Hello,
(podcast episode recording below)
I mentioned previously I’ve written an essay on Psychoanalysis, Freud, Reich and Adler etc and I intended to publish it, but decided against it for a few reasons I won’t go into here. Overall, my point of view in that is that most people are ignorant of these men and their project. It’s also my contention that they’re all treated very unfairly because of these misunderstandings.
Particularly Freud, who was a man with capacities well beyond anyone out there whom seemingly take such joy in attacking a strawman.
Herzog like many others possesses a fundamentally incorrect view of Freud and psychoanalysis. However generally true or good his intentions in the clip under discussion may be in a more general sense as it pertains to diagnostic or taxonomic styles of psychiatry.
To psychoanalysis he is attributing incorrect notions, motivations as well as outcomes and consequences. Those that we’re experiencing now and for the last 40 years or so, result from psychiatry, psychology or whatever else that in turn arose from diagnostic, objectivist therapeutic culture. This is an entirely different strain of thinking and methodology.
As we will see, Herzog, and by retweet Musk, attribute outcomes to psychoanalysis that are really the fault of diagnostic psychiatry. A truly diagnostic type of psychiatry was really not introduced until the 1970’s, and was distinct from psychoanalysis or earlier dynamic psychiatry. Distinct in its rejection of these other forms of viewing the workings of the mind.
Few people know, but to be a psychiatrist prior to the 1960’s, it was expected you were also trained in psychoanalysis. But this became increasingly unfashionable as the scientific thinking changed. The notion arose that these types of interventions were far too subjective to be of value or contain any scientific validity. And I guess you couldn’t give people mind-decimating drugs so easily, if something was…you know…so subjective.
So analysis and dynamic psychiatry, as you will hear, were rejected by the so-called diagnostic psychiatric establishments as failing to meet the standards of a true science. As being too subjectivist to meet the standards of a new embrace of objective diagnosis, and importantly, of diagnostic taxonomy. See the DSM manuals. This is a crucial point. This is incidentally something Freud didn’t agree with.
Certainly, we’re all aware of the great crimes of psychiatry. Herzog and Musk are right in some sense. But it’s important to understand how little psychoanalysis had anything to do with this really rather modern way of viewing things.
Not only that, Freud explicitly rejects a taxonomic model for mind. Along with this, analysis or dynamic psychiatry, with some exceptions, didn’t agree with medical or drug-type interventions for diagnosed illnesses. This is generally the case - again I’m sure there are or were exceptions.
So Herzog is wrong, as is Musk for retweeting this incorrect and unspecific, broad-brush opinion.
Needless to say, I’ve always felt particularly sorry for Freud, because his detractors get him totally wrong.
When you get a good understanding of him you realise how unfair treatments of his work generally are. The counter arguments, for which incidentally there are many valid ones, are always of an atrociously low quality and betray an ignorance of what his project was really about.
I’ve never seen a single person, say in the abominable x-sphere as one example, get even a single point right. I will say it here, large accounts very often result from a form of all-too-human hypnosis. And very often their takes are complete nonsense. But large follower accounts means authority in the minds of the hapless simians that we are. This is funnily enough one of the things Freud talks about in a round-a-bout way. That is - how much of what drives people is really totally outside of their self-consciousness, and how they very often refuse to look at it if it’s brought to their attention. Choosing to keep the banal commonness of their behaviours buried deep down. I like Freud because he became disenchanted with the animal in his later life. And I think this is an entirely appropriate point of view.
So in another way I disagree with Herzog that understanding what he refers to as the “darker parts” is a bad thing. Integration and understanding is important if this monkey is to become anything worthwhile. It’s also important, for some people, for living a better life. Not most. But a few. The types who read this substack. For the rest, they’ll do what they’ve always done, and what Freud did or didn’t think is of little relevance to their cradle to grave lifestyles, which lack any insight, depth, or meaning.
Psychoanalysis (which also doesn’t really exist anymore, I forgot to mention) was also really quite inaccessible to most. It required a relatively high intelligence to even work. For sure for this reason most humans haven’t, nor will they ever really care about what he said.
So even if Herzog meant psychoanalysts specifically, I fail to see how the average joe has been even remotely impacted by what is a form of pretty niche knowledge. One thing they are impacted by is mainstream psychiatry and psychology as we know it today, perhaps we can call it the mindscience of reductionist midwits - and also of course the mass man is affected by virtue of his robotic idiotness - this is a feature Freud is no way responsible for. But one he clearly pointed out, depressingly, as being the case.
Anyway, this one was off the cuff this afternoon and contains an overview of Freud’s real project. His real origins, what he was really doing. Where he was really coming from.
The difficulties we have in understanding what he was doing exist largely because of popular and really rather silly analysis of his ideas. That usually serve to obfuscate, rather than elaborate them. Most ideas and critiques I see used somewhat ironically - for people who hate psychiatry - actually historically driven by the diagnostic psychiatrists who rejected Freud as being too subjectivist or pseudo-scientific.
So yes, you’re typically using the arguments of the enemy, I’m afraid.
I’ve also included a nice David Lynch clip in the recording, on a related matter. Discussing negative mind states and the romanticism people have for the troubled genius. The apparent drive of the nut case artist. Thinking one has to be completely sideways and unbelievably unhappy to be a good artist. I agree with Lynch here. What do you think? Let me know.
The idea circulating is that one has to have severe mental problems to be a good artist - and that something like a course of psychoanalysis (not that Freudian analysis is at all that effective, by the way, a real critique that no one understands enough about to level at him) would somehow lobotomise someone into not producing anything of worth. I believe this to be almost total fallacy. That one has to suffer in an extremely neurotic way to have access to creative force.
This is wrong on 2 levels I believe. As it pertains to “psycho-analysis”.
The first is that psychoanalysis is a process of lobotomy. One designed to stifle creative energy. This was explicitly never the intention of any of these people. The intention was almost always the opposite. To unleash creativity. Whether analysis achieves this is a technical matter that goes well beyond this article.
Lobotomy is for sure the outcome of modern diagnostic psychiatry however. As we all know.
The second is that somehow creative edge is magically lost when the truly debilitating elements of character are integrated and controlled - and that art is somehow related not to the creative power and genius of the individual, but to his or her mental illness.
The truth is, we’re all still human. We will always have conflicts from which creative drive comes, and that will occur regardless of how much of this or that psychoanalysis we have undergone.
In fact, I argue Freudian talking therapy or Jungian therapy basically does nothing anyway, and if it has any strength at all, it’s almost a kind of artistic process. So I could see a world in which it may help the artist, despite doing more or less nothing at all. At least in any reasonable timeframe. Anyway.
It’s pretty clear to me that being a nut gets in the way. There is little doubt in my mind. Creativity happens despite being a nut, in the interludes, as respite in rare moments when they get out of the way of themselves. Not because of it.
Anyway, hope you enjoy!
Episode here: