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What if Freud never existed?

Freud may have set psychiatry back 100 years. (photo: 4to40)

Paul Feyerabend once noted that “suppressing a paradigm in preference to one politically favored, could permanently damage society”. In a world saturated by psychoanalysis and “repressed” emotions, children blaming parents, it’s difficult to imagine these things not being a part of our daily psyche. Many have argued this point for over a century, but even in the argument, Freud in both reaction and in practice has mangled the face of psychiatry.

 

Take the extreme movements in the behaviorists; while they threw out such things as Freud’s “id” and “superego” in a rejection of his movement, behaviorism also threw out such things as the conscious mind.  As a result, many years of research were laid to waste, in feeding pellets to bunnies or electrocuting children. It was overkill and the ramifications were quite damaging in the progress of studying the human mind.

 

Without Freud, we would still be aware of the conscious and unconscious mind, even though these ideas are so often attributed solely to him. There are records of it in nearly every culture dating back to 600 BCE, where the Hindus called it Vedas. More recently, the study of neuroscience has all but proven its existence with researchers at Columbia University Medical Center. They discovered that by flashing images of frightened faces, so briefly that the conscious mind would not catch on, it still produced a subconscious reaction of anxiety. After several tests they concluded that the conscious mind is hundreds of milliseconds behind the unconscious processes.

 

For too long, science has followed the idea that parents are directly responsible for disorders in children was well as later in there life. Grieving mothers were told it was there fault their child killed themselves or fathers had sexual sights on their daughters. Throughout the last century, followers of Freud have, in many cases, been found to have placed suggested memories so deeply in a patient’s mind that they begin to believe it, despite its accuracy. Psychoanalytic theory is believed to have played a huge role in this huge set back. Instead of looking at environmental, political, geo-political and genetic factors as far back as the 1920s, the breadth of the psychological world has set back these advances by adhering to lofty notions with little to no questioning of its validity.

 

Hopefully, in the next few weeks, I will try to explore this topic in a more thorough manner with more specific examples of current research being conducted by such minds as Dr. Julian Lieb, Paul Feyerabend, Emil Kraepelin and many more who may have taken psychiatry and its related sciences in a much different direction had it not been for Freud’s theories.