Google Doodle celebrates Freud (I don’t)

May 6, 2016 • 7:30 am

I’m not a big fan of Freud; in fact, I’m not even a tiny fan. He regarded psychoanalysis as a “science”, but it was really a pseudoscience, designed as a self-contained, airtight system of explanation rendered immune to disconfirmation by its slippery acolytes and its ability to explain everything—thereby explaining nothing. And there’s no evidence that psychoanalysis is better than a placebo, much less other forms of talk therapy. It’s expensive, too.

I see it as a scam, and I’ve read my share of Freud. If you want to see his “science” in action, read some of his case studies like Little Hans, or The Interpretation of Dreams. Psychoanalysis is dying out, and I see that as all to the good. It’s ineffectual and serves largely to enrich the psychoanalyist, who sees patients several times a week, often for years, at a whopping fee.

Nevertheless, I suppose one can argue that Freud made some contribution to our civilization. The notion of the unconscious is one, though he was far from the first to talk about that. And his books about religion, like Civilization and Its Discontents, at least limned provocative hypotheses about the origins and persistence of religion.

/Rant.  Today’s Google Doodle celebrates Freud’s 160th birthday, and it’s pretty clever, at least if you admire Freud:

Screen Shot 2016-05-06 at 7.27.25 AM

In case you don’t get it, The Indian Express explains:

While the psychoanalyst is most commonly represented sitting on a chair with the patient lying on the couch beside him, or as we’ve now come to perceive every clinical psychologist ever, Doodler Kevin Laughlin instead chose one of Freud’s most groundbreaking theories – the iceberg.

The iceberg theory, which explains the unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious and how they give birth to id, superego and ego which in turn shape a person’s identity.

Depicting the Freudian theory, the doodle shows most of the brain submerged and unknown, representing the pre-conscious and unconscious and shows only a part of the face above surface to represent the conscious.

 

71 thoughts on “Google Doodle celebrates Freud (I don’t)”

  1. So psychoanalysis was a primitive, and expensive, incarnation of Facebook?

    At least the horror of listening to the self-absorbed was only inflicted on one person at a time. I say those analysts earned their money. Makes you wonder why people suffer Facebook for free.

  2. Same goes for me. If you haven’t read them, you may want to check out “The Memory Wars” and “Unauthorized Freud”, both by Frederick Crews.

    1. Yes. Crazy. I always had the impression Freudianism was a bit loopy and attracted romantics or impractical theorists with a slight pervy inclination. Plus there was that female patient he referred to his friend who nearly killed her leaving the nose bandage in – the friend had some kinky theory about psycho problems being connected to the nose as a sexual organ, and then Freud adamantly defended the friend but admittedly never referred anyone to him again. Certainly parts of Freudian ideas do make sense and hold today – but the great bulk of it is fantasy.
      I read about Freud and prejudices confirmed.
      for the full “psychosexual” trip but sure everyone has other things to do or read.
      Introduction to Sigmund Freud, Module on Psychosexual Development
      https://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/freud.html

    2. Jerry has read my Uncle Fred’s books! While the two have never met, they have communicated and share mutual respect.

      1. Also, when Jerry visited my last summer I had him sign a copy of Faith vs. Fact and sent it to Fred.

  3. Reading Freud as a child was very educational. I learned that just because a large number of adults believed something didn’t mean it had any real meaning. Almost as good as homeopathy.

  4. “Psychology Gone Wrong: The Dark Sides of Science and Therapy” by the Polish skeptics Tomasz Witkowski and Maciej Zatonski is well worth the read. They demolish Sigmund Fraud (excuse the Freudian slip).

    In her review (available on the Science-Based Medicine website) “The SkepDoc” Harriet Hall writes: “Therapy can do real harm and can lead to suicide. It encourages dependence, false optimism, and externalized responsibility.”

    2. It’s my favorite Fraudian slip!

      I remember leaning what the fuss was about. My incredulous reaction was Spockian: “Fascinating [but not really]!” [/raises one eye brow]

      I think it was about the same time I learned about utopian Communism, so I have always lumped those two together. To sum them up, we should all have the exact same dreams, right?

  5. I agree with the Freud assessment.

    But – call me an old curmudgeon – but I personally think Google Doodles need to at least become way less frequent. It was fun when it first appeared. It isn’t anymore – for me, anyway. It appears they are running out of ideas, or something.

  6. Some creationists portray Marx, Freud and Darwin as some sort of atheist triumvirate. I guess they hope that Darwin’s ideas will eventually be discredited like those of Marx and Freud.

    1. I don’t know if all Marx wrote is rubbish, or if some of Freud is not, but we have to consider them in context. We maybe needed to have them… ?

      1. In my view the descriptive parts of much of Marx are more or less correct. The normative parts are inconsistent, and have some stuff worth thinking about (asymptotic political localism, etc.). And he has a bad metaphysics (dialectical materialism and the philosophy of history proposed is confused and wrong, to say the least) and almost no epistemology, so there’s no good way to revise some of it.

        Bunge suggests that the rescuing of the good bits is a “4 PhD” problem – one each in economics, sociology and politology and one in philosophy.

        Freud and psychoanalysis generally is a lost cause – there’s not a single bit that I could find (and I did a project on this) that was (a) sufficiently true (b) novel at the time of writing (never mind now).

        However, there’s a popular confusion between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis (and psychology), which gets in the way of some understanding the latter sorts of remarks …

    3. The early Marxists invited Freud to give conferences and speeches. and there is still a strand of Marxism thats very keen on Freud … they think its liberating and revolutionary because they see it as counter bourgeois and subverting the nasty nuclear family – even tho Freud was actually beneath it all, very much defending the bourgeois order of things.

    4. They are all scientists in the sense that they all came up with their hypotheses but only Darwin’s had any actual evidence and hasn’t been falsified.

  7. I’m not a big fan of Freud; in fact, I’m not even a tiny fan.

    …and how do you feel about that? Was your mother a Freud fan?

  8. My favorite writing of Freud is how humans tamed fire on the way from being savage animals to becoming civilized. Men did not tame fire because every time one started, they showed their dominance over it by peeing it out. Because women could not safely pee on a fire, they showed their dominance over it by harnessing it. Thus, it was women who tamed fire!

    Isn’t that a very science-based idea?

  9. Sadly in France psychoanalysis is still going strong. This due to Lacan and his school of thought being French. They were revered as intellectuals in the 60s-70s-80s. Today, psychoanalysts are still regularly invited on TV to give their opinions on the ill-of-the-day, and they are treated as equals to serious psychologists.
    Worse, it is taught as a “science” in French universities, where it contributes to do its share of harm. Amongst great psychoanalysts we can count Francoise Dolto (“incest does not exist and abused children asked for it”), who, believe it or not, was regarded for years as an authority on childhood development.

    A few years ago, Michel Onfray (author of the Atheist Manifesto, and in my opinion one of the only modern French philosophers worth reading) dared writing a book criticizing Freud and psychoanalysis. In a US context this sounds innocuous enough. But there the backlash was huge, with Lacan’s faithful calling him nothing short of a fascist/liar/soldout to Big Pharma/whatever. Several debates were organized, though not much came of them.

    That psychoanalysis is obviously bogus does not seem to bother the French university students. I’d say there is a parallel with homeopathy. Asking several psychology/pharmacy students what they think of those, I got the same answer: they’ve got no idea how it could work, but since they are taught this, this has to be true ! No critical thinking.

    1. I will add that it’s especially sad since Pierre Janet, one of the founders of psychology as a discipline and the inventor of the term “subconscious” was French. Nowadays he is completely unknown to the French public.

    2. Like some universities here (Australia) teach chiropractise.

      I think Freud has seriously lost his former cache in the anglosphere so depressing to hear he is more or less supreme in French psychology. Im not a psychologist but any sensible person can see most of his theories are basically mythologising. I think his views are both wildly unscientific and lacking in compassion and morality. Like his theories about “hysteria” and to my mind his brand of therapy seems to strip a person of agency and reduce them to child status – the therapist is all powerful and reading mystic meaning into their problems becomes their purpose. Carl Jung is also quite popular here, but not revered either. Jung is not as bad but he was just as or almost as unscientific – all about finding your mythic archetype.

        1. No relation, presumably, to the Pink Floyd movie ‘The Wall’? – which on one level showed a whole different set of psychological hangups…

          cr
          P.S. Did you really mean ‘quacklash’ ?

          2. I hadn’t heard the term before but it’s a good one!

            But I had heard of Simon Singh vs the chiropractors. Well done, Simon!

            cr

    3. Psychoanalysis is still a reasonably prominent thing in Quebec (for the obvious reason, perhaps?) and also, I am told, in South and Central America.

      Lacan is *far* worse than Freud, who was somewhat clear enough to be wrong. Lacan as far as I can tell is what you get when Brouwer (the mathematician) and Freud are mixed with a whole lot of very strong psychotropic drugs.

    4. Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto was a terrifically interesting book and should be better known. It doesn’t fit in with the New Atheist books, but rather follows in Nietzsche’s path by pursuing an “atheology” which will rewrite a civilization that still bears too many traces of Judaeo-Christianity.

    1. And not a doodle in the UK even though he lived & died here! Rather unpleasantly… thus illustrating the results of a tobacco addiction.

  11. What is a Freudian slip?
    When you say one thing, but you mean your mother.

  12. As it currently stands, non-specific effects, self-report, and positive correlations are endemic in psychotherapy-based research. Furthermore, biased interpretations of clinical outcomes with a propensity to rely on anecdotal evidence automatically degrades discussions about any effective mechanisms of psychotherapy intervention (i.e., CBT, DBT). Given these factors, mental health therapy constitutes a wide range of clinically informed, but not accurate or predictive, efforts to elicit shifts in cognition and behavior.

    One thing is clear; no one wants to work with anyone who has Borderline Personality Disorder.

  13. The link to The Indian Express is broken but this should work. I went to the trouble of straightening that out because I wanted to confirm that the second paragraph of the portion quoted above is indeed not a sentence.

    2. Yes, I noticed that too. An editor could have just removed the first comma and the “which” and we’d have had a sentence.

      I suspect the author started out to write the sentence in one form, then changed his mind mid-sentence and forgot to go back & reword the first part. (Happens to me a lot!)

  15. I don’t despise psychoanalysis as much as the branch of psychology that has employed it: abnormal psych.

    Although greatly interested in language and cognition, I steered myself away from psychology as a field because, when I was younger, the most predominant form of it focused on what was wrong with people in a way that felt like a stigma-perpetuating enterprise mixed with mystery. I have more respect for psychiatry, but, to be honest, not much.

    Several summers ago, I competed for an award in public health (and got it) to analyze recidivism among the severely mentally ill in Seattle & King County’s jails. I learned two things: 1) so-called “community interventions” (e.g., therapy and temporary housing) were completely ineffective at preventing the re-jailing of those who *shouldn’t* be there to begin with, and 2) jails are asylums

    So–in my mind, psychiatry has failed to care for its most vulnerable population, though I’m cognizant that blame can’t be leveled solely into psych’s direction; I’m thinking here of the societal dimensions of morality that undercurrent the prison and jail systems.

    Rant over.

    1. Okay, I wasn’t quite done…

      Yesterday, Jerry posted a video of an interview during which he spoke about free will, that is, our lack of it and the societal implications of the belief in free will, one of which being the prison system.

      This got contrasted in my mind with how scientists and families (patient advocacy groups) treat rare genetic (congenital) diseases—conditions over which we have little control—born predisposed. Because we experience genetic predisposition as an assault on us over which we are agentless, there is some compassion and energy to fix the problem.

      While in the scope of things I know that $29 million is not much, in 2014 the NIH allocated that much to expand an already existing research program for rare diseases. What if we funneled comparable resources for conditions and situations over which we see ourselves as having (the illusion of) choice?

      https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-funds-research-consortia-study-more-200-rare-diseases

      1. So–in my mind, psychiatry has failed to care for its most vulnerable population, though I’m cognizant that blame can’t be leveled solely into psych’s direction; I’m thinking here of the societal dimensions of morality that undercurrent the prison and jail systems.

        Not to mention a misguided populace that sought to banish mental hospitals and care facilities and a tradition of not viewing mental health issues the same way physical ones are regarded.

      1. Great question, and one I pondered, a lot.

        While we are lacking the political will, I can say what I wished for that population:

        Many were released into temporary, makeshift apartments, some in complexes with other past offenders with co-morbid substance abuse, and into shoddy, downtown areas where access to heroine was easy, some being set up with minimum-wage jobs that kept them in a never-ending deadening state of poverty.

        But what if serious resources went into creating livable environments for the severely mentally ill? What if they were given housing in beautiful, walkable neighborhoods with trained, live-in caretakers (for those requiring it) and a sense of normalcy and dignity?

        The objection, of course, is money, and again the moral resistance. But that’s mistaken. Tax payers provide millions and millions annually to jail and re-jail. If the funds were repurposed to provide permanent (with whatever level of care is needed), high quality lifestyles for the (offending but released) severely mentally ill, that would save money. At least, that’s my educated hunch. I didn’t do a cost-benefit analysis.

        I know, it sounds so naively utopian. But, I don’t think so. I think it is just humane to wish the best for those who need our help the most.

        1. Beautifully and thoughtfully put. Does not sound at all naively utopian to me. Sounds more like one of the causes the left should be spearheading–wouldn’t that make a nice plank for the Democratic Party?

  16. My opinion of Fraudian psycho anal lies (and of TV producers) was confirmed in 2003 when a steam-hauled special train, the first on the main line for two decades, was run from Wellington to Auckland New Zealand to commemorate the centennial of the completion of the Main Trunk Railway. The TV news had an item on it and they had invited a prominent railway enthusiast to comment and, for god knows what reason, some shrink. And the shrink promptly trotted out some bullshit about the sexual symbolism of the pistons thrusting in and out and the train going into tunnels. The poor railway enthusiast who was expecting to waffle on about the historic significance of the occasion was completely blindsided by this crap. And Fraudian psychobullshit earned my undying enmity.

    cr

    1. Freudian : “[some sexual bullshit]”
      Train enthusiast : “Well, if that’s what you see, that tells us a lot about you. but what we’re interested in is …”
      Standard UXB disarming technique #437.

      1. Oh, I agree, in principle. But…

        Well, the enthusiast was an experienced radio DJ, but of the relaxed easy-listening sort, not into shock-jock or ambush interviewing. And it just caught him completely by surprise, so I can’t fault his inability to instantly go on the offensive and point out how twisted the shrink was.

        cr

        1. Oh well … thinking beck to a university career (partly) mis-spent trying to persuade psychology students to go to bed with me … I had practice.

          1. Ah, one of the practical applications of psychology, then. 😉

            cr

    2. OMG, that’s inexcusable. As you say, why on earth have a shrink involved in the first place? Just when you think you’ve heard it all…

  17. In the movie “Zelig”,
    Woody Allen’s character says
    “I worked with Freud in Vienna. We broke over the concept of penis envy. Freud felt that it should be limited to women.”

    Freud seems to have capture the imagination of creative artists enormously, so he seems to have on one level struck a nerve. And he is always an interesting figure in historical novels, movies, and plays. He was well played by Viggo Mortensen in “A Dangerous Method” and by Montgomery Cliff in “Freud”. (Worst movie Freud ever has to be Alec Guinness in “Lovesick”)

    But he was egotistically dogmatic, resistant to the slightest departure from any of his theories, all of which based entirely on case studies with no quantitative or experimental research, and never veering much outside the culture of Vienna, Austria.

    Fortunately, not all critics of Freud have had to contend with having personal problems that might discredit them as does Gregory Peck in this short clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” (I have it set to start 50 seconds in.)

    https://youtu.be/E11nDAZtXTQ?t=51s

    1. Most of it was based on analysis of his dreams. He did no comparative study of dreams or any rigorous scientific comparisons at all. Most of his theories are completely fantastic. He believed for example that civilisation started from survivors of father killing. That every man wants to kill his father etc. I could go on and on but the whole lot of the explanation of the alleged stages to adulthood from infancy are frankly completely bizarre. It equates the sex act with all the processes of reproduction and ongoing survival itself and reduces people to walking genitalia. Its also misogynist and led to injustices such as the American cases of repressed memory rape allegations coaxed out by therapists from people 20 or more years after the alleged incest. Its freudian psychotherapy I have a problem with – not psychology per se.

      1. The only time I envy penises is when I’m out in the woods and have to pee.

  19. “I suppose one can argue that Freud made some contribution to our civilization.”
    The notion of the unconscious and subconscious really did help people escape that notion of the primacy of mind. That’s quite an important conceptual leap, and really helped framed the discussion of mind in the 20th century.

    1. I agree his work did contain some good ideas or insights, theres something to the id and superego idea. I think Freud overestimated the irrational and underestimated the problem solving aspect of our thoughts and he was fatalistic – we are a certain kind of being that never changes

  20. Freud once made a comment to the effect of, “My theories are so true and correct that they do not REQUIRE testing.”
    I had a friend years ago who was convinced that Freud had all human behavior completely figured out- in the course of a year’s worth of debates with him on the subject of the validity of psychoanalysis (which finally disintegrated into cursing and name-calling by him, at which point I shut him off) I read a great deal of Freud’s crap and the many books that thoroughly debunk every aspect of his “theories”, which he basically made up out of whole cloth and his own sexual neuroses. His theories are so full of logical fallacies that it would take an entire book to list them: his “seduction theory” was so absurd (eventually devolving into “The more you insist that you WEREN’T molested as a child, the more likely it is that you WERE”) that even he had to abandon it, although quotes from him years later indicate that he still believed it but felt that it would never be accepted. Reading his lectures is enlightening: he begins with an unproven hypothesis; a few minutes later, this hypothesis is now a “fact” and is used as “evidence” to back up even more unproven hypotheses, with him all the time virtually begging the audience to believe what he says is truth.
    He was a cult-leader of the “Ayn Rand variety”, having “favorite” slavish followers and brooking absolutely no dissent or any skeptical discussion of his ideas or he would order the offender “shunned” by the entire group.
    He groomed a man named Horace Frink to be the head of the American Psychoanalytical Association and used his power over him as his therapist to insist that he divorce his wife and marry a wealthy socialite (which involved convincing her to divorce HER husband, as well; Freud desired her wealth and social status as a benefit to the organization). He told Frink that if he didn’t do so, he would turn into a queer and so Frink reluctantly followed his orders, actions which ultimately ruined the lives of four people and led to the premature death of Frink’s ex-wife. Frink went on to have a series of “breakdowns” and Freud turned his back on him. Years later, Frink, broken in body and spirit, was visited in a sanitarium by his daughter, who was going to Europe and thought she might get to see Freud. She asked him if there was anything he wanted her to tell him. Horace said, “Tell him I think he is a great man- even if he DID invent psychoanalysis!”

    1. Now that was interesting! Thanks for the elucidation. I was so hoping Frink was going to say something entirely different at the end, there!

Comments are closed.