Doubts about my future profession - Please Input

[Requia ☣]

How was the interpretation for family drawing with small children built?

[The Johnny]

I didn't bother to read all of this thread, but I'm going to do my best to summarize the various reasons why Freud is often considered incorrect.  I think it basically boils down to two things:

The one that first springs to mind (and I can give a good example of) is the unscientific nature of Freudian theory, despite Freud's wish for it to be thought of as a contribution to science, it isn't.  The best example I can think of is the use of the term "libido", which can refer to anything from a "sexual energy" to a universal "life force".  This term, which is rather central to a lot of Freud, lacks any proper definition, or accurate form of measurement.

Now I briefly glimpsed a mention of psychoanalysis as qualitative not quantitative, but you still can't qualify if you don't have a definition of the quality.

Secondly:  The interpreter.  This is my main quarrel with Freud.  He and his followers have no way of accounting for the "unconscious" projections of the person who is doing the analysing.  There have also been a number of studies showing how wildly varied Freudian therapists can be in their interpretation of exactly the same data.  Related to this, as Freud said, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar", well, how does the therapist know? exactly what method does the analyst use to differentiate between parts of a dream that are important details, and those which are meaningless?

Simply put, Freudian analysis is not an analysis of the patient.

x

edd

Libido

Latin: wish, desire

Freud: libido is an expression taken from the theory of affection (affectivity?). We call this the energy considered like a quantitative magnitude -even though it cannot currently be measured- of those drives related with all that can be included under the term <love> (1921); Its the dynamic manifestation of the sexual drive in the psychic life (1922).

Laplanche/Pontalis: the energy postulated by Freud as the sustrate of the transformations of sexual drive as related to the Object (investment displacement) and unto the ends (sublimation) and unto the source of sexual arousal (diversity of erogenous zones).

[Golden Applesauce]

Are you asking if psychoanalysis as a profession is a good idea, or if psychoanalysis as a field is a good idea?

If you're asking if you should go into psychoanalysis ... I don't like the theories at all, but it's still a profession where the basic goal is to help people.  You might be setting yourself up to operate in a less-than-useful framework, but any mature, reasonable person with a measure of wisdom who really means the Hippocratic Oath will benefit his clients/patients in some way.  I don't think God exists, but several of the people who I would trust to ask advice on serious life decisions are priests.  Psychoanalysis might be valid in the sense that it is possible to help patients from within that framework, but still BS in an academic sense.

Psychoanalysis as a field, however ... is just so much metaphysics.  I admit to not having studied psychoanalysis specifically, but the method it uses to generate theories is not conducive to coming up with accurate theories.  The reason the scientific model works is falsifiability - over any period of time, scientists will generate a ton of hypotheses that are wrong, but it's okay because sooner or later the false hypotheses will be debunked by an experiment.  We believe in theories not because they've been conclusively proven by some experiment, but because over decades/centuries the best and brightest minds have been trying to find a way to show the theory is false, and failed.  The difference between Freud's theories and more established ideas is that modern psychologists have been running their ideas through the gauntlet of experiment (admittedly, many experiments are poorly designed) and weeded out most of the wrong ones.  We have a reason to believe that the theories which stand up to rigorous experimentation might be true, because people have looked for places where the theories break down and failed to find any.

On the other hand, we basically have Freud's word that his theories are true.  According to (my meager knowledge of) Freud, you either exhibit a thought pattern regarding your mother and sex or whatever, or you repress it.  If that theory were false - and so many theories from that time period turned out to be (I think we still had the ether model of the universe at that point?) - there'd be no way to tell.  If you test and individual for unconscious desires about your mother, you'll either find them or not.  If you find them, you haven't shown Freud is right or wrong (that individual could just be an outlier) and if you fail to find it, you still haven't shown that Freud is right or wrong (he could just repressing it.)

So when I say that the claims of psychoanalysis are unfalsifiable, I don't mean that they're necessarily wrong, just that whether they're right or wrong, we'd have no way to tell, and the default position should be that any existence claim (this relationship exists, this pattern exists) is false.

The other quibble with psychoanalysis is that it's so subjective, that what its analysis reveals has at least as much to do with the test evaluator.  The person evaluating the response to House-Tree-Person or whatever is himself giving an open ended response to ambiguous input - so it doesn't say much that psychoanalysts find that the patients HTP fit in with their psychoanalytic worldview.  It's very much a Lo5s problem - everything relates back to your childhood sexual identity, and the statement is truer the harder you look for connections.  If you walk into a therapy session with the preconception that the main problem with your patient is the patient's parents and childhood, you can probably "verify" that with clever use of association games and picture drawing, but only if you're willing to give up on any possible cause that isn't in psychoanalysis's portfolio of "things that mess up your head later" and the patients who really do have anxiety for a reason other than their (lack of) a sex life at eight years old.

[The Johnny]

How was the interpretation for family drawing with small children built?

I cant find my notes nor textbooks, but if i recall correctly, there were studies made with a number of children that had already been diagnosed and subsequently the features in the drawings they made were correlated with their personality. But this is mostly speaking of HTP and Human Figure.

Now, Family Drawing is more complex, because it not only takes into account what the features each character represents, but also the portrayal of each member, its positioning (or lack of prescense). Even though the subject is told to draw an imaginary one, its usual that they will draw their own family. Basicly the interpretation comes from the features, which comes from correlation thru different cases, and the positionings are taken as symbolical and non-random.

For example, assuming its a four member family, consisting of mother, father, daughter and a younger brother; the test is applied to the daughter, which proceeds to only draw her parents and herself, symbolically it expresses the desire to supress her brother; why does she wish to supress her brother? it would need to be taken in the context of other available data, but a possible explanation would be envy of the attention the newborn draws instead of herself.

Projection tests are a tool or an aid, its not a full diagnostics solution. Also, one must never keep out of sight on whom the criterions were based on, which is usually USA middle class populations, and many of these tests must be standardized to be of greater use.

For example, in Mexico, houses rarely have differentiated rooftops, have chimneys or are made of wood, and each one is associated with a particular disorder; not standardized, therefore, not as useful or relevant.

[The Johnny]

Are you asking if psychoanalysis as a profession is a good idea, or if psychoanalysis as a field is a good idea?

If you're asking if you should go into psychoanalysis ... I don't like the theories at all, but it's still a profession where the basic goal is to help people.  You might be setting yourself up to operate in a less-than-useful framework, but any mature, reasonable person with a measure of wisdom who really means the Hippocratic Oath will benefit his clients/patients in some way.  I don't think God exists, but several of the people who I would trust to ask advice on serious life decisions are priests.  Psychoanalysis might be valid in the sense that it is possible to help patients from within that framework, but still BS in an academic sense.

Psychoanalysis as a field, however ... is just so much metaphysics.  I admit to not having studied psychoanalysis specifically, but the method it uses to generate theories is not conducive to coming up with accurate theories.  The reason the scientific model works is falsifiability - over any period of time, scientists will generate a ton of hypotheses that are wrong, but it's okay because sooner or later the false hypotheses will be debunked by an experiment.  We believe in theories not because they've been conclusively proven by some experiment, but because over decades/centuries the best and brightest minds have been trying to find a way to show the theory is false, and failed.  The difference between Freud's theories and more established ideas is that modern psychologists have been running their ideas through the gauntlet of experiment (admittedly, many experiments are poorly designed) and weeded out most of the wrong ones.  We have a reason to believe that the theories which stand up to rigorous experimentation might be true, because people have looked for places where the theories break down and failed to find any.

On the other hand, we basically have Freud's word that his theories are true.  According to (my meager knowledge of) Freud, you either exhibit a thought pattern regarding your mother and sex or whatever, or you repress it.  If that theory were false - and so many theories from that time period turned out to be (I think we still had the ether model of the universe at that point?) - there'd be no way to tell.  If you test and individual for unconscious desires about your mother, you'll either find them or not.  If you find them, you haven't shown Freud is right or wrong (that individual could just be an outlier) and if you fail to find it, you still haven't shown that Freud is right or wrong (he could just repressing it.)
So when I say that the claims of psychoanalysis are unfalsifiable, I don't mean that they're necessarily wrong, just that whether they're right or wrong, we'd have no way to tell, and the default position should be that any existence claim (this relationship exists, this pattern exists) is false.

The other quibble with psychoanalysis is that it's so subjective, that what its analysis reveals has at least as much to do with the test evaluator.  The person evaluating the response to House-Tree-Person or whatever is himself giving an open ended response to ambiguous input - so it doesn't say much that psychoanalysts find that the patients HTP fit in with their psychoanalytic worldview.  It's very much a Lo5s problem - everything relates back to your childhood sexual identity, and the statement is truer the harder you look for connections.  If you walk into a therapy session with the preconception that the main problem with your patient is the patient's parents and childhood, you can probably "verify" that with clever use of association games and picture drawing, but only if you're willing to give up on any possible cause that isn't in psychoanalysis's portfolio of "things that mess up your head later" and the patients who really do have anxiety for a reason other than their (lack of) a sex life at eight years old.

I'm more interested in the latter, I personally think that it's a good profession, im not sure if in the OP and throughtout the discussion ive made it clear that this is what I wish to be my occupation (although I have some years to go yet).

I thought of being a lawyer, sociologist or philosopher, but, A) im not that greedy B) the individual seems more interesting C) too abstract, little application, no money. As an analyst one can make decent money while helping others and I have an inclination to investigate the secret motivations of others. Im not sure I would trust a priest with giving advice, theres a saying, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

And here's where there is a stumble in the conversations, I know there is no physical manner to show that an Oedipus Complex, for example, exists, for it is a symbolical working of the mind, and not a physical one and although it is not a simple thing, I would like to try my hand at showing why I think its true (I just need some time to think how I would proceed with it); or some concept in the same branch of things, I have several works that ive done, including hypothesis, methodology and the likes, and just to bring a concrete example so as to be dissected in its flaws id be willing to translate it.

Its not precise, it is in a certain manner as detective work, piecing things together for a diagnostic. And as I mentioned before, HTP is a tool/aide, not a conclusive reference.

Its not all about childhood sexual identity, its about if there was a healthy passage thru the different stages of development, which ideally is done with at 19ish while not disregarding influential events that could have happened later on.

And you see, theres something weird with your discourse at the end, why bring up sex-life of an eight year old at all?

[The Johnny]

GA,

As i previously asked to someone else ITT (to which they didnt respond):

-Why is the insult "Fuck your mother" a global phenomenon?
-Why does the imagining of one's own parents having intercourse evoke disgust?
-What is so tragic about the myth of Oedipus?

[Requia ☣]

I cant find my notes nor textbooks, but if i recall correctly, there were studies made with a number of children that had already been diagnosed and subsequently the features in the drawings they made were correlated with their personality. But this is mostly speaking of HTP and Human Figure.

Now, Family Drawing is more complex, because it not only takes into account what the features each character represents, but also the portrayal of each member, its positioning (or lack of prescense). Even though the subject is told to draw an imaginary one, its usual that they will draw their own family. Basicly the interpretation comes from the features, which comes from correlation thru different cases, and the positionings are taken as symbolical and non-random.

For example, assuming its a four member family, consisting of mother, father, daughter and a younger brother; the test is applied to the daughter, which proceeds to only draw her parents and herself, symbolically it expresses the desire to supress her brother; why does she wish to supress her brother? it would need to be taken in the context of other available data, but a possible explanation would be envy of the attention the newborn draws instead of herself.

Ok, but why does it mean that she wishes to suppress her brother?

In the human drawing one, or the ink blot test (which I'm a bit more familiar with), you can draw validity, (though not reliability) because you can diagnose those disorders, then compare the disorders to the results, and use that to build a database of drawings or answers or whatever and link it to the disorders.  (IE, if 70% of the people who see a certain inkblot and answer butterfly have narcissistic tendencies, and your patient answers butterfly, you know to do more thorough tests for narcissistic tendencies, though you can't simply conclude that the patient has that).

But in family drawing, there's no diagnosis for the little girl wishing to suppress her brother, no database of 'this drawing was by a person with the following issues', the test was made up, it wasn't drawn from thin air, so it might be correct, but you have no way of knowing if it is correct or not.

-Why is the insult "Fuck your mother" a global phenomenon?
-Why does the imagining of one's own parents having intercourse evoke disgust?
-What is so tragic about the myth of Oedipus?

Why is this relevant?

[Requia ☣]

And here's where there is a stumble in the conversations, I know there is no physical manner to show that an Oedipus Complex, for example, exists, for it is a symbolical working of the mind, and not a physical one and although it is not a simple thing, I would like to try my hand at showing why I think its true (I just need some time to think how I would proceed with it); or some concept in the same branch of things, I have several works that ive done, including hypothesis, methodology and the likes, and just to bring a concrete example so as to be dissected in its flaws id be willing to translate it.

There's lots of psychology out there that isn't based in the physical workings of the brain.  Nothing about Bias research is based in neurology, but I can still say the Ball and Bat Bias exists, because no matter how many times the experiment gets run, people get the problem wrong.  You can give a lot of reasons why the Oedipal stage is true, but how do you run an experiment to demonstrate it isn't false?   And don't give me any vague statements, if you don't know where it comes from, and you don't know how to find out where it comes from, then how did you decide it was correct?

[Triple Zero]

-Why is the insult "Fuck your mother" a global phenomenon?

It's not. We don't use that insult in Dutch.

(With the exception of doing an ironically bad literal translation of US pop-culture/movie phrases, which is mainly used for the irony of cheese rather than meaning what is actually being said)

[Roaring Biscuit!]

Projective testing, only an abstract mind

"Nobody agrees how to score Rorschach responses objectively. There is nothing to show what any particular response means to the person who gives it. And, there is nothing to show what it means if a number of people give the same response. The ink blots are scientifically useless." (Bartol, 1983).

"The only thing the inkblots do reveal is the secret world of the examiner who interprets them. These doctors are probably saying more about themselves than about the subjects." (Anastasi, 1982).

also,  some more detail on issues with projective testing

I couldn't find the stuff on Freudian analysis, but if you want a comprehensive read on the issues of Freudian theory I can recommend Hans Eysenck's "The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire".

As for that there definition, well you've kind of proved my point there, as there are two seperate definitions quoted right there, and reading Freud you may notice that his use of libido is a linguistic use not a scientific.  Is the definition you quoted now the standardised definition?

Thirdly, if this is the line of work you really want to follow, check yourself out some George Kelly, his testing methods try to minimise the effect of therapist interpretation.


x

edd

[Roaring Biscuit!]

-What is so tragic about the myth of Oedipus?

his children are likely to have serious genetic defects?

There are some pretty good evolutionary reasons for children to not be sexually attracted to their parents...

[Golden Applesauce]

GA,

As i previously asked to someone else ITT (to which they didnt respond):

-Why is the insult "Fuck your mother" a global phenomenon?
-Why does the imagining of one's own parents having intercourse evoke disgust?
-What is so tragic about the myth of Oedipus?

"Fuck your mother" - I'm not sure that it is a global phenomena.  But if you were making the claim that "fuck your mother" is evidence for the psychoanalytic view, then you'd also need to show that past societies used the same insult (either that, or past societies didn't have a mother complex.)

"Parent's intercourse evoke disgust" - Neither of my parents are particularly sexually attractive, and the combination of modern porn culture and American crypto-puritanism has conditioned me to view any sex between less than movie starlet quality couples is gross.  I find the idea of most of my professors having sex to be a bit discomforting, and I only met them within the past few years.  I've also found (only within instrospective psych, although I think other experiments have/would bear this out) that imagining specific kinds of sexual situations changes your own sexual appetites and relationship to the subjects.  So I don't imagine my classmates in sexually provocative positions because I don't want to change the way I think about them as human beings.

"Oedipus tragedy" - I haven't read any of the epics about Oedipus, but I suspect that the tragedy comes from a combination of quality literature and "Guy does things the Gods do not approve of, gets ass handed to him in divine retribution as moralistic tale for audience."

[Golden Applesauce]

Its not all about childhood sexual identity, its about if there was a healthy passage thru the different stages of development, which ideally is done with at 19ish while not disregarding influential events that could have happened later on.

And you see, theres something weird with your discourse at the end, why bring up sex-life of an eight year old at all?

As I understand it, psychoanalysis traces the roots of present-day disorders back to people's failures to progress "normally" through the hoops of development as laid out by Freud and others.  But suppose psychoanalysis, while being correct about the influence of development in people's future lives, got the precise stages of development that people are supposed to go through wrong.  (Considering how much we've revised the work of greats like Newton, Piaget, and Darwin it would seem incredible that a field would get everything very nearly correct on the first go-round.)

There would be no way to tell - psychoanalysts would of course find that their patients didn't go through all the stages properly and diagnose them with disorders.  The fact that the patients only didn't go through the stages properly because the stages themselves are flawed could only be discovered if a) there really are neurotypical people b) those actual neurotypical people go to see a psychoanalyst and c) the psychoanalyst correctly identifies them as not having any disorders and doesn't attribute this them repressing their disorders or whatever.  Which means that psychoanalysis as a field has no good way of correcting its errors, and so we should expect all the inevitable errors made over the years to still be there.

I cant find my notes nor textbooks, but if i recall correctly, there were studies made with a number of children that had already been diagnosed and subsequently the features in the drawings they made were correlated with their personality. But this is mostly speaking of HTP and Human Figure.

Well there's your problem right there.  Double blind studies need to be done with a mix of healthy children and diagnosed ones.  Because if the healthy children put the same kinds of features in their drawings, then the drawings are diagnostically useless.

[Triple Zero]

It's not. We don't use that insult in Dutch.

I have to ask then, what's the rudest Dutch insult, or is it one of those funny things that will not translate well?

We generally curse with diseases.

Tering = TBC
Tiefus = Typhoid
Klere / Kolere = Cholera
(these are all slang words, the actual diseases are named tuberculose, tyfus and cholera)

While those are pretty harsh language, depending on who you are with they can also be rather mild and used as random expletives.

But probably the worst one is "krijg kanker", meaning "get cancer", or variations thereupon. The former diseases are quite uncommon and treatable, while there's a pretty good chance that a person has lost a family member or close friend to cancer. So that usually gets them. It's also the reason why I don't use that one. IMO it's either bad taste or if the person really deserves it, I can probably come up with something stronger and more relevant.

Ooh, I just remember another one. "Schurft" means "Scabies". Often used in combination with "hekel" (dislike) into "schurfthekel". To mean you really hate something (or someone). The nice thing about this one is that it sounds like clearing your throat and you can really spit it out. (schurft sounds like "skurft" except with the Dutch throat-clearing "g" sound instead of a "k")

[Requia ☣]

Projective testing, only an abstract mind

"Nobody agrees how to score Rorschach responses objectively. There is nothing to show what any particular response means to the person who gives it. And, there is nothing to show what it means if a number of people give the same response. The ink blots are scientifically useless." (Bartol, 1983).

"The only thing the inkblots do reveal is the secret world of the examiner who interprets them. These doctors are probably saying more about themselves than about the subjects." (Anastasi, 1982).

While there may be a lot of therapists who use inkblots that way, there is a very specific set of interpretation rules that go with the cards, and I suspect that those two critics never actually learned how to use them.  (Which is not to say that rules are necessarily any good, there are a lot of issues with it, not least of which is that there's no way to be sure if cultural drift has made the data invalid over the decades, and the lack of repeated experiments to verify the initial results).