The essence is very subjective, the story needs to be self-circular

(I)

Suppose you have a pile of smelly stockings in the corner of your room, twisted and tangled together with the strange odor faintly emitting to witness the length of time it has been on your feet. Although you have used it to greet Santa's gifts, and even once added to your XXOO (if it was a stocking), given its current special smell and N holes, throwing it away is the wisest choice.

Freud's psychoanalysis is similar to the stinky socks in the corner.

Something that it has long since retired from the stage of history. However, as long as we want to understand and learn the discipline, it is difficult to bypass it. Although Freud's psychoanalysis has long since become a part of the history of psychology, it is again something we have to focus on given its strong influence in the history of psychology and its powerful appeal to the general public.

At present, Freud's psychoanalysis resembles more of a philosophy that has served more to stimulate the imagination of literary and artistic creation than the study of scientific psychology.

(II)

Although you can't get around psychoanalysis if you want to study psychology, it doesn't mean it's useful. Just like if you accidentally step in a piece of shit on your way home, you can't say you must get home, it's just a derivative of a particular stage.

A very serious note: students who want to study psychology, never! Never! Never start with studying psychoanalysis, let alone end with studying psychoanalysis.

My advice is: if you only want to get a cursory understanding of psychology, or if you are planning a career in scientific psychology in the future, it is enough to limit your understanding of psychoanalysis to the content of my previous chapters. Do not waste any more of your life on this theory! Because psychoanalysis has been abandoned by modern psychology, thrown far away, flying high, and falling miserably, its rising and falling trajectory draws a beautiful parabola.

Why is psychoanalysis abandoned by modern psychology?

(1) Subjectivity

As in many of the examples in the previous chapters, the results of psychoanalysis are subjective and cannot be proven to be correct, and certainly cannot be proven to be incorrect. This leads to the dilemma of "believe it or lose it" or "it is inaccurate because you are not sincere". In this respect, there is no essential difference between psychoanalysis and the reading of palms and gods.

However, people who do psychoanalysis are good at writing books and setting up their academic journals to publish their papers, or organizing their seminars to keep people who don't like them out. They will put on a scientific appearance, or at least make the formality very formal. This is where those who dance and read palms are incomparable: fortune telling has to be made very academic.

For example, if you are depressed, psychoanalysis suggests that there is a "focal point", usually a traumatic event from your childhood. This includes how you were neglected and abused, who you are hating, and so on. They focus on your relationship to depression and try to reconstruct a "meaningful" explanation from these things.

Maybe you just want to say: I'm out of love, okay!

(2) Storytelling

The reason why psychoanalysis is more influential in stimulating the literary imagination is that psychoanalysis itself is like a work of literature, only relatively obscure. The strength of psychoanalysis lies in storytelling, and stories with bizarre plots always easy to attract people's interest. If learning a boring theory is like reading a detective novel, how interesting it would be!

First of all, psychoanalysis conquers the media with stories, and he uses some twisted and bizarre classic cases to attract people's attention. Therefore, it is a model of success in communication science. This is something modern psychology needs to learn from Freud.

Secondly, psychoanalysis conquers the "visitor (counselor)" with stories, and it often creates an epiphany of "Oh, so that's how it is" for people who come to counseling.

For example, the counselor discovers through association and imagination that the visitor's current relationship pattern is similar to her pattern with her father, and says that she has an attachment to her father. This kind of ambiguity often gives you the feeling of having your head lit up as if it makes sense as if you are "progressing and growing.

Everyone wants to find a reasonable explanation for his or her confusion, and psychoanalysis satisfies this need. Therefore, in today's highly developed science, there are still many fans of psychoanalysis. When the knowledge you receive exceeds your common sense, or when an answer is finally given to a puzzle that you have struggled to solve, people will experience an epiphany, even if the experience is wrong.

(3) Interpretive

Psychoanalysis is not a science at all, it is more like a hermeneutics that explores psychological phenomena.

Hermeneutics is a theory and philosophy that focuses on the understanding and interpretation of the meaning of things. According to Heidegger, the founder of modern hermeneutics, hermeneutics is the study of "what is the way of being of the kind that exists only through understanding".

Do you know what hermeneutics is? Don't know? No problem, I don't understand either. Philosophy never speaks well anyway.

The simple understanding is the study of explaining things: I do not explore the causes of things, I am only responsible for explaining the results that have emerged.

For example, Confucius said something back then, and the disciples got "Analects" from memory, but its words in the era of the hundred schools of thought are just a family of words and have not been taken seriously. It was not until Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty "dismissed a hundred schools and revered only Confucianism" that it began to take off. Later, Confucian scholars of all dynasties began to interpret the Analects of Confucius, taking into account their background and understanding of the meaning of Confucius' words. Throughout history, there have been countless interpretative works of all kinds. Some years ago, there was a boom of the Analects and Harmonious Society, as if Master Confucius had understood thousands of years of truth in a few words, and had understood thousands of years of social development.

This is pure nonsense, to put it bluntly. The depth of thought in any philosophy book is hundreds of times that of the Analects. Moreover, if the Han Dynasty had been ruled by the "Huanglao thought" insisted by the founding emperors of the early Han Dynasty, the current Confucian thought might be the stinky socks in the corner.

Some things are just historical accidents, not as good as you think.

If there is something in history, we keep interpreting it according to our understanding and the current social development, it is similar to hermeneutics. That's what psychoanalysis does, but it interprets your mental problems.

Psychoanalysis uses a lot of distorted analogies and builds sectarian barriers by inventing a lot of weird terms like Oedipus complex, impedance, ego, superego, orofacial period, anal period, Ribbit, and so on. They invented these terms not to build a disciplinary system, but to use these "terms" they invented to explain and describe psychological phenomena that cannot be explained.

As for the core meaning of these "Terms", they are often mysterious and may lose their original meaning with the development of theories. To put it, to explain my more mysterious theory, I invent some more mysterious terms to explain it. And as we all know, the mystery has a fatal attraction.

(4) Science and usefulness

Some people may still ask: If psychoanalysis is worthless as you say, and has nothing to do with science, why is he often used in clinical practice, and many patients say he is useful?

Just because it's not scientific, doesn't mean it's not useful. Placebo can cure is not scientific, but sometimes he is just as useful.

One of the important prerequisites for psychological counseling to be effective is the active cooperation of the patient. By creating certain rituals, psychoanalysis creates a sense of mystery and reverence, which leads to active cooperation in reflecting on the self. This is probably the source of its effectiveness.

Thus, it seems to work sometimes, but the reason for it is not clear; what is more difficult to grasp is that it works for one person but hardly works for another.

(iii)

Psychoanalysis should be understood in the context of historical development.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, psychology was in its infancy. There was a paucity of academic understanding of mental functioning and mental illness, and when mental illness was identified, it was often difficult to find useful ways to intervene and there were no drugs that worked. It was even often used as an excuse for discrimination and extermination. For example, the "witches" that had been popular in Europe for thousands of years were a way to persecute the mentally ill; Hitler's Nazis had "purged" similar groups.

So, this time began to show the "hundred schools of thought", to put it bluntly, all the gods jumped out of the woodwork to show their ability to fool. Some of the more able to fool will be by their understanding of the fooling out of a variety of psychotherapy methods and even establish their theoretical system. In one of them, there is a person named Freud, especially can tell strange and bizarre stories, but also the existing problems can explain the head so that patients and the general public listen to a daze, and immediately became his fans. So, he established a doctrine called "Psychoanalysis" along the way.

Is it useful? Sometimes it seems to have, sometimes it doesn't, and no one knows. But, in that situation, there was no better way to use it, so we just "use the dead horse as a living horse", and use it first!

But! But! But! But!

In modern society, there are better methods, we should not use so unreliable things!