[HN Gopher] Freud as Talmudist
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Freud as Talmudist
Author : Caiero
Score : 61 points
Date : 2023-04-26 06:43 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jewishreviewofbooks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jewishreviewofbooks.com)
| RadixDLT wrote:
| The Horrors of Freud - Stefan Molyneux
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Yikes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan_Molyneux
| wubbert wrote:
| [dead]
| jeffwass wrote:
| From the article : "On this view, the fact that a Jew discovered
| psychoanalysis didn't mean it was a 'Jewish science,' any more
| than Einstein's e = mc2 was a Jewish equation."
|
| This is a strange statement to write because Einstein's
| relativity was indeed shrugged off as "Jewish Physics" by many
| antisemitic German physicists prior to WWII, in favour of German
| (or Aryan) Physics :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
| naniwaduni wrote:
| It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that Freud was not
| in full agreement with the Nazis on the matter of his
| relationship with Judaism.
| detourdog wrote:
| The biggest problem the talmud has in my opinion is that most
| people have such a distorted view of religion that the talmud is
| out of reach. I find it very worthwhile for framing human
| interactions and worth more study.
| barberpole wrote:
| Reading Freud, Wittgenstein said "now here is something new."
| jb12 wrote:
| [flagged]
| samstave wrote:
| [flagged]
| valarauko wrote:
| I think 'ethnicity' is a complicated term, since it's a
| catchall for all sorts of identities we can't quite assign to
| something easier to parse. In the example of the Australian
| Indigenous, that identity is a Venn diagram of overlapping
| ideas about lineage, culture, language, and tribal affiliation.
| Any one or more of those attributes could be potentially
| disrupted and yet maintain Indigenous identity and acceptance
| by the larger community - perhaps precariously.
|
| A counter example would be the American designation of 'Latino'
| as an ethnicity, independent of race, language, and culture,
| and based entirely on national origin.
| akiselev wrote:
| "Latino" refers to the mixed descendants of Spanish or
| Portuguese ancestry as opposed to the indigenous Mayans,
| Guarani, Aymara, etc that still inhabit the continent,
| numbering in the millions.
| valarauko wrote:
| Sure, though you're using the community definition of the
| term, while the US government definition encompasses
| anybody from those countries, regardless of ancestry. So a
| Lebanese - Mexican or Chinese - Mexican with no Spanish
| ancestry could be considered latino by the government.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I don't think it's that simple.
|
| From the Catholic perspective, it is _primarily_ a theological
| identity, as evidenced by the way the New Testament uses the
| word. Jesus, his mother Mary, the Apostles, the first so-called
| Christians, were all "Jews", and so in some sense, we can
| speak of the Jews who accepted Christ as the Messiah, and those
| Jews who did not. The New Testament describes the latter as
| "the Jews", and since there is no ethnic difference between the
| former and the latter, it follows that "Jew" in this context is
| not an ethnic, but a theological concept[0]. This isn't to say
| there is _no_ ethnic sense, but the theological concept is the
| real focus.
|
| Among Jews, Jewishness is taken to be communicated
| matrilineally, and the interpretation of such phrases as
| "children of Abraham" (or "seed of Abraham") is understood in
| carnal terms. Most Jews today are not observant, yet they still
| view themselves as Jews and are viewed as Jews even by
| observant Jews. Cultural Jewishness might seem like one way to
| be able to maintain Jewish identity without the theology, but
| because Jewish culture in the traditional sense is so
| theological (and frankly, all cult-ure ultimately is), one has
| to ask what kind of Jewish culture are we talking about? Once
| the underpinning and sustaining beliefs are gone, the culture
| loses its force and meaning, even if it takes a while for the
| old attachments to wither to completion. Some new theology
| would need to take the place of the old while maintaining the
| old name. Without the old theological basis, carnal identity
| begins to take on an even greater importance.
|
| I might also touch on the civilizational definition of
| "Jewish", though because civilization is ultimately determined
| by religion, the question is ultimately a question of theology.
| Koneczny's definition comes to mind.
|
| So the word is overloaded. But generally speaking, we are very
| much living in a period of identity crises. Some claim that the
| uptick in racial politics is the result of the decline of
| religious identity in the West.
|
| [0] Incidentally, this is why some of the accusations of
| antisemitism that are made of Catholicism are wrongheaded and
| involve some kind of modernist projection of categories alien
| to Catholicism. "Antisemitism" is a term coined in the 19th
| century (conventionally attributed to Wilhelm Marr) that has in
| mind a racial and ethnic meaning of "Jew", but the conflict
| between Catholicism and Judaism is not ethnic or racial, but
| theological. The Rabbinic Judaism that emerged after the
| Crucifixion, with the destruction of the Second Temple that
| left the Jews with no temple sacrifice and no priesthood, is
| taken to be defection from the Faith, something analogous to
| Protestantism (recall that the Old Testament is a history of
| such defections, and is the history of heretical Christian
| sects). Judaism is taken to have transformed from a faith
| _centered_ on sacrifice to one _centered_ on observing the law.
| The sacrifice and the priesthood are taken to continue in the
| Church--the New Israel--and in the mass, now bloodless and
| perfected[1].
|
| [1] https://catholicexchange.com/church-new-israel/
| andresgottlieb wrote:
| I disagree. Judaism is not an ethnic group, it's many
| absolutely different and disjunct ethnic groups, that only have
| religion in common. A Jew from Yemen has nothing else in common
| with a Jew from Poland. Different language, different food,.
| different music, different physical resemblance, different
| interpretation of the Torah, etc.
|
| I recommend reading The Invention of the Jewish People, by
| Shlomo Sand.
|
| As a practical example. When my father (Ashkenazi) married my
| mother (Sephardic), my father's grandma was devastated, because
| he was marrying a non-jew.
| jb12 wrote:
| > A Jew from Yemen has nothing else in common with a Jew from
| Poland
|
| Except for the genetics we share, distinct from non-Jews,
| statistically significantly.
|
| I recommend reading "Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish
| People" by Harry Ostrer.
|
| We really are the people of the book, aren't we?
| hersko wrote:
| Not a great example. In the orthodox community it is very
| common to intermarry between religious Sephardi and Ashkenazi
| jews.
|
| > A Jew from Yemen has nothing else in common with a Jew from
| Poland
|
| 1) They descended from the same people 2) If they are
| religious, they have a tremendous amount in common
| culturthrowaway wrote:
| A constant worldview-pervading awareness of Jewishness as an
| ethnicity is only really widespread in 4 groups of people:
| particularly ethnic-chauvinist Jews, the hardest-core
| antisemites, and their victims.
|
| Wishing for more Jews to become much more aware of their
| ethnicity would be one of those monkey's paw wishes.
| wslh wrote:
| I think the article itself failed to understand or counterpoint
| the issue about Judaism. Judaism as a religion and ethnic group
| is known by criticizing themselves, even in the extreme
| orthodox side. "Freud as Talmudist" could be more generally
| seen as "Freud as a Thinker".
| jrumbut wrote:
| Is this is a criticism of the article? Because it seems like
| the author takes great pains to distinguish between a person
| who is Jewish and a person who practices Judaism.
|
| I also don't think that ethnic group really captures it either.
|
| For me, being Jewish is just its own thing, sui generis, that
| only partially overlaps with these other concepts (religion,
| ethnicity, nationality, etc) but isn't any of those things.
| fear_and_coffee wrote:
| [dead]
| edgyquant wrote:
| Eh it's and ethnoreligious group.
| netbioserror wrote:
| [flagged]
| TheFreim wrote:
| > It frustrates me when Jewish people, especially very smart
| Jewish people like Freud, fail to understand that Judaism is
| more than just a religion, it's also an ethnic group.
|
| This is because the waters have been, seemingly intentionally,
| muddied. I have seen criticism of Judaism, oddly enough even
| criticism by ethnic Jews, as being considered "anti-Semitic"
| and similar terms. Furthermore, the distinction in my
| experience seems to be rejected by many Jews who consider
| "being Jewish" as being essentially and intrinsically related
| to the Jewish religion enshrined in cultural practice.
| jb12 wrote:
| It is definitely possible for Jews to say antisemitic things,
| in the same way it is possible for people of colour to say
| racist things.
| entelechy0 wrote:
| [dead]
| svnt wrote:
| The conclusion doesn't seem to follow. All people have
| race, and so can be externally racist, but you would not
| consider a white person aggressively critiquing white
| culture to be anti-white, would you?
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Yes, you would. Whether speech is racist or not is a
| characteristic of the speech, not determined by the
| speaker's skin colour.
| Minor49er wrote:
| Why not?
| 462436347 wrote:
| [flagged]
| aridiculous wrote:
| From my understanding he was starting a radical new thread of
| ideas that ran counter to the hard empiricism at the time that
| was going nowhere, or at least too slowly to help a significant
| portion of people (which remains the case today in my opinion).
| You can read the late 19th century state of neuroscience which
| sounds eerily close to today's views -- and the distaste for
| Freudianism espoused in your comment.
|
| I have read a lot of Freud and still remain skeptical of some
| of the overall thrusts. But reading it and get the full context
| makes you realize that the modern interpretations of his
| thought are wildly reductionistic.
|
| About his behavior with those in his following: It is true that
| he had many moments of harshness/weakness, but he was also
| surprisingly modern in his liberalism and self-scrutiny. I've
| read that he was extremely concerned about being taken
| seriously in the face of the large amount of reaction from
| society to uncomfortable ideas. So his method was to be hyper
| organized and disciplined.
|
| One thing I really like about Freud is his openness to changing
| his ideas in the face of new evidence and his commitment to
| making sure there were people working on treatment/solutions to
| suffering that was currently happening. He was open to the idea
| of biological interventions in the future replacing his own
| interventions, but he wanted to do something that would help
| people now in the meantime. I don't think we've adequately
| established that more modern therapies and interventions work
| better in all types of cases and think his work is still very
| relevant, especially in certain types of cases. Not to mention
| that most of the modern therapeutic practices are based on his
| work in a way you can't easily tease out and cast out as
| irrelevant.
|
| It seems much more likely to me that the fate of Freud's ideas
| were not as much discounted as integrated. Most bits of
| discounting was more because of other developments in society,
| industry, and academia. One easy example is that it's quite
| difficult to perform Freudian therapy at multiple times a week
| given modern billing and scheduling.
|
| Again, I remain cautious about the utility of many of the
| ideas, but I'd recommending reading a serious book like
| Revolution in Mind (Makari) to ground you in the actual history
| of psychoanalysis. Almost everything I've read on internet
| blogs, articles, and some otherwise-serious writers are missing
| woefully important context.
| masswerk wrote:
| Well, nowadays, we may have another look at this. E.g., when it
| comes to Freud's interpretation of dreams, think of an embedded
| semantic field with some activation, probably in another
| dimensionality than that of the field itself, much like a
| multi-head attention header. Now imagine a RLE enhancing some
| of the possible productions and suppressing others, due to
| training (Freud's _Vorbewusstsein_ ). What we get are
| productions that are still pointing to the same hot spots in
| the embedded field, but with minute vectorial shifts and
| changes in attention (compression and displacement), resulting
| in legitimate productions that are able to pass the controlling
| RLE instance. The result is pretty much the "dream text" and
| the process is very similar to Freud's dream work (
| _Traumarbeit_ ).
|
| In other words: I'd argue, you can't believe in transformers
| actually doing some work and entirely dismiss psychoanalysis at
| the same same time.
| EGreg wrote:
| Ok don't know whether Freud was a charlatan or simply one of
| many explorers of his time, who believed in his theories.
| (Consider Lysenko and others.)
|
| But his nephew EDWARD BURNAYS in the USA is the reason Freud
| came to USA and we even know about Freud. And Burnays was far
| more successful using methods of mass psychology -- very meta,
| he renamed Propaganda to PUBLIC RELATIONS.
|
| Burnays got women to smoke, and helped promote the public stock
| market, which now is used for IPO of many startups. Google
| "Century of the Self" for a great documentary.
| 462436347 wrote:
| > Lysenko
|
| You're sympathetically comparing him to Lysenko, which only
| proves my point: both were unscientific charlatans
| legitimized by leftists, to the detriment of many.
| EGreg wrote:
| The vast majority of people in new disciplines were like
| that at the time. Rigor comes later.
|
| I mean, didn't most physicists in the 19th century believe
| the Earth was no more than 100 million years old? And
| everyone was afraid to challenge them until radioactivity
| was discovered. Bloodletting and leeches and phlogiston and
| humours and spontaneous generation - same thing.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle
|
| How about today's pioneers... Is Bem a charlatan? Is B J
| Fogg? Robert Cialdini? Erik von Markovik from Mystery
| Method? Jeremy Miner from NEPQ? LOL
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Burnays got women to smoke
|
| I think being allowed to use an addictive substance would
| deserve a great deal of the credit.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Freuds methods are as effective as CBT. Methods based on his
| theories are one of the most common forms of therapy here in
| Germany
|
| Regardless of what you believe about his theoretical
| constructs, it works
|
| EDIT: you should also consider how this aligns with the
| analytic vs continental divide. In the Anglosphere we
| historically have a very limited view on what constitutes
| meaningful knowledge, partly as a reaction against British
| Hegelianism
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I'm surprised to see you downvoted. Just read his works,
| people! They're utter nonsense.
| heywhatupboys wrote:
| > Freud was a conman and charlatan,
|
| Freud has left an everlasting impressions on the field of
| psychology with frameworks to interpret and analyze human
| behavior and cognition. It is not a hard science, and thus
| things will fall out of fashion and be disregarded, that makes
| him no less of a pioneer, and his research stands.
| trgn wrote:
| Not to mention Freuds enormous impact on art, literature.
|
| Fashions come and go indeed. His thinking will endure,
| there'll be revivals.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Freud was a conman and charlatan, and the Horace Frink affair
| best illustrates his character
|
| On the one hand I can certainly agree that Freud's
| psychoanalytical theories were full of logical inconsistencies
| and holes and his publication of them marred the intellectual
| development of the 20th century in every field it touched,
| especially literature which I find particularly galling. And
| anyone familiar with Freud's malpractice and manipulation of
| patients over the years would find the Frink affair relatively
| tame, the guy was an absolute twisted scumbag.
|
| On the other hand he did a lot of important work in biology
| when younger https://www.embrc.eu/newsroom/news/sigmund-freud-
| eel-testis-....
|
| A shame he did not continue on with that.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| I didn't know that.
|
| Why are there so many psychologists practicing psychoanalysis
| today, then? Has modern psychoanalysis evolved so far beyond
| Freud's psychoanalysis that it became a serious branch of
| psychology? If so, why is it still called "psychoanalysis"?
| 462436347 wrote:
| > Why are there so many psychologists practicing
| psychoanalysis today, then?
|
| There aren't. Psychology (in the US) abandoned Freud roughly
| in the 50s and 60s, with the rise of Behaviorism and later
| Cognitive psychology. These movements tried to make
| psychology an empirical science, with testable hypotheses
| subjected to replicable experiments. (Obviously, given the
| replication crisis, this effort hasn't been completely
| successful.) Psychiatry (the medical specialization) took
| much longer, until the 80s, but eventually they dispensed
| with his nonsense as well.
|
| Most talk therapy today entails some form of CBT, REBT, ACT,
| or something similar, and these have nothing to do with
| Freud.
| EGreg wrote:
| I mean, you could also say B F Skinner was a charlatan for
| behaviorism, and so on. Very reductionist to say that
| though!
|
| And you can say B J Fogg is a more modern charlatan. And
| Robert Cialdini. But all of them put together very
| interesting theories!
| 462436347 wrote:
| > Skinner was a charlatan for behaviorism
|
| Being wrong doesn't make you a charlatan. Skinner, to his
| credit, tried to operate scientifically, by formulating
| empirically falsifiable hypotheses and testing them.
| Freud, by contrast, crafted reams of "theory" that his
| followers were expected to unquestioningly accept as
| gospel.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| Being wrong doesn't make Freud a charlatan either. It
| makes him a crackpot and a crack, but that's not the same
| thing.
| bowsamic wrote:
| This is only true in the US. Even in the UK it isn't
| uncommon. In Germany it is very common
| abyssin wrote:
| Many psychologists use psychoanalysis the same way many
| priests use religious stories to provide guidance. It's a
| great source of allegories. It's also prestigious and lets
| them charge a lot of money, while practicing "floating
| attention" ie. letting their mind wander while listening and
| not actually paying attention. Last is that in many countries
| anyone can pretend to be a psychoanalyst. Lacan famously said
| "Le psychanalyste ne s'autorise que de lui-meme".
| Gerard0 wrote:
| Surprised to read this quote here! This means nothing/no
| one can guarantee you being a psychoanalyst. Just like
| either you can code and be good at it or not. That's all
| this phrase means. Of course it gets tricky. A programmer
| can show the result and it either works or it doesn't. An
| analyst can't show anything, really. Even if the analysand
| claims his/her life has changed because of an analysis
| (people also claim Jesus changed them, for example).
|
| About the floating attention thing, that's a very strange
| generalization ("analysts don't pay attention"). It is
| about treating all the "material" equally (ie without
| preconceptions).
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| > Why are there so many psychologists practicing
| psychoanalysis today, then?
|
| They aren't uncommon, but CBT, DBT, EMDR, Family Systems,
| Internal Family Systems, Rational emotive, Humanistic,
| Mindfulness-based are currently much more in vogue than
| psycho-analysis/dynamics.
|
| Rather than a point-in-time analysis of psychoanalytic vs
| humanistic approaches, there's a deeper, more interesting
| story in the history of prevalence between the two.
|
| The comment section in a HN discussion won't do the story
| justice, but to understand the historical picture, I'd
| recommend reading about how homosexuality was extricated from
| the DSM and the stories of John Fryer, Ronald Gold, and
| others. It's the story of the ousting of psychoanalysts from
| the APA by the humanists and helps set the stage for
| understanding the landscape of psychology today with respect
| to psychoanalysis.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Because it works
| stronglikedan wrote:
| I presume because it has a place, in a nonscientific way. A
| lot of issues can be merely talked through. For those that
| can't, the patient can be referred to a psychiatrist, who can
| further evaluate and identify the issues using scientific
| methods, and prescribe medicines if necessary (which a
| psychologist cannot do).
| DocTomoe wrote:
| > banished from the DSM
|
| Are you referring to the DSM classification instrument for
| mental disorders (where Freud never even was mentioned), or is
| there another three-letter-acronymed organisation in
| psychology/psychiatry I am unaware of?
| 462436347 wrote:
| > where Freud never even was mentioned
|
| Maybe he wasn't mentioned by name, but he was a major
| influence on earlier versions:
|
| https://psychmuseum.uwgb.org/clinical/dsm
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I'm of the same conclusion. Freudian analysis is the
| chiropracty of the mind.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| As somebody with a jacked up spine, chiropractic care has its
| place. Alongside a doctor's treatments, physical therapy,
| etc..
| 462436347 wrote:
| > As somebody with a jacked up spine, chiropractic care has
| its place
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6016850/
| svnt wrote:
| From your link:
|
| > Specifically, data from the report suggests that a
| chiropractor will be aware of an arterial dissection
| occurring following cervical manipulation only once in
| 8.06 million office visits
| comeonbro wrote:
| I default to assuming chiropraxis is bullshit, but the
| existence of "potential dangers" is not a good argument
| against the potential existence of benefits.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| I subscribe to Piet Hein's insight: `Everything's either concave
| or -vex/So everything you dream will be something with sex'.
| csdvrx wrote:
| The Talmud has many interesting logical "sanity checks": one of
| my favorites is the need for dissenting voices.
|
| Basically, if a decision has full agreement, jumping to the
| conclusion is wrong as it can mean some details were not properly
| investigated.
|
| https://www.jewishaz.com/religiouslife/the-importance-of-dis...
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Disappointed this link isn't available in the UK due to GDPR
| according to the site.
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