Psychology Evolved From Philosophy Apparently
Psychology, the science of the mind and behavior, supposedly evolved from Philosophy. That was what I was taught when I was taking my psychology classes. I can see how that would be the case, they have much in common and overlap quite a bit.
Comments (63)
Freud developed his system of psychoanalysis in the 1890s. He deserves credit, but psychoanalysis would have benefitted from more science and less philosophy.
I've never thought of psychoanalysis as scientific. I think it's more of a meditative practice. It's about awareness, not facts. Clearly Freud considered it science.
I was taught Skinner's Behaviorism was responsive to Freud's unscientific approach.
Psychoanalysis isn't dead, but good luck finding insurance that will pay for it. Talk therapy with a competent therapist (there are fewer of them than one might think) is unquestionably beneficial for many people. Besides finding a good therapist, one needs more than 6 sessions, usually. A year of weekly sessions would be more like it.
Whatever therapy one seeks, it seems like there are a couple of truths, at least:
Self knowledge is good and useful. (know thyself, and the unexamined life isn't worth living)
Therapy means change. (Easier said than done)
Sanity is difficult to maintain in a crazy society. (Erich Fromm)
My older brother started taking an anti-depressant. He found himself thinking more and more about how he had behaved all his life and how much he hurt people. It made him miserable. His solution? Stop taking the anti-depressant. That seemed like a pretty good solution to me.
Sure, but so did every other field.
But they do have more in commons than what one might first think of. In so far as they both study the mind, it is hard to distinguish. Once it gets to therapy or medication, then the differences are more obvious.
Quoting HardWorker
I have also taken two courses in Psychology in college, but, more importantly, I have read a lot of books in this field, including of course its big "stars" This is because I was always interested in the subject of mind. However, at that time, I was very little involved in philosophy and in general personal "critical" or "philosophical" thinking. So I "bought" Psychology's foundation that everything happens in the brain. (At least at that time, about 50 years ago. I have stopped reading psychology books since a long time ago so I’m not updated on the subject.) At that time, I didn't even cared about the big irony that its name --as well as its friend, Psychiatry-- expresses: The word "psychology" comes from Greek psyche (= soul) and the ending -logy, coming also from Greek "logos" (= speech), and denoting a subject of study or interest. Yet, Psychology has nothing to do with "psyche", which mainly refers to the soul, mind or spirit. And "mind" here is not a physical thing that exists in the brain.
Wikipedia says that "The ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, China, India, and Persia all engaged in the philosophical study of psychology." Yet, in modern times, although Psychology has a few things in common with Philosophy, its foundations, procedures/methods, way of thinking, views of life, the human being and existence in general, are totally different.
I, personally, have left Psychology far behind me ...
People stop taking psychoactive medication because the drugs work, and they don't need them any more. Then they relapse. People also stop taking these meds if they don't feel any better. That is not an unreasonable response, but a different medication (along with talk therapy) might have been successful.
Maybe your brother did hurt a lot of people, or perhaps he exaggerated his guilt (to himself). He wouldn't be the first or only depressed person to consider himself a miserable failure, In some ways, the feeling of failure is the flip side of unworkable perfectionism. Some people manage to achieve some sort of perfection, but most of us don't. We just keep beating ourselves over the head because we are not smarter, happier, sexier, richer, more fit, better hung, or anything else under the sun. Short changing ourselves is a feature of depressive thinking.
So how is your brother doing?
He is doing well.
Or so you think.
https://philospsy.blogspot.com/
There are some good articles in there.
It was likely stated by a scientist. Only commoditized and conventionalized philosophy becomes the sciences. Science is sort of like an unself-aware philosophy who's ultimate goal is to overcome its worldview through a philosophical gestalt shift. Good philosophy continues to stay a step or two ahead of the sciences.
Yes. But I think Psychology, Sociology, and the other "soft" sciences are still primarily theoretical & philosophical, with a scientific veneer of statistical probabilities. In the early 20th century, premature psychology was dismissed by scientists as "mere philosophy". So, Skinner proposed to make it a "hard" science by studying only objective behavior, instead of speculating on subjective ideas & feelings. That approach faded away after a while, since outward behavior is not a reliable indicator of inward thoughts & motives. What we now know is that humans evolved from apes, yet still have much in common with them. :smile:
Behaviorism :
Strictly speaking, behaviorism is a doctrine – a way of doing psychological or behavioral science itself.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/
Speaking as somebody whose got a four year college degree in Psychology I would have to say that Psychology is both a hard science and a soft science. Psychology can get very mathematical, an ANOVA is just one example, but it also gets much into areas that are hard to measure with just numbers, so as far as being a hard science or a soft science, I would say it's both.
Yes. But empirical (physical) scientists tend to look down upon their theoretical (metaphysical) colleagues for doing "soft" science : producing no hard verifiable evidence for their theories. Since, Psychology does use statistics to define the probability of their conclusions, It remains a step above feckless Philosophy in esteem, as a way of knowing & understanding intangibles. :smile:
What Is the Difference Between Hard and Soft Science? :
[i]In general, the soft sciences deal with intangibles and relate to the study of human and animal behaviors, interactions, thoughts, and feelings. . . .
The distinction between the two types of science is a matter of how rigorously a hypothesis can be stated, tested, and then accepted or rejected. . . .
So, one might say the terms hard science and soft science have become outdated.[/i]
https://www.thoughtco.com/hard-vs-soft-science-3975989
Do you see any truth in the claim that Freud's theory of mind (Id, Ego, and Superego) was a ripoff of Socrates' Chariot Analogy?
But, one has to speak of William James here, he made important contributions that stand the test of time very well.
I don't know. He probably was familiar with it, being a well-educated urbane sophisticated crackpot. Were you planning on suing Freud's estate for copyright infringement of Socrates' ideas?
Freud's psychodynamic system is too rococo to be tied to any single source. I don't think he cooked up the oedipal conflict and penis envy after reading Sophocles' plays. Besides, he was wrong about penis envy. Men have penis envy, not women. (see the scholarly work of M. Python, Biggus Dickus)
:rofl: I wish I knew how, but the resemblance...it's hard to ignore.
Quoting Bitter Crank
:lol: Freud's psychological theory revolves around sex, run-of-the-mill and deviant, and there's merit to it if you look at from a Darwinian (evolutionary) perspective: survival is about reproductive success! :chin:
One of Freud's favorites, Wilhelm Reich, spoke out in favor of adolescent sexuality -- the importance of adolescents being able to explore sexuality. It was a scandal back then, and a lot of adults still dread adolescents doing exactly that. Not that anything ever goes wrong with hot teenagers exploring their sexuality!
By whom?
I enrolled in psychology as an undergraduate, but was eventually dissappointed by the subject. The orientation of the department at the University I attended was described dismissively as 'pulling habits out of rats'. I liked the units on humanistic psychology, Albert Ellis, Carl Rogers, and some of those thinkers.
I read many of Sigmund Freud's humanist essays at that time - Totem and Taboo, Civilization and its Discontents, and others of that ilk. Philosophically, many of Freud's ideas are very interesting, he was certainly a much deeper thinker than many of the subsequent generations. But his conception of science was (shall we say) 'scientistic' in the extreme. That is well-illustrated by the anecdote of his last meeting with Jung. 'In Vienna in 1910 Sigmund Freud asked Carl Jung to promise that he would ‘never abandon the sexual theory.’ When Jung asked why, Freud replied that they had to make it a ‘dogma’, an ‘unshakeable bulwark’ against the ‘black tide of mud of occultism’. God knows what unconscious fears drove that conviction.
I think on the whole psychology is only as ever as good as the individuals who practice it. It has scope to be life-changing but it can also be waffle, as it is clearly impossible to treat as an objective science. Humans are after all subjects of experience before they're objects of analysis. Unless it is anchored in a greater worldview it looses much redemptive power - after all Freud said the aim of his work was merely to convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. That's why I think amongst the most insightful psychologists are Victor Frankl and Erich Fromm - they had a philosophical breadth and depth that infused their writings.
Sciences have specialties and sub-specialties as delineated by their aims, methods of observation and analysis, and their semi-private insider jargon. All of these are cut across by a theoretical 'pure' and applied pragmatic divide.
The speculative theory of mind goes back at least as far as Plato's tripartite theories of the soul. The scientific pragmatic side goes back at least to the Heraclitean dismissal of poets in favor of logos as laws of nature. But all science owes Galileo for his radical rejection of theological scholasticism in favor of Pythagorean mathematical explorations of physics and astronomy.
So it's an art more than a science?
Quoting magritte
I'm currently studying Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences which has many vital insights into the role of Galileo as one of the architects of modernity proper. It's too deep and involved a subject to give an account of in a forum post save to point to the seminal division Galileo makes between the 'primary', supposedly mind-independent, properties of bodies, which can be expressed precisely in mathematical form, and the so-called secondary qualities, apparently inhering in the subjective domain of mind. Thereby setting up the fundamental mind-matter dualism which ultimately gives rise to the 'Cartesian anxiety':
Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. It has subsequently become the basis for much discussion.
I've read a lot of Freud and I don't recall his saying psychoanalysis is a science.* He changed his mind constantly, he was constantly re-exploring and revising his theories. Can you point me to where Freud makes this claim? Legitimately curious. :smile:
*My memory's not the best...
And so much plain old humanity.
Looks like you hit the behaviorist wall. Behaviorism - Walden Two - the grotesque result of an art aspiring to be a science.
Not to discount the methods and successes of behavior analysis - especially vis-a-vis autistic children. (This I witnessed first-hand when I studied behavior analysis. Ultimately turned back to the humanists to pursue a license in psychotherapy.) The science there is just very, very limited. CBT has roots in behaviorism and has been a success for the field. So it may be just a question of extremism. Walden Two is an extremist vision.
Freud uses the word eros. Which at times meant sexual energy and at other times a general life force or life drive (as opposed to the death drive). Freud revised his theories constantly.
Freud is mostly studied at second- or third-hand so you really need to check your primary source. His reputation for quackery precedes him, sadly. He really was a profoundly insightful man. Though wrong about a lot of it.
Happily, Britannica has it right:
"Libido, a concept originated by Sigmund Freud to signify the instinctual physiological or psychic energy associated with sexual urges and, in his later writings, with all constructive human activity. In the latter sense of eros, or life instinct, libido was opposed by thanatos, the death instinct and source of destructive urges; the interaction of the two produced all the variations of human activity. Freud considered psychiatric symptoms the result of misdirection or inadequate discharge of libido.
Carl Jung used the term in a more expansive sense, encompassing all life processes in all species. Later theories of motivation have substituted for libido such related terms as drive and tension."
https://www.britannica.com/science/libido
That he was being "scientific" is my projection of what he was doing--even if it wasn't great science.
I know I'll never read his entire oeuvre so I was just curious.
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
The psychologist George Kelly wrote:
“I often tell my students that a psychopath is a stimulus- response psychologist who takes it seriously.”
Quoting Bitter Crank
I think when it comes to psychology, ‘great science’ is an oxymoron. The more psychologists and psychiatrists try to emulate the natural sciences the less useful their work becomes. Rather than the psychologists envying physicists, it is the physicists who should be taking cures from psychology.
:lol:
Behaviourist after making passionate love: 'That was great for you, darling, how was it for me?'
Still, have we not all read really interesting articles in the social sciences that were enlightening, and which either have been subsequently validated or which struck many readers as immediately truthful. David Riesman's Lonely Crowd, Domhoff's The Power Elite, Humphrey's study of public sex in St. Louis, MO around 1970 (Tearoom Trade), or Faith and Ferment: An Interdisciplinary Study of Christian Beliefs and Practices by Sr. Joan Chitister and Martin Marty, and The Sane Society by Erich Fromm. None of these books utilized the scientific method, though document research observation, surveys, and interviews were used.
I've mentioned before that I read many of Freud's 'humanistic' essays as an undergraduate. Totem and Taboo, Civilization and its Discontents, and others of that genre. He was clearly brilliant - after all along with Marx and Darwin, one of the main intellectual influences of the early 20th Century - but also 'scientistic' in the sense of attempting to address all and any problems through the lens of what he understood as the objective sciences. Basically thoroughgoing positivism, in the Comtean sense. That was really why he broke with Jung, who had a vastly larger understanding of human nature and the human situation.
Can you tell me where I can read more about Freud's scientism or positivist attitude?
"I have repeatedly heard it said contemptuously that it is impossible to take a science seriously whose most general concepts are as lacking in precision as those of libido and of instinct [the drive] in psychoanalysis. But this reproach rests on a complete misconception of the facts. Clear basic concepts and sharply drawn definitions are only possible in the mental sciences in so far as the latter seek to fit a region of facts into the frame of a logical system. In the natural sciences, of which psychology is one, such clear-cut concepts are superfluous and indeed impossible. Zoology and botany did not start from correct and adequate definitions of an animal and a plant; to this very day biology has been unable to give any certain meaning to the concept of life. Physics itself, indeed, would never have made any advance if it had had to wait until its concepts of matter, force, gravitation, and so on, had reached the desirable degree of clarity and precision.?" (Freud)
"Consequently, Freud asserted that in the sciences of nature, the basic representations (Grundvorstellungen) or the general concepts lack clarity. Only later analysis of the material gathered from observation and experiments will add some precision to these Grundvorstellungen, and therefore they stand in contradistinction to the sciences of the mind, which have to do with the domain of facts in the framework of a systematic intellectual construction. Now, psychoanalysis being founded upon clinical practice and therefore upon observation, it only remains to it to develop its results such as they present themselves – that is to say, in a necessarily fragmented form – and to resolve the problems step by step. Freud (1925, p. 32) claimed that psychoanalysis was nothing other than an Ergebnisse herauszuarbeiten, that is to say, quite literally, the elaboration of results from which one extracts hypotheses (herausen). In this sense, Freud underlined that the hypotheses were virtually contained in the results, but he also suggested that we should highlight the scientist’s imaginative capabilities, which allow him or her to arbeiten (to work) on these results in order to extract concepts and hypotheses from them. Here we can find some kinship between this Freudian method and the pattern of argumentation that Darwin built in On the Origin of the Species."
"In one of the passages of the thirty-fifth New Introductory Lecture, Freud (1932) compares the work of the analyst with the work of the scientist, going so far as to declare that their resemblance makes them identical: the analyst is a scientist."
"This is to say that, for Freud, both religion and systematic intellectual constructions – like those of the Geisteswissenschaften or the Weltanschauung – lie on the same side of the frontier, while on the opposite side lie science and, therefore, psychoanalysis."
"In any case, when Freud considers psychoanalysis to be one of the sciences of nature, the model of Naturwissenschaft was invariably that of physics, which is a constant presence in the manifest Freudian discourse: from this stems the idea of psychical forces, as well as the ongoing employment of the notion of “mechanism” and innumerable mechanical, hydraulic, and electrical metaphors that crop up in his description of the psychical processes. In this respect, Freud does not set himself apart from his contemporaries: the prestige that this discipline enjoyed was immense, with its spectacular progress seeming to confirm with each new challenge the truth of Newton’s doctrine."
https://www.cairn.info/revue-recherches-en-psychanalyse1-2014-1-page-73a.html#re1no1
But why is this the case? Is it just a function of the obvious fact that the social sciences deal with phenomena that are much ‘messier’ than the natural sciences due to their complexity and instability? Or are the social sciences also capable of challenging the assumptions underlying what constitutes prosper science? For instance, Skinner never accepted cognitive psychology as a real science. And older versions of cognitive science are now making similar accusations concerning the scientific legitimacy of phenomenologicallly influenced newer approaches in psychology. So it’s important to separate sloppy science from approaches that define the methods and scope of science.
that's actually a highly relevant passage.
As for my analysis, I inferred it from those essays I mentioned - Totem and Taboo and The Future of an Illusion. They basically analysed religious consciousness in terms of psychoanalytic categories. They were very influential in his day, and obviously brilliant, but I found them reductionist. He had no inkling of anything like higher consciousness. At the time I was deep into 'theories of spiritual awakening' which are all anathema to Freud, but which can be mapped quite successfully against Jung. Of course, Jung was never mentioned in the Psychology department, the only place I encountered him was the occasional mention in comparative religion tutorials. But Freud was very much a product of The Enlightenment, seeking to vanquish 'archaic' ideas associated with religion in the clear light of science. Recall his traumatic last meeting with Jung when they broke for good - Freud asking Jung to 'promise him' that he would safeguard the 'scientific sexual theory' against the 'black tide mud' of 'occultism'.
It's probably worth mentioning that when Popper came up with his idea of falsification, that psychoanalysis was one of the examples of a theory that could not be falsified by empirical findings and therefore by implication was not a properly scientific theory (another being Marxism). Whatever 'data' a psychoanalyst came up with by way of first-person accounts from patients could be accomodated within the Freudian framework.
In a way, then, Freud was one of the 'science-religion culture warriors', although later in life he was also quite ambiguous in his attitudes to Judaism, his ancestral faith. But overall he seems to have held to the 'conflict thesis' which is that science and religion are irreconciliable.
Right. He confesses as much in the opening pages of Civilization and Its Discontents: no sense of the 'oceanic.'
While I love reading Freud for his speculative brilliance and bombshell-perfect prose, I feel more of a brotherhood with Jung.
"All in all, from early on, Jung was nagged by the thought that Freud placed his personal authority above the quest for truth."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/06/carl-jung-freud-nazis
Had I the wherewithal to answer that question, I'd probably be a tenured psych or social science professor, enjoying a comfy late career or a generous pension. Sigh.
A large part of the answer is institutional: colleges require "knowledge production" from its faculty (aka, publish or perish) and bs research is, frankly, a lot easier than coming up with deep ideas. So you have thousands of psych and social science graduate students and the several grades of the professoriat doing what they can to "produce knowledge" on a regular schedule,
The earlier psychologists who were measuring perception, learning, memory, recall, and so on did legitimate experimental scientific research -- they were doing the best they could on some of what would later be taken up by neurology. Its pretty dull stuff, imho, but baselines needed to be established.
When we turn to questions like, "How does college attendance affect the value system of working class students?" or "How does one develop character in students" the required research effort is difficult, requiring longitudinal study over maybe a decade, among other things.
You know "the marshmallow experiment"? children are left alone with a marshmallow and instructed to not eat it (until some future point). If they wait 5 minutes, they will get two marshmallows." Some children can wait, some eat the single marshmallow forthwith,
The ability to wait 5 minutes supposedly predicts how well children will do in life, where delayed gratification is commonly practiced by successful (but chronically unsatisfied?) people. I don't know whether the marshmallow experiment proves anything or not, but it's the kind of easy to do, readily replicable experiment that comes to mind.
Pedagogy produces a lot of research that often gets excoriated for being trivial. Pedagogy and Psychology are two peas in a pod in a number of ways.
Universities could maybe do us all a favor and start discouraging research in psychology, social science, and pedagogy, unless the researcher has solme really good ideas, much better ideas than what has so far been put forward.
So Freud was bang on target! His theory of libido and eros are perfectly aligned with Darwinism in which "success" boils down to reproduction aka sex!
Don't give up on Freud or Jung yet!
It’s also a deeply flawed experimental paradigm in my opinion. Experiments like this , the supposed Dunning- Krueger effect, cognitive dissonance and others that appear to find cognitivist ‘bias’ in decision-making presuppose an objective starting point for that variable which is allegedly vulnerable to bias. Attempts like this to translate moral reasoning situations into empirically measurable frameworks substitute simplistic normative biases for an understanding that takes account of the perspectival nature of value.
Which gets to the point I was making that you haven’t commented on, which is that objectively based research in social psychology is using the wrong notion of science, that derived from the natural sciences. The third-person perspective currently in vogue needs to be embedded within a first-person perspective , which should be treated as primary. I’m far from alone in pointing this out.
Eugene Gendlin writes:
“ We would not expect a first-person process science to contradict the genuine findings of reductionistic science, any more than ecology does. But it places those findings within a broader perspective that can be more useful for certain purposes. One of those purposes is to understand first-person processes in such a way that 'the person' does not drop out.”
Varela and Thompson reject the claim that scientific objectivity presupposes a belief in an observer independent reality. Evan Thompson(2001) writes:
“Another way to make this point, one which is phenomenological, but also resonates with William James' thought (see Taylor, 1996), is to assert the primacy of the personalistic perspective over the naturalistic perspective. By this I mean that our relating to the world, including when we do science, always takes place within a matrix whose fundamental structure is I-You-It (this is reflected in linguistic communication: I am speaking to You about It) (Patocka, 1998, pp. 9–10).”
Matthew Ratcliffe(2002) says:
“The unquestioned givenness of the objective world that is constitutive of scientific descriptions cannot capture the way in which the given is disclosed by a meaning-giving background. Thus, if anything, it is the transcendental, meaning-giving account that has ontological priority over an objective/causal description.”
The psychologist, social scientist, wishing he needed the apparatus of a chemist, dehumanizes the subjects by making objects (it) of them. There is no pressure from physical scientists to do this of course. It's envy on the part of the social scientist. There is more influence flowing from the corporate world, which objectifies employees and consumers as a matter of course.
The social science research that has moved me has been written from the POV of the participant observer - getting inside the group. One can observe social behavior like one observes beetles; the gang behavior one observes is equivalent to observing ant warfare--no personal involvement. Better to ingratiate one's self with a gang and put (just a little) skin in the game.
In the 1980s AIDS crisis response, quite a few gay men engaged in various educational 'interventions' which required participant observation. How else to figure out how to reach risk takers in bath houses, parks at night, back rooms, and so forth. There are risks, of course, which more objective research doesn't involve--temptation not being the least of it.
Or, this example: Primates of Park Avenue by Wednesday Martin, an anthropological account of the up-scale women of the upper east side of New York City and their sharp-elbow interactions.
Long story short, if you want to understand your fellow humans, study them as fellow humans.
:fire:
[quote=Neil deGrasse Tyson]So we're just sacks of chemistry.[/quote]
The law of gravity doesn't care whether you're a saint or a sinner or a stone.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Bravo!
Is that possible?
I think this can't be right for the simple reason that for Freud's theories and therapeutic methodologies first-person accounts of experiences were all important. An objectivist psychology would consist in taking into account only behavior or brain chemistry in attempting to understand and treat psychological "disorders". That is not Freud.
Freud may have aspired to develop psychology and psychoanalysis into sciences, but his approach certainly did not consist in any reductive materialist approach. He, like Jung, was interested in the role of symbolic archetypes in human psychology, even if he didn't allow them the esoteric spiritual significance that Jung did.
So, it is true that he wanted to rule any supernatural factors out of consideration, and considered religion to be a manifestation of infantile needs for guidance and generally a phenomenon which finds its origins in fear of death, but to paint him as a positivist is not at all accurate, in my view.
Which is precisely why his theories are nowadays often dismissed as pseudoscientific. He didn't use the term 'objectivism' but what I meant is, he conceived of his work as part of science. Agree that he was not positivist in an explicit sense, but in the general sense conceived by Auguste Comte (see paragraph 3 here). As for Freud's materialism, there is an entry here - agree he was not a simple 'reductive materialist'.
I observed that behaviour with my eldest son, now in his thirties. He always had that kind of discipline as a very small child, and lo, has generally been a very successful and balanced individual. (Don't know where he got it, as it's a quality I myself don't exhibit. :yikes: )
The approach of Vygotsky is interesting. He called for research that was not just based upon personal testimony.
In opposition to the behaviorists who said that such reports were not data, Vygotsky recognized that the development of individuals needed more than their reports to build models to try and understand the process..
How Skinner got to a place where it had to be one thing or another is a mystery.
A variation of the popular conservative mantra:
‘science doesn't care about your feelings’.
Or at least, that’s the story a certain era of science tells itself. An era just coming into being knows that valuative frameworks are the very basis of science.
Quoting Joshs
This just popped into my mind: Consciousness plays a major role in quantum mechanics! We're living at the wrong scale of reality (we'd be better of living quantum lives where our consciousness, perhaps feelings, make a difference).
That's like saying 'Old English grammar is "proto-Shakespearean?!"' :eyes:
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
plus these old sketches & &
So, in sum ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/553997 :smirk:
No real disagreements here. "sort of like a proto-science" was not intended to diminish its usefulness. I view philosophy as the laboratory where ideas are cooked up that can eventually be tested. Philosophy creates, science tests and confirms.
Quoting 180 Proof
That sums up my point nicely. I consider such philosophy a success. Philosophy is also littered with failures that have not gone anywhere beyond the lab itself. In my opinion, if a philosophy cannot eventually be turned into something testable, or put into practice in life with measurable outcomes, its just fiction. It can be comforting, exciting, and imaginative; but still fiction.
Of course, my view of science is that its "testable philosophy". But once such philosophy has been tested, a small part of it has been destroyed. Philosophy can only exist as a logical exercise. Once the real world puts it to the test, it is no longer philosophy. So this is why I noted philosophy's goal is to destroy itself. All of its successes are no longer philosophy, and all of its failures are the leftover dregs of petri dishes.
In this specific case, it was The Philosophy of Mind.
Philosophy is "the mother of the sciences."
Why?
Because, by Dr. Robert S. Hartman's definition, in his magnum opus, THE STRUCTURE OF VALUE,
pHILOSOPHY is the continuous clarification and analysis of vague concepts - while
SCIENCE is the continuous clarification and analysis of pprecise concepts.
The latter concepts are terms in a framework, in a systematic theory.
Questions? Comments?
Libido seems to be used in a very similar fashion than "will" or "spirit" or "creativity", or many other substances of that sort. Driving, creating force behind the scenes.Very typical 19th century scientific thinking. Psychoananalysis was indeed scientific back in the days, but we need to understand that the world was something totally different.
I just read Richard Noll's book Aryan Christ, and it opens up very interesting POV to the early years of psychoanalysis. In that account, Freud appears to be very much of scientific type, but Jung is something else.
As to The Aryan Christ, I would say be sure to check and double-check your sources. The "Jung was a Nazi" controversy is - to put it mildly - unsettled. (As far as I know. I'm far from an expert, but I've heard both sides of the story.)
Other folks on the forum may have some input about this controversy.
@Wayfarer
@Janus
I also want to add that Jung also was very scientific and meticulous, but his theories were a bit wild, to put it mildly. Anways, Noll's book is just one POV, although almost strangely hostile one. But I enjoy reading it, and especially its descriptions of the strange spiritual scenery of 19th century Europe.