I think it's ridiculous, I need to garner an understanding for why people flocked to these mentalities (and you've given a good account thus far; people wanted to intersperse the knowledge of others in their work to look more intelligent), but I suppose I need to engage with that literature to really critique the methodology with appropriate venom. I know a little about Freud, but very rudimentary content, like the case of the boy scared of horses - I dare say enough to be very skeptical. But look, what would you recommend as a primer for this content? I can't say I'm heavily subscribed to the idea, but just enough to have an understanding.
good bye.

Interesting take, thanks.
Is there any alternative to psychoanalysis that you'd consider to have honestly explored the depth of of the psyche? Which phenomenologists are worth reading? I've heard that Husserl's is rather confused and overrated (if honest) in his attempt to rigorously describe the workings of the mind.

OP, the only reason you were able to wake up to this thread is because
user saved it.
Show some goddamn gratitude!!!

Fine here's a (You)

Feelings are fine, but insisting all feelings must fit within an archaic box or otherwise they're 'invalid' by academic standards is not. Feelings should be discussed as feelings, not as science. When it comes to feelings, why is 'This passage made me feel sad because it reminds me of loss' less valid than 'This passage made me feel sad because it tapped into an unconscious fear of death spurned on by an epigenetic complex desire for immortality' so on and so forth. For a more literal idea, why is "Hans was scared of horses because he was 5 and they were significantly larger than him" less apt than "Hans was scared of horses because they had a mustache which triggered his castration anxiety"?

>psychoanalysis is like a premade paradigm for thinking, particularly about emotions, that can then be applied to texts?
It's more like the presumption of a prestigious paradigm, before anything is actually understood about the paradigm itself. There's an analogous use of phenomenology, in that most people in the humanities who say they use "phenomenology" in their research mean something very vague, more or less that they pay attention to subjective states or emotions at all.

You can find both extremes in psychoanalysis. There are definitely books of people applying literal Freudian ideas schematically to literature for example, but there are also decades worth of articles in Diacritics where people are basically showing off that they can regurgitate structuralist and psychoanalytic jargon without actually committing to any theory (because that would be naive). Over time, the outright Freudians decline in academia, because believing anything other than social constructivism in academia makes you a positivist, which is a bad thing.

>But look, what would you recommend as a primer for this content?
Ricoeur's book is probably the most philosophically sophisticated and sympathetic you're going to get. Ricoeur famously called Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx the "school of suspicion" or the pioneers of the "hermeneutics of suspicion," another way of saying that they shifted the focus of philosophy to the unconscious, structuring preconditions of the possibility thought (rather than the conventionally accessible/visible, logical conditions of Kantian transcendentalism). On that note, the famously long intro to Derrida's Grammatology by Spivak goes into a lot of detail about Derrida's debt to Heidegger, Nietzsche, Freud, and comes down pretty heavily in favour of a reading that Heidegger's conceptual matrix was already present and even pushed farther in Nietzsche and Freud. That's about as sympathetic as you can get.

As for the historical stuff, there's no one book I can think of. I think Roudinesco writes histories of psychoanalysis. You could also look into Francois Dosse and see if he talks about psychoanalysis at all in his two-volume History of Structuralism, which is a bit of a gossip rag.

I don't even think psychoanalysis is necessarily bad, as long as you read Freud as being in the same tradition as contemporary descriptive and experimental psychology. He's worth reading, and I don't think he was dishonest. If anything his positivism is so honest that it's occasionally refreshing.

James' Principles of Psychology is maybe a good example of a very subtle and reflexive thinker? I think his later stuff is good too, but lends itself too much to kitsch vulgarizers who want to read a Deleuzian or Peircean "transcendental empiricism" into it. Maybe Wundt? Fechner? Stumpf? Even Freud's fellow travs like Janet. Just follow the thinkers connected with these ones, Freud is just one of them.

I fucking hope I’m alive when Freud’s ideas are eventually and inevitably found to be true. Based man he was.

Also don't underestimate Husserl. He isn't at all a second-rate thinker. It's just extremely extremely difficult to understand Husserl properly. Far harder than Heidegger, because a conventional understanding of Heidegger has been harmonized by academics so you have an easier ascent to him.

If you read fin de siecle German psychology and you can TRULY understand how they were struggling to make sense of psychologism vs. logicism, and you can see how Husserl is right at the crossroads between logic, psychology, platonism, Kantianism and neo-Kantianism, you can just begin to fully appreciate what he was trying to do. It's far more subtle than Heidegger, who was basically systematizing Nietzsche and aestheticizing transcendentalism. The conventional narrative about Husserl is that he's some kind of naive transcendentalist with atemporal categories, like the worst neo-Kantian, and then Heidegger comes along and immanentizes and "historicizes" all thought, including all attempts at transcendental or categorial intuition, to a single stream of pure intuition of "being." But Husserl already understood the problem of the "stream," and was looking for its transcendental conditions. The most subtle and convinced Heideggerian or Nietzschean, or say Wittgensteinian, could plausibly respond to Husserl that it's simply not possible to do what he was trying to do, but that would just be old scepticism, nothing new - the critiques of Strauss are dead-on in this respect, though his positive solutions are vague or lacking (and his supposed followers can mostly be ignored, as they are not aware of the metaphysical stakes, while Strauss was).

But Husserl could also simply reply back: How do you know? And most Nietzscheans/Heideggerians (etc.) are NOT even subtle, they DON'T understand that they are simply giving the classic sceptical "nope, our knowledge is inescapably limited, sorry bud" to Husserl, they think they (through Heidegger) are actually logically REFUTING Husserl. Even worse than that, most of them somehow think they're being consistent Nietzscheans or Heideggerians by adopting a radical scepticism with regard to all knowledge of nature (whether physical/metaphysical) and then simultaneously, arguing for the inescapable immanence and historicity of consciousness, but then naively naturalizing this immanence to biology. They somehow do an outright astonishingly naive metaphysics of consciousness while denying transcendentalists and platonists the right to do metaphysics of consciousness. Things have gotten worse since Strauss' time: it used to be smugly self-negating "historicism" (scepticism), now it's become somehow all that smugness and self-negation of historicism but coupled with sophomoric scientism.

I truly hope that you are high, drunk or underage.

Thanks, you've given a pretty good and rigorous critique of the field as far as my eyes can tell; I'll take a look into Ricoeur especially. Derrida sounds interesting, but I'm worried it'll be lost on me without reading through the source materials quite extensively. I feel perhaps a little less ignorant now that my initial thoughts have been, to an extent, validated; I'll feel much better when I have a more concrete approach to the field.

Finding quality literature on the subject has been... difficult. You've given me a good starting point for addressing the theories. I'll be expanding my knowledge as per your recommendations, thank you for all of your input and help.

(Was going to post this sooner, but the Cloudflare outage happened)

>"Hans was scared of horses because they had a mustache which triggered his castration anxiety"
kek that sounds ridiculous

I wish I had made that up.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Graf
>boy is scared of horses
>boy plays with his dick
>boy must be scared of horse because horse represents father figure