#my basic stance is... it's right to hate freud but people hate him for all the wrong reasons

[ohsalome]

@feralwomb asked and i’m here to deliver (also not @ing op because i don’t want to start a fight i’m just here to rant)

the basic premise of the original argument: freud’s patients were raped by their fathers, in therapy they opened up to him about this, but since he was paid by the womens’ families, and not by women themselves, freud made up a handy-shifty “seduction theory” and misdiagnosed them with hysteria (even though they had ptsd)

1. what kind of a moron would confuse ptsd with hysteria not touching the fact that ptsd is being unjustly overdiagnosed today, especially among armcoach specialists (real talk - a huge issue in relation to our ATO situation), they have very different clinical pictures. just compare the dsm-5 criteria for yourself if you’re wondering also, keep in mind that hysteria used to present inself with very different symptoms at victorian times. it is a super versatile diagnosis. as far as i know, modern dsm-5 has divided it into “histrionic personality disorder” and “conversion syndrome”, but tbh it’s basically the same thing. back at ye olde times, though, the conversion syndrome was THE reason women were hospitalised. like,.... you simply don’t get blind/lose control of your limbs/get seizures from ptsd. these are very definite hysteria/conversion syndrome symptoms. today, it is very rare to find a histrionic person with such symptoms, but back then it was common. dostaevsky has a lot of such characters in his books, think кликуши

2. author either intentionally, or by indolance, misrepresented freud’s works i mean you can fuckin read it in the very same wikipedia page op cites noone on this site knows how to read. freud wasn’t labelling every patient who reported sexual abuse hystrionic; he admitted that some of them actually were; and whaddaya think, some of his patients in this category were men as well. the “seduction theory” (which he discarded later in his life btw) wasn’t based on patients’ reports, no. freud practised hypnosis, and during the sessions he believed he was uncovering “unconscious repressed memories”, usually of the times where patients were under the age of four. firstly, modern neurological research proves that although repression of memories is A Thing that our brains can do, it happens dramatically less often than freud originally suggested (and, according to him, we repress stuff наліво і направо). secondly, hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness which makes people very very suggestable (put a pin on it...i’ll return to this point later)

3. incestious families are complicated there’s also a psychological portrait of incestuous family, and although, like any theoretical model, it doesn’t 100% cover every single case that happened in the history of humankind, ever, they do present a certain pattern. basically, they are very isolated, they have fucked up family dynamics, and i’ll repeat once more that they are very self-isolated bc that’s a huge point. they are the “get out of my lawn!!!” people, “don’t stuck your nose into our family, this is none of your fucking business” people. i personally find it really unlikely that this type of people would willingly send their victim daughters away (!) to a mental institution (!!) where she will spill the family secrets (!!!). even considering the “noone will believe you because you are a woman” factor. also, freud had a lot of patients... was there, like, a victorian incestuous pedophilea craze that we weren’t aware of? man, what happened to all of them?

4. hysteria is, actually, a thing tfw you’re so cought up in your conspiracy theories that you forget that psychology exists freud had medical education. originally, he was looking for biological, plausable, material theory to explain human behavior. sadly, medicine/technology wasn’t advanced enough back then to allow that, so instead he created a metaphoric theory of mind. keep that in mind, when applied to hysteria and aedypal complex. i’ll quote modern psychoanalytical understanding of these things, from nancy macwilliams. parents treat kids of different gender differently. and kids are very attentive to the world around them. so, when a girl notices that she’s treated like an inferior in comparison to her brothers, or that her mother in powerless before her father, she quickly learns that femininity=weakness. and, basically, all of the characteristic treats of hystrionic personality (theatrality, helplessness, flirtyness, anxiety, lying-so-hard-i-believe-my-own-lie etc) come from this worldview. you see where i’m leaning? yeah, you can follow freud’s road and go “the difference between a girl and a boy is a penis, so, when a girl notices she doesn’t have one, she links her inferiority to it = penis envy”, but there is much more sense to view it metaphorically, in the upbringing theory. a dick is a metaphor for gender inequality, dude and, add the factor of repressed sexuality (being shamed for having normal human urges is not A Great Thing, psychologically) and an abscence of any way to express your feelings/needs/etc... and you get what you get, classic victorian-style hysteria. bonus fun fact: to quote macwilliams once more, freud considered himself to be somewhat of a histrionic personality, just to a less dramatic extent... 

all these things considered, my own theory on how things actually went down. return to the pin we made, about the hypnosis usage. freud’s hypothesis was the following: early sexual abuse - memory too traumatic to accept so it gets repressed into unconsciousness - hypnosis allows direct access into unconsciousness - memories can get retracted. well...only that’s most probably, most likely, wrong. there is no evidence that hypnosis is like your backdoor into unconsciousness, or into your repressed memories, for that matter. what hypnosis does is it makes you extremely gullible, suggestable, easy to influence, etc. it turns off your critical thinking. and, considering freud’s undeniable obsession with sex, i theorise that he might have unintentionally suggested himself to his patients that they were abused. something similair to this often happends to minors when they are questioned on the basis of possible sexual abuse, which is why interviewers are taught to be extremely careful. you can only imagine how traumatising it can be... and how absurdly stupid, if - if! - the abuse in question turns out to be not real. on topic of “uncovering repressed memories”, stanislav grof practices something similair to that, only he claims to reveal memories from previous lives. naturally, in his practice there is some lsd involved, because of course lsd would be involved. it is only my hypothesis tho. just something i added up from what i know. i haven’t researched it properly, or discussed with my superiors... so take it, and take a huge grain of salt with it. sorry that’s ranty and bitter but thank you for asking because i’m glad to get it off my chest 💖