Whiz-dumb
I've been reading a lot, lately. Trying to self-teach some of the foundations of psychological thought. I read (as much as I could of) a collection of Freud's work, including Interpretation of Dreams and Totem and Taboo.
First, he's hardly an exciting or even a very clear writer. In his defense, he was writing in German around the turn of the 20th century, and I'm reading 100 years later in translation. And, he was wrestling with the task of defining new terms for things that most of us don't even agree that we do. But maybe that's part of the problem ...
He was a very innovative thinker about the human condition. He was also headstrong enough to continue despite strong opposition from his contemporaries. We all owe him a debt for even trying to find a cause-and-effect relationship for mental illness; most people at the time assumed it was due to "degeneration", essentially incurable and somehow the fault of the sufferer.
But on the other hand, I would submit he probably wasn't all that much fun to be around. He wanted to reduce everything to two opposing forces (what he called them varied over time) and more importantly, he wanted to believe every person responded essentially the same. Such an attitude might have been necessary as a simplification, early in the fledgling science of psychology, but it's really hard to deal with now.
Too, his approach to opposition was to declare that his opponents were simply exhibiting behavior that was covered by his theory. His theory claimed that we repress certain natural urges, for various reasons which amount to "because we don't approve of them", and force them back into our unconscious. But then, those urges end up expressing themselves in other ways, usually symptomatic ones. While that may be true in some cases of some illnesses, he was quite willing to describe any denial of his theories as a similar situation of his opponents repressing what they don't want to believe. In other words, either you agree I'm right or you're mentally ill.
The reason I'm going into all of this is that, after saturating on his writing, I was starting to get irritable and unhappy, and I wondered why. What I realized was that I was letting Freud get into my head! I was starting to doubt my own beliefs, to think that maybe they were all based on my own repressions. After all, I can't prove my beliefs.
But that's where I had to call "bullshit": neither could he. He had his; I have mine. I even agree with some of his. But in my head, I'm the Decider. That's not selfish; that's survival.
And, now that I feel better again, I thought I would share that experience. Never let someone else into your head, including me. That's not the same as sharing what's in your head with others; I think sharing, letting stuff out of your head, is vital. But don't let them in, to make your decisions for you, whether it's through doubt, guilt, or fear.
Now, translated into German, that probably makes no sense at all. But I know what I mean. :-)
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