Ya love to see it folks
exactly lol to treat psychoanalysis seriously is a joke. its a fun hobby maybe but its not at all the focus of modern psychology. its completely just some jerk offs thinking cool shit with little empirical support
i say this as someone who likes it for fun, but i wouldn’t dare bring it up in one of my psych courses
like the sheer fact the deluezian people are like nah ima make up my own shit should show how loosy goosy the study is
Tbh bud, this just sounds like you’re taking modern psychology’s anti-psychoanalytic sentiment at face value. I remember my professors making similarly flippant remarks all the time. It’s a sentiment certainly tied to American Positivism and Cognitive Psychologists’ desperately hoping to differentiate themselves as ‘properly scientific’. Thank god they did that. I guess that’s why academic psychology has no problems with replicability nowadays huh?
Psychoanalysis and psychology should not be treated as a choice of one or the other. Psychology’s unwillingness to engage with its theoretical counterpart should be an indictment of psychology (which is why I’ve abandoned it as an academic path). Modern Psychology, to my mind, has been largely a failure outside of marketing and algorithms. Of course there’s a need to engage with empirical evidence and the scientific method, of course! But that doesn’t mean a goddamn thing if there’s no understanding of its ontological or epistemological implications for us as subjects, no understanding of how to realize new relations and habits as a result.
For instance, nobody has learned about Chomsky’s Universal Grammar and done anything radically new with language as a result. It always remains an antinomy of Being, a fetishized structure of language as such, not in its active, immanent dynamism, but as an eternally stale opposition to enunciation. Universal Grammar is a synthetic a priori which has spurned much development in cognitive psychology, this is fantastic. However through it, the ontological and epistemological implications it carries, we can also see it as a symptom of the Kantian Dualism which both drives and stains all of modern psychology. Yet it is also an abstraction we must work through to grasp its real dynamism, to develop something paradigmatically new and potentially liberatory in how we approach language as subjects
Let me start with you are right, I came in a bit brash, I just get concerned about alot of the sweeping assumptions and confidence some psychoanalysts tend to have (like zizek) about how the psyche functions without much concrete substance to it.
It’s a sentiment certainly tied to American Positivism and Cognitive Psychologists’ desperately hoping to differentiate themselves as ‘properly scientific’. Thank god they did that. I guess that’s why academic psychology has no problems with replicability nowadays huh?
Yeah I agree I am stuck in my positivist bunker for sure (and is something I should probably keep my mind more open) , however for the replicability crisis (something I am also worried greatly about as well!) is largely due to the misapplication of statistics and methods, as well as the incentive structure favoring rejecting the null instead of just doing good science and reporting “boring” results.
I am a stats and methods nerd so producing worthwhile meaningful results that are as close to reality as I can get is important to me. alot of modern psychology is probably bullshit agreed (due to p hacking and the other bad stats, methods, and structures, etc imo) and it definitely needs new life injected in, but I do think empirical examination should be the end goal so we can fact check ourselves so to speak before applying any of this theory as the risks are high.
Of course there’s a need to engage with empirical evidence and the scientific method, of course! But that doesn’t mean a goddamn thing if there’s no understanding of its ontological or epistemological implications for us as subjects, no understanding of how to realize new relations and habits as a result.
I will definitely compromise on this front . I believe psychoanalysis could potentially be useful if used to inform an a-priori hypothesis that we can then get concrete idea of if it exists in reality. My concern stems from “bad” psych being misapplied having hugely damaging implications. For example the false memory epidemic in the 90s especially where psychologists would implant traumatic memories while fishing for repressed memories (which evidence now shows is likely not how memory works in a vast majority of cases) They used those psychoanalytic rooted approaches and caused a great deal of harm to the accused and the client who had the memory implanted.
you lost me with the chomsky part, my apologies. Would you mind going explaining it a different way? a bit I am rather curious.
I apologize again if I came across the wrong way, you seem very informed and I appreciate you taking the time to go over some of this and sort of keeping my positivist ass in check haha.
I just get very concerned about using psychoanalysis in an ends to itself instead of informing research and formulating/adjusting the theory based on that evidence.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I was worried about coming in too hot there. I’m very much in the transition between these two worlds at the moment and always feel a bit too passionate. Honestly I’m more interested in philosophy and political economy, where the methodology of psychoanalysis has tons of parallels. I just think people do tend to dismiss a lot of this stuff, especially Zizek, because of an obstinate refusal to leave an analytic frame in engaging with it
however for the replicability crisis (something I am also worried greatly about as well!) is largely due to the misapplication of statistics and methods, as well as the incentive structure favoring rejecting the null instead of just doing good science and reporting “boring” results.
I would definitely see the “why” behind this as ultimately a psychoanalytic question, that is, we can only view it as a symptom of some larger abstract movement which we could never observe empirically but which has real effects. Why is this now something every undergrad gets taught?
Emphasis on stats and methods is great and 100% necessary nowadays! You can tell me to fuck off if you don’t want to share info on here, but what are your interests?
The repressed memories stuff is dumb guy, feel-better industry psychoanalysis for sure though, definitely agree there. I will say I still have tons of reading to do about psychoanalysis’ history, I know there’s been a plenty of problematic notions and naive idealism in the field (I can also think of rebirthing therapy off the top of my head, which is very cringe). Yet there’s something very methodologically promising in the much more critical approaches I’ve come across and I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
you lost me with the chomsky part, my apologies. Would you mind going explaining it a different way? a bit I am rather curious.
Lemme try. I’m more than a bit stoned and that part was me fucking around and trying to practice the use of concepts which are still freshly learned and developing, but lemme give it a shot. What I was trying to do was relate Chomsky’s Universal Grammar to Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s notion of Real Abstraction.
Chomsky presents Universal Grammar as an a priori of human language, that is before this abstract capacity for divisibility, combination, organization etc. (grammar) exists, pure linguistic exchange is impossible. In order for language to be truly human (this is where we differentiate from animals in how we exchange concrete verbal enunciation) this abstract capacity must already be present. Thus, and this is where Chomsky opens room for God, this capacity must be the nature of man as such.
In a sense, there is certainly truth here, once this abstract capacity arises it has real and irreversible effects on the nature of how humans interact with the world. Our concrete enunciation (making noises) could indicate nothing more than a relational immanence without the abstract, formal underpinning of grammar. However there is no witnessing grammar empirically, it exists in so far as language appears organized as such (when someone talks to you, the division and organization of the sound you receive simply appears to you as a matter of fact). The immediate exchange via language must appear to us to be the eternal nature of such an exchange, otherwise language would break down. We don’t need to understand the history of linguistic development to use language - this is the radicality of grammar. Yet Chomsky takes this radicality and flattens it into a dualism, grammar is the eternal nature of enunciation.
In a sense this very similar to how Proudhon treated money, if you want something to relate to Marx. Money appears as the eternal nature of commodity exchange. Labor time determines the quantity exchanged. Proudhon sees this and concludes that we must harmonize the duality between money and labor, to avoid forceful and unjust exploitation. Marx says, no you can’t flatten it like that, these determinants can only have their interconnection because the abstract dominance of the money-commodity is a historical condition tied to the immediate, material reality of the form in which useful labor is alienated for purpose of exchange. We must treat money as a bearer of purely abstract value when we actually buy anything, whether or not we personally admit to this subservience to abstraction is irrelevant. Yet it is precisely this indifference of the money-commodity to individual thought which leads the historical development of it as a force of domination. Money allows for the manifold qualitative differences between subjects on either side of exchange to be negated via the implicit, mutual recognition of its abstract authority. Money is not some eternal fact who signifies the eternal nature of exchange, but a Real Abstraction determined in and by the necessities confronted by commodity-exchange in material immanence.
This is precisely the case with grammar as well: the manifold qualitative, material differences between enunciating subjects is negated due to a mutual, implicit recognition of some abstract authority in shared grammar. That actually is very radical once you start poking at it. Something I certainly wouldn’t want to abandon to a naive Deleuzian “becoming animal” so as to desperately flee the tyranny of the grammatical structuring of enunciation. To me it points to the creative capacity of language, that the capacity to move beyond immanence in language requires that this immanence can be negated by grammar. Yet grammar is not some eternal essense, it is a formal force generated through the ensemble relations of active, enunciating subjects. As subjects, us engaging with universal grammar as some a priori or thing-in-itself gives us little recourse to developing our relation with how we use language, socially or instrumentally or however, because in this frame it is just the substance of this eternal thing which we are helplessly subservient to. Engaging with the concept this way masks that it is we, in our many varieties of interdependence, who are ourselves the agents of active, formal structuring of relation to the world. That this structuring is not the product of some eternal fact, but whose form and codification into law is determined in and by the necessities confronted by linguistic exchange in material immanence.
Jesus Christ this turned into an effortpost (effortcomment?), I hope it’s somewhat intelligible. I’m reading Alfred-Sohn Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labor at the moment (which I guess isn’t psychoanalytic per say, but I found him through Zizek) if you want to check that out. I find it fascinating thus far and, because I did not study philosophy in college, I feel like every time I work through the book a bit I understand Kant (and his relation to Marx, Hegel etc) better and better. I think Sohn-Rethel’s notion of Real Abstraction points to exactly the kind of problematic which a methodology like psychoanalysis tries to grapple with and which more positivist streams like modern psychology are incapable of grappling with - not because of moral failings or anything, but because it’s beyond the scope of their methodology. This is a domain which can’t be abandoned to a sheer liberal nominalism. Thanks for suffering through my rambling.
