If you have completed your undergraduate degree in psychology from an average university in India, chances are these are the things you know, or will ever know, about Sigmund Freud.
He founded the psychoanalytic school of thought in Vienna
He wrote “The Interpretation of Dreams”
He gave the id, ego and superego theory of personality
He proposed the psycho-sexual stages of development of a child which was so crazy that even his most ardent followers left him after that.
Before I joined my program at Ambedkar University (a psychoanalytic school), all that I knew about Freud could be largely summarized in the four points mentioned above. Much like a normal psychology student, I also thought that Freudian theories were unscientific, far-fetched and to be very honest “batshit crazy” (I have used that description multiple times).
But is that really all there is to Freud? Is it really possible that someone who was one of the most influential psychologists during his living years, proposed so little academically?
A look through the bibliography of Sigmund Freud should give you an idea of the wide-ranging topics that he wrote and spoke about. After all, even his collected works clock in at 24 volumes (!!) Freud used to write about sexuality, hysteria, dreams and even something as simple as jokes or an error.
Why then do modern psychologists learn so little about Freud when his contributions to psychology have been immense? The question has a painfully simple answer. Psychology is now an empirical and rational science.
Ever since the 60s, Psychology has been moving away from the psychodynamic school of thought and towards the more rigorous and empirical practice of behavioural or cognitive science. It is understandable why, each science likes being respected among its peers and if you want to be respected as a science you need to have the blessing of empirical data on your side. Psychoanalysis does not have that. It never claimed to have it, nor can it.
The painful consequence of this development in psychology has been the visible erasure of the history and contributions that Freud and his school has made to the modern field and to the world at large. Today, the idea of an unconscious or a sub-conscious mind comes to us almost naturally but it was psychoanalysis that tried to study this scientifically for the first time.
I only know so much about Freud and his work because I enrolled in a psychoanalytic program at the School of Human Studies, Ambedkar University Delhi but if it wasn’t for that, I would have spent my life looking down upon psychoanalysis and questioning its very existence in the modern times. An uninformed view that was the consequence of the wiping out of anything related to psychoanalysis in the modern syllabi.
I will share an anecdote that might help you understand what the modern therapist may be missing out on because of little training in psychoanalysis.
During my experience of therapy, I always struggled to express how I felt when I was clinically depressed. My therapist would have a checklist in front of her and see if I checked every box on her list and yet, while the list did seem like an approximation of what I was going through, it didn’t feel like a complete understanding of it. There was so much that was left unheard and unsaid in that list, a product of cognitive-behavioural science.
That was until I read Freud’s work Mourning and Melancholia where, for the first time, it felt like a professional understood what I was trying to express. The funny thing was this was not even a professional I could talk to and yet I felt heard. No checklist can ever arouse that emotion in a human being. The inner psychic phenomenon of a human being cannot be understood only through surface thoughts and behaviours.
We need to go deeper; just like Freud did and the psychoanalysts after him.
To conclude I would just say, with a caveat, that yes, there are a lot of issues in psychoanalysis when it comes to scientific validity as well as the ethics of research on it BUT the modern psychology student would only be working with a handicap without a basic understanding of psychoanalysis.
Question of the Week:
What do you think the role of psychoanalysis in modern psychology should be? Should we let it be a relic of the past, or should we try and integrate it in our syllabus again?
You can reply to this email to let me know what you think.
I think it's very important that students have a deep understanding of Freud, but this should be a deep historical understanding. I studied my undergraduate degree in the UK, where we learnt an awful lot about Freud (across may units) so we could better make sense of the history of Psychology and the scientific theories that came after ol' Sigmund. It's just as important to have a basis in Freud to understand the developmental stage theories that came after him, as it is to understand the subconscious to properly comprehend involuntary memory.
We can see and observe Freud's work in our day to day life experiences and behaviors- the defense mechanisms and all.