exactly lol to treat psychoanalysis seriously is a joke. its a fun hobby maybe but its not at all the focus of modern psychology. its completely just some jerk offs thinking cool shit with little empirical support
i say this as someone who likes it for fun, but i wouldn’t dare bring it up in one of my psych courses
like the sheer fact the deluezian people are like nah ima make up my own shit should show how loosy goosy the study is
Tbh bud, this just sounds like you're taking modern psychology's anti-psychoanalytic sentiment at face value. I remember my professors making similarly flippant remarks all the time. It's a sentiment certainly tied to American Positivism and Cognitive Psychologists' desperately hoping to differentiate themselves as 'properly scientific'. Thank god they did that. I guess that's why academic psychology has no problems with replicability nowadays huh?
Psychoanalysis and psychology should not be treated as a choice of one or the other. Psychology's unwillingness to engage with its theoretical counterpart should be an indictment of psychology (which is why I've abandoned it as an academic path). Modern Psychology, to my mind, has been largely a failure outside of marketing and algorithms. Of course there's a need to engage with empirical evidence and the scientific method, of course! But that doesn't mean a goddamn thing if there's no understanding of its ontological or epistemological implications for us as subjects, no understanding of how to realize new relations and habits as a result.
For instance, nobody has learned about Chomsky's Universal Grammar and done anything radically new with language as a result. It always remains an antinomy of Being, a fetishized structure of language as such, not in its active, immanent dynamism, but as an eternally stale opposition to enunciation. Universal Grammar is a synthetic a priori which has spurned much development in cognitive psychology, this is fantastic. However through it, the ontological and epistemological implications it carries, we can also see it as a symptom of the Kantian Dualism which both drives and stains all of modern psychology. Yet it is also an abstraction we must work through to grasp its real dynamism, to develop something paradigmatically new and potentially liberatory in how we approach language as subjects
Let me start with you are right, I came in a bit brash, I just get concerned about alot of the sweeping assumptions and confidence some psychoanalysts tend to have (like zizek) about how the psyche functions without much concrete substance to it.
It’s a sentiment certainly tied to American Positivism and Cognitive Psychologists’ desperately hoping to differentiate themselves as ‘properly scientific’. Thank god they did that. I guess that’s why academic psychology has no problems with replicability nowadays huh?
Yeah I agree I am stuck in my positivist bunker for sure (and is something I should probably keep my mind more open) , however for the replicability crisis (something I am also worried greatly about as well!) is largely due to the misapplication of statistics and methods, as well as the incentive structure favoring rejecting the null instead of just doing good science and reporting "boring" results.
I am a stats and methods nerd so producing worthwhile meaningful results that are as close to reality as I can get is important to me. alot of modern psychology is probably bullshit agreed (due to p hacking and the other bad stats, methods, and structures, etc imo) and it definitely needs new life injected in, but I do think empirical examination should be the end goal so we can fact check ourselves so to speak before applying any of this theory as the risks are high.
Of course there’s a need to engage with empirical evidence and the scientific method, of course! But that doesn’t mean a goddamn thing if there’s no understanding of its ontological or epistemological implications for us as subjects, no understanding of how to realize new relations and habits as a result.
I will definitely compromise on this front . I believe psychoanalysis could potentially be useful if used to inform an a-priori hypothesis that we can then get concrete idea of if it exists in reality. My concern stems from "bad" psych being misapplied having hugely damaging implications. For example the false memory epidemic in the 90s especially where psychologists would implant traumatic memories while fishing for repressed memories (which evidence now shows is likely not how memory works in a vast majority of cases) They used those psychoanalytic rooted approaches and caused a great deal of harm to the accused and the client who had the memory implanted.
you lost me with the chomsky part, my apologies. Would you mind going explaining it a different way? a bit I am rather curious.
I apologize again if I came across the wrong way, you seem very informed and I appreciate you taking the time to go over some of this and sort of keeping my positivist ass in check haha.
I just get very concerned about using psychoanalysis in an ends to itself instead of informing research and formulating/adjusting the theory based on that evidence.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I was worried about coming in too hot there. I'm very much in the transition between these two worlds at the moment and always feel a bit too passionate. Honestly I'm more interested in philosophy and political economy, where the methodology of psychoanalysis has tons of parallels. I just think people do tend to dismiss a lot of this stuff, especially Zizek, because of an obstinate refusal to leave an analytic frame in engaging with it
however for the replicability crisis (something I am also worried greatly about as well!) is largely due to the misapplication of statistics and methods, as well as the incentive structure favoring rejecting the null instead of just doing good science and reporting “boring” results.
I would definitely see the "why" behind this as ultimately a psychoanalytic question, that is, we can only view it as a symptom of some larger abstract movement which we could never observe empirically but which has real effects. Why is this now something every undergrad gets taught?
Emphasis on stats and methods is great and 100% necessary nowadays! You can tell me to fuck off if you don't want to share info on here, but what are your interests?
The repressed memories stuff is dumb guy, feel-better industry psychoanalysis for sure though, definitely agree there. I will say I still have tons of reading to do about psychoanalysis' history, I know there's been a plenty of problematic notions and naive idealism in the field (I can also think of rebirthing therapy off the top of my head, which is very cringe). Yet there's something very methodologically promising in the much more critical approaches I've come across and I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
you lost me with the chomsky part, my apologies. Would you mind going explaining it a different way? a bit I am rather curious.
Lemme try. I'm more than a bit stoned and that part was me fucking around and trying to practice the use of concepts which are still freshly learned and developing, but lemme give it a shot. What I was trying to do was relate Chomsky's Universal Grammar to Alfred Sohn-Rethel's notion of Real Abstraction.
Chomsky presents Universal Grammar as an a priori of human language, that is before this abstract capacity for divisibility, combination, organization etc. (grammar) exists, pure linguistic exchange is impossible. In order for language to be truly human (this is where we differentiate from animals in how we exchange concrete verbal enunciation) this abstract capacity must already be present. Thus, and this is where Chomsky opens room for God, this capacity must be the nature of man as such.
In a sense, there is certainly truth here, once this abstract capacity arises it has real and irreversible effects on the nature of how humans interact with the world. Our concrete enunciation (making noises) could indicate nothing more than a relational immanence without the abstract, formal underpinning of grammar. However there is no witnessing grammar empirically, it exists in so far as language appears organized as such (when someone talks to you, the division and organization of the sound you receive simply appears to you as a matter of fact). The immediate exchange via language must appear to us to be the eternal nature of such an exchange, otherwise language would break down. We don't need to understand the history of linguistic development to use language - this is the radicality of grammar. Yet Chomsky takes this radicality and flattens it into a dualism, grammar is the eternal nature of enunciation.
In a sense this very similar to how Proudhon treated money, if you want something to relate to Marx. Money appears as the eternal nature of commodity exchange. Labor time determines the quantity exchanged. Proudhon sees this and concludes that we must harmonize the duality between money and labor, to avoid forceful and unjust exploitation. Marx says, no you can't flatten it like that, these determinants can only have their interconnection because the abstract dominance of the money-commodity is a historical condition tied to the immediate, material reality of the form in which useful labor is alienated for purpose of exchange. We must treat money as a bearer of purely abstract value when we actually buy anything, whether or not we personally admit to this subservience to abstraction is irrelevant. Yet it is precisely this indifference of the money-commodity to individual thought which leads the historical development of it as a force of domination. Money allows for the manifold qualitative differences between subjects on either side of exchange to be negated via the implicit, mutual recognition of its abstract authority. Money is not some eternal fact who signifies the eternal nature of exchange, but a Real Abstraction determined in and by the necessities confronted by commodity-exchange in material immanence.
This is precisely the case with grammar as well: the manifold qualitative, material differences between enunciating subjects is negated due to a mutual, implicit recognition of some abstract authority in shared grammar. That actually is very radical once you start poking at it. Something I certainly wouldn't want to abandon to a naive Deleuzian "becoming animal" so as to desperately flee the tyranny of the grammatical structuring of enunciation. To me it points to the creative capacity of language, that the capacity to move beyond immanence in language requires that this immanence can be negated by grammar. Yet grammar is not some eternal essense, it is a formal force generated through the ensemble relations of active, enunciating subjects. As subjects, us engaging with universal grammar as some a priori or thing-in-itself gives us little recourse to developing our relation with how we use language, socially or instrumentally or however, because in this frame it is just the substance of this eternal thing which we are helplessly subservient to. Engaging with the concept this way masks that it is we, in our many varieties of interdependence, who are ourselves the agents of active, formal structuring of relation to the world. That this structuring is not the product of some eternal fact, but whose form and codification into law is determined in and by the necessities confronted by linguistic exchange in material immanence.
Jesus Christ this turned into an effortpost (effortcomment?), I hope it's somewhat intelligible. I'm reading Alfred-Sohn Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labor at the moment (which I guess isn't psychoanalytic per say, but I found him through Zizek) if you want to check that out. I find it fascinating thus far and, because I did not study philosophy in college, I feel like every time I work through the book a bit I understand Kant (and his relation to Marx, Hegel etc) better and better. I think Sohn-Rethel's notion of Real Abstraction points to exactly the kind of problematic which a methodology like psychoanalysis tries to grapple with and which more positivist streams like modern psychology are incapable of grappling with - not because of moral failings or anything, but because it's beyond the scope of their methodology. This is a domain which can't be abandoned to a sheer liberal nominalism. Thanks for suffering through my rambling.
I would definitely see the “why” behind this as ultimately a psychoanalytic question, that is, we can only view it as a symptom of some larger abstract movement which we could never observe empirically but which has real effects. Why is this now something every undergrad gets taught
That's where modern methods come in, we can measure indirectly these abstract concepts if done correctly. (they def dont teach this in undergrad but I was in a psych stats and methods research lab that lowkey taught me stuff much higher than I should have) In my opinion if we want to understand psychoanalytic better we need to not only formulate interactions a-priori (very important!!) but test those concepts with modern stats.
I fear making inferences without bringing it down to something more concrete and disprovable, its hard to sift through what is real and what is crack pot. I dont mean this derogatorily but its very easy to be persuasive and become convinced your theory is right as you keep justifying niche reasons why it acted the way you wanted. This has real consequences when either in practice you are harming/depriving a client of a therapeutic model that could be better (not any particular psychoanalytic necessarily being inferior but the fear is still there) , or that we make assumptions about how the world works due to a wrong theory giving us a less true perspective of the world. I have less of these fears with empirical analysis because I am using the same tools to dissect and compare models of the world between each other concretely. I can show it performs X better or acts in X way definitively, or at least its easier to deconstruct and tear down. (I'm a sucker for popper falsification if you couldn't tell.) I guess its my biggest fear is moving farther and farther away from material reality and truth with it.
For example on how abstract concepts can be measured maybe this will help:
Structural equation modeling and other latent variable analysis allows us to measure abstract concepts. They do this for many constructs and see how one abstract concept correlates, is co dependent with, or even soft causality. Think of it like a web diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_equation_modeling#/media/File:Example_Structural_equation_model.svg here is a link to the wikipedia diagram (sorry for my laziness!) basically the squares in this diagram are concrete measured "observed" values. This can be a scale which we can establish to be reputable, it can be number of times done X etc. you feed multiple things that make up this abstract idea into it to sort of create a gestalt summation of it (thats my way of describing it but its not exactly theoretically accurate ofc). This is the circle the "latent variable" or abstract or immeasurable and we can make an approximation of it to be used to show what relationship it should have in theory. and we can use what we learn from it to inform future theoretical models and adjusting it.
boring stats jargon aside, think of modern stats methods as putting a blanket over a bastketball. you can see the shape and you can touch the outside of it and poke it and gain lots of info about it. just because I cant directly observe it in its entirety I can still gain insight indirectly. Thats basically what this does.
Sorry to rant on this but "its abstract and immeasurable" is becoming less and less of an excuse for psychology with the power of modern methods and stats. This is empowering to me because we can tread previously taboo waters. So yes I dismiss alot of claims of psychoanalysis sometimes in an academic sense if it was used to inform a study I can actually find a way to disprove that sounds awesome to me!
The shift in focus to teach undergrads to understand the importance of empiricism imo is probably because previously untouchable concepts are becoming measurable. and in turn people needing to use these very sensitive stats and methods carefully. tbh most psychologists have very poor stats and methods undertanding and it shows in the replication crisis. They need to make a theory and set what tests they will do before hand and just show the results, but there is alot of fuckery that happens in between adjusting models until its nice and tidy. I hate this so much. Give me your messy study because thats reality not your skewed narrative! you know? thats why transparency and incentive structues and hammering in the importance of doing your methods correctly!!!
Emphasis on stats and methods is great and 100% necessary nowadays! You can tell me to fuck off if you don’t want to share info on here, but what are your interests?
I have a very wide interest pool. I have a psychology bachelors but I want to get my PHD eventually. I didn't get into a program 2 years ago, it hit me kind of hard and I got discouraged, and got lowkey in a slump and smoked weed daily for 2 years lmao. I am planning on getting out of my rut this year though and trying to get back into academia. i appreciate this conversation its very stimulating for me as I have been out of practice haha.
I guess I want to measure models of mental health applications but I want it extremely grounded to reality and I would like to operationalize abstract concepts for use in in therapy or other treatment. I would also like to understand the mechanisms better but again I want to be sure its REAL not just fitting a narrative someone theorized. People spend their lives working on their theories leaving them to often nudge the results in their direction. I want to make sure the work I do is academically honest and is actually useful practically. I just love learning and want to know truth with a capital T as much as I can. I dont have a particular field or sub group,
I have worked with data from middle school substance use surveys to project individual variations and their trajectories (mixed effects modeling) so basically I wanna know if you started at "high use" in middle school do you stay or increase and when do these patterns stabilize. It was my first study i was able to investigate so its not theoretically rich necessarily because it was more a sort of playground for me to learn how to format, use, and apply these techniques. My professor was NB and so our lab also had a secondary focus of gender identity research, so while I did not work on those projects those issues and finding ways to operationalize non binary identities are close to my heart (lots of information is lost with a binary while continuous scale variables are much more fruitful!!!).
The repressed memories stuff is dumb guy, feel-better industry psychoanalysis for sure though, definitely agree there. I will say I still have tons of reading to do about psychoanalysis’ history, I know there’s been a plenty of problematic notions and naive idealism in the field (I can also think of rebirthing therapy off the top of my head, which is very cringe). Yet there’s something very methodologically promising in the much more critical approaches I’ve come across and I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Yeah that was just an example of theory not reigned in and applied despite not being "real". Thats my fear is harm will come to people or incorrect assumptions will be gained from a lack of grounding it to observations.
I will admit my theory is really weak, I love to learn about it but I treat it more as hobby. I think if those who are great at theory linked up with devoted methods people alot of great work could be done.
anyway now you get my anxieties with alot of psychoanalytics , and I defintely came in very hot at first haha.
As for the chomsky stuff I find it fascinating I learned about the LAD and how he destroyed skinner, but it was very skimmed/surface level. Honestly psych undergrad is day care sometimes. It doesn't scratch the surface of alot of these theories.
I just want to say that you are extremely incredibly well read and I respect the effort you put in, I will defintely be referencing this post when I need a theory fix and want to look into psychoanalytics more.
Thanks for your time, if you want to link up in discord or something DM me!
being knowledgeable and well practiced at a certain task or on a certain subject doesn't mean you're knowledgeable about other things, and I think its fair to assume that most people discuss things they have less than perfect knowledge of. I mean, were on a shitposting communism site, how much of Capital have you read? How organized is your local militia?
I agree that "most people discuss things they have less than perfect knowledge of" but what you originally threw out was "everyone is just bullshitting." sometimes people aren't bullshitting and they are actually competent and well-intentioned.
Well I meant just in general and I did say I was especially talking about online personalities. But now that you mention it even the most skilled and well intentioned engineer would in fact be bullshitting if they claimed to have a priori knowledge of a sewer before it is built because the creative force put into the sewer contributes to its total being
Yes and engineers and coders bullshit about things they don't know about too. Its epistemologically impossible to not be full of shit
Engineers and coders are notorious for bullshitting about things they don't know well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architects_%26_Engineers_for_9/11_Truth
that's all i got out of Wittgenstein
I mean it's basically Zizeks entire contribution to philosophy
exactly lol to treat psychoanalysis seriously is a joke. its a fun hobby maybe but its not at all the focus of modern psychology. its completely just some jerk offs thinking cool shit with little empirical support
i say this as someone who likes it for fun, but i wouldn’t dare bring it up in one of my psych courses
like the sheer fact the deluezian people are like nah ima make up my own shit should show how loosy goosy the study is
Tbh bud, this just sounds like you're taking modern psychology's anti-psychoanalytic sentiment at face value. I remember my professors making similarly flippant remarks all the time. It's a sentiment certainly tied to American Positivism and Cognitive Psychologists' desperately hoping to differentiate themselves as 'properly scientific'. Thank god they did that. I guess that's why academic psychology has no problems with replicability nowadays huh?
Psychoanalysis and psychology should not be treated as a choice of one or the other. Psychology's unwillingness to engage with its theoretical counterpart should be an indictment of psychology (which is why I've abandoned it as an academic path). Modern Psychology, to my mind, has been largely a failure outside of marketing and algorithms. Of course there's a need to engage with empirical evidence and the scientific method, of course! But that doesn't mean a goddamn thing if there's no understanding of its ontological or epistemological implications for us as subjects, no understanding of how to realize new relations and habits as a result.
For instance, nobody has learned about Chomsky's Universal Grammar and done anything radically new with language as a result. It always remains an antinomy of Being, a fetishized structure of language as such, not in its active, immanent dynamism, but as an eternally stale opposition to enunciation. Universal Grammar is a synthetic a priori which has spurned much development in cognitive psychology, this is fantastic. However through it, the ontological and epistemological implications it carries, we can also see it as a symptom of the Kantian Dualism which both drives and stains all of modern psychology. Yet it is also an abstraction we must work through to grasp its real dynamism, to develop something paradigmatically new and potentially liberatory in how we approach language as subjects
Let me start with you are right, I came in a bit brash, I just get concerned about alot of the sweeping assumptions and confidence some psychoanalysts tend to have (like zizek) about how the psyche functions without much concrete substance to it.
It’s a sentiment certainly tied to American Positivism and Cognitive Psychologists’ desperately hoping to differentiate themselves as ‘properly scientific’. Thank god they did that. I guess that’s why academic psychology has no problems with replicability nowadays huh?
Yeah I agree I am stuck in my positivist bunker for sure (and is something I should probably keep my mind more open) , however for the replicability crisis (something I am also worried greatly about as well!) is largely due to the misapplication of statistics and methods, as well as the incentive structure favoring rejecting the null instead of just doing good science and reporting "boring" results.
I am a stats and methods nerd so producing worthwhile meaningful results that are as close to reality as I can get is important to me. alot of modern psychology is probably bullshit agreed (due to p hacking and the other bad stats, methods, and structures, etc imo) and it definitely needs new life injected in, but I do think empirical examination should be the end goal so we can fact check ourselves so to speak before applying any of this theory as the risks are high.
Of course there’s a need to engage with empirical evidence and the scientific method, of course! But that doesn’t mean a goddamn thing if there’s no understanding of its ontological or epistemological implications for us as subjects, no understanding of how to realize new relations and habits as a result.
I will definitely compromise on this front . I believe psychoanalysis could potentially be useful if used to inform an a-priori hypothesis that we can then get concrete idea of if it exists in reality. My concern stems from "bad" psych being misapplied having hugely damaging implications. For example the false memory epidemic in the 90s especially where psychologists would implant traumatic memories while fishing for repressed memories (which evidence now shows is likely not how memory works in a vast majority of cases) They used those psychoanalytic rooted approaches and caused a great deal of harm to the accused and the client who had the memory implanted.
you lost me with the chomsky part, my apologies. Would you mind going explaining it a different way? a bit I am rather curious.
I apologize again if I came across the wrong way, you seem very informed and I appreciate you taking the time to go over some of this and sort of keeping my positivist ass in check haha.
I just get very concerned about using psychoanalysis in an ends to itself instead of informing research and formulating/adjusting the theory based on that evidence.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I was worried about coming in too hot there. I'm very much in the transition between these two worlds at the moment and always feel a bit too passionate. Honestly I'm more interested in philosophy and political economy, where the methodology of psychoanalysis has tons of parallels. I just think people do tend to dismiss a lot of this stuff, especially Zizek, because of an obstinate refusal to leave an analytic frame in engaging with it
I would definitely see the "why" behind this as ultimately a psychoanalytic question, that is, we can only view it as a symptom of some larger abstract movement which we could never observe empirically but which has real effects. Why is this now something every undergrad gets taught?
Emphasis on stats and methods is great and 100% necessary nowadays! You can tell me to fuck off if you don't want to share info on here, but what are your interests?
The repressed memories stuff is dumb guy, feel-better industry psychoanalysis for sure though, definitely agree there. I will say I still have tons of reading to do about psychoanalysis' history, I know there's been a plenty of problematic notions and naive idealism in the field (I can also think of rebirthing therapy off the top of my head, which is very cringe). Yet there's something very methodologically promising in the much more critical approaches I've come across and I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Lemme try. I'm more than a bit stoned and that part was me fucking around and trying to practice the use of concepts which are still freshly learned and developing, but lemme give it a shot. What I was trying to do was relate Chomsky's Universal Grammar to Alfred Sohn-Rethel's notion of Real Abstraction.
Chomsky presents Universal Grammar as an a priori of human language, that is before this abstract capacity for divisibility, combination, organization etc. (grammar) exists, pure linguistic exchange is impossible. In order for language to be truly human (this is where we differentiate from animals in how we exchange concrete verbal enunciation) this abstract capacity must already be present. Thus, and this is where Chomsky opens room for God, this capacity must be the nature of man as such.
In a sense, there is certainly truth here, once this abstract capacity arises it has real and irreversible effects on the nature of how humans interact with the world. Our concrete enunciation (making noises) could indicate nothing more than a relational immanence without the abstract, formal underpinning of grammar. However there is no witnessing grammar empirically, it exists in so far as language appears organized as such (when someone talks to you, the division and organization of the sound you receive simply appears to you as a matter of fact). The immediate exchange via language must appear to us to be the eternal nature of such an exchange, otherwise language would break down. We don't need to understand the history of linguistic development to use language - this is the radicality of grammar. Yet Chomsky takes this radicality and flattens it into a dualism, grammar is the eternal nature of enunciation.
In a sense this very similar to how Proudhon treated money, if you want something to relate to Marx. Money appears as the eternal nature of commodity exchange. Labor time determines the quantity exchanged. Proudhon sees this and concludes that we must harmonize the duality between money and labor, to avoid forceful and unjust exploitation. Marx says, no you can't flatten it like that, these determinants can only have their interconnection because the abstract dominance of the money-commodity is a historical condition tied to the immediate, material reality of the form in which useful labor is alienated for purpose of exchange. We must treat money as a bearer of purely abstract value when we actually buy anything, whether or not we personally admit to this subservience to abstraction is irrelevant. Yet it is precisely this indifference of the money-commodity to individual thought which leads the historical development of it as a force of domination. Money allows for the manifold qualitative differences between subjects on either side of exchange to be negated via the implicit, mutual recognition of its abstract authority. Money is not some eternal fact who signifies the eternal nature of exchange, but a Real Abstraction determined in and by the necessities confronted by commodity-exchange in material immanence.
This is precisely the case with grammar as well: the manifold qualitative, material differences between enunciating subjects is negated due to a mutual, implicit recognition of some abstract authority in shared grammar. That actually is very radical once you start poking at it. Something I certainly wouldn't want to abandon to a naive Deleuzian "becoming animal" so as to desperately flee the tyranny of the grammatical structuring of enunciation. To me it points to the creative capacity of language, that the capacity to move beyond immanence in language requires that this immanence can be negated by grammar. Yet grammar is not some eternal essense, it is a formal force generated through the ensemble relations of active, enunciating subjects. As subjects, us engaging with universal grammar as some a priori or thing-in-itself gives us little recourse to developing our relation with how we use language, socially or instrumentally or however, because in this frame it is just the substance of this eternal thing which we are helplessly subservient to. Engaging with the concept this way masks that it is we, in our many varieties of interdependence, who are ourselves the agents of active, formal structuring of relation to the world. That this structuring is not the product of some eternal fact, but whose form and codification into law is determined in and by the necessities confronted by linguistic exchange in material immanence.
Jesus Christ this turned into an effortpost (effortcomment?), I hope it's somewhat intelligible. I'm reading Alfred-Sohn Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labor at the moment (which I guess isn't psychoanalytic per say, but I found him through Zizek) if you want to check that out. I find it fascinating thus far and, because I did not study philosophy in college, I feel like every time I work through the book a bit I understand Kant (and his relation to Marx, Hegel etc) better and better. I think Sohn-Rethel's notion of Real Abstraction points to exactly the kind of problematic which a methodology like psychoanalysis tries to grapple with and which more positivist streams like modern psychology are incapable of grappling with - not because of moral failings or anything, but because it's beyond the scope of their methodology. This is a domain which can't be abandoned to a sheer liberal nominalism. Thanks for suffering through my rambling.
That's where modern methods come in, we can measure indirectly these abstract concepts if done correctly. (they def dont teach this in undergrad but I was in a psych stats and methods research lab that lowkey taught me stuff much higher than I should have) In my opinion if we want to understand psychoanalytic better we need to not only formulate interactions a-priori (very important!!) but test those concepts with modern stats.
I fear making inferences without bringing it down to something more concrete and disprovable, its hard to sift through what is real and what is crack pot. I dont mean this derogatorily but its very easy to be persuasive and become convinced your theory is right as you keep justifying niche reasons why it acted the way you wanted. This has real consequences when either in practice you are harming/depriving a client of a therapeutic model that could be better (not any particular psychoanalytic necessarily being inferior but the fear is still there) , or that we make assumptions about how the world works due to a wrong theory giving us a less true perspective of the world. I have less of these fears with empirical analysis because I am using the same tools to dissect and compare models of the world between each other concretely. I can show it performs X better or acts in X way definitively, or at least its easier to deconstruct and tear down. (I'm a sucker for popper falsification if you couldn't tell.) I guess its my biggest fear is moving farther and farther away from material reality and truth with it.
For example on how abstract concepts can be measured maybe this will help:
Structural equation modeling and other latent variable analysis allows us to measure abstract concepts. They do this for many constructs and see how one abstract concept correlates, is co dependent with, or even soft causality. Think of it like a web diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_equation_modeling#/media/File:Example_Structural_equation_model.svg here is a link to the wikipedia diagram (sorry for my laziness!) basically the squares in this diagram are concrete measured "observed" values. This can be a scale which we can establish to be reputable, it can be number of times done X etc. you feed multiple things that make up this abstract idea into it to sort of create a gestalt summation of it (thats my way of describing it but its not exactly theoretically accurate ofc). This is the circle the "latent variable" or abstract or immeasurable and we can make an approximation of it to be used to show what relationship it should have in theory. and we can use what we learn from it to inform future theoretical models and adjusting it.
boring stats jargon aside, think of modern stats methods as putting a blanket over a bastketball. you can see the shape and you can touch the outside of it and poke it and gain lots of info about it. just because I cant directly observe it in its entirety I can still gain insight indirectly. Thats basically what this does.
Sorry to rant on this but "its abstract and immeasurable" is becoming less and less of an excuse for psychology with the power of modern methods and stats. This is empowering to me because we can tread previously taboo waters. So yes I dismiss alot of claims of psychoanalysis sometimes in an academic sense if it was used to inform a study I can actually find a way to disprove that sounds awesome to me!
The shift in focus to teach undergrads to understand the importance of empiricism imo is probably because previously untouchable concepts are becoming measurable. and in turn people needing to use these very sensitive stats and methods carefully. tbh most psychologists have very poor stats and methods undertanding and it shows in the replication crisis. They need to make a theory and set what tests they will do before hand and just show the results, but there is alot of fuckery that happens in between adjusting models until its nice and tidy. I hate this so much. Give me your messy study because thats reality not your skewed narrative! you know? thats why transparency and incentive structues and hammering in the importance of doing your methods correctly!!!
I have a very wide interest pool. I have a psychology bachelors but I want to get my PHD eventually. I didn't get into a program 2 years ago, it hit me kind of hard and I got discouraged, and got lowkey in a slump and smoked weed daily for 2 years lmao. I am planning on getting out of my rut this year though and trying to get back into academia. i appreciate this conversation its very stimulating for me as I have been out of practice haha.
I guess I want to measure models of mental health applications but I want it extremely grounded to reality and I would like to operationalize abstract concepts for use in in therapy or other treatment. I would also like to understand the mechanisms better but again I want to be sure its REAL not just fitting a narrative someone theorized. People spend their lives working on their theories leaving them to often nudge the results in their direction. I want to make sure the work I do is academically honest and is actually useful practically. I just love learning and want to know truth with a capital T as much as I can. I dont have a particular field or sub group,
I have worked with data from middle school substance use surveys to project individual variations and their trajectories (mixed effects modeling) so basically I wanna know if you started at "high use" in middle school do you stay or increase and when do these patterns stabilize. It was my first study i was able to investigate so its not theoretically rich necessarily because it was more a sort of playground for me to learn how to format, use, and apply these techniques. My professor was NB and so our lab also had a secondary focus of gender identity research, so while I did not work on those projects those issues and finding ways to operationalize non binary identities are close to my heart (lots of information is lost with a binary while continuous scale variables are much more fruitful!!!).
Yeah that was just an example of theory not reigned in and applied despite not being "real". Thats my fear is harm will come to people or incorrect assumptions will be gained from a lack of grounding it to observations.
I will admit my theory is really weak, I love to learn about it but I treat it more as hobby. I think if those who are great at theory linked up with devoted methods people alot of great work could be done.
anyway now you get my anxieties with alot of psychoanalytics , and I defintely came in very hot at first haha.
As for the chomsky stuff I find it fascinating I learned about the LAD and how he destroyed skinner, but it was very skimmed/surface level. Honestly psych undergrad is day care sometimes. It doesn't scratch the surface of alot of these theories.
I just want to say that you are extremely incredibly well read and I respect the effort you put in, I will defintely be referencing this post when I need a theory fix and want to look into psychoanalytics more.
Thanks for your time, if you want to link up in discord or something DM me!
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I respectfully disagree that it is "epistemologically impossible to not be full of shit"
somebody, somewhere always ends up doing real work.
Yes, but I assure you that that work involves a suprising amount of incompetent flailing about by said skilled people.
that's inevitable when you're trying to do/make/say something new. very different from "bullshitting"
Yes, the bullshitting comes when you realise upper management must never, ever know about said flailing.
being knowledgeable and well practiced at a certain task or on a certain subject doesn't mean you're knowledgeable about other things, and I think its fair to assume that most people discuss things they have less than perfect knowledge of. I mean, were on a shitposting communism site, how much of Capital have you read? How organized is your local militia?
I agree that "most people discuss things they have less than perfect knowledge of" but what you originally threw out was "everyone is just bullshitting." sometimes people aren't bullshitting and they are actually competent and well-intentioned.
amazing I know
Well I meant just in general and I did say I was especially talking about online personalities. But now that you mention it even the most skilled and well intentioned engineer would in fact be bullshitting if they claimed to have a priori knowledge of a sewer before it is built because the creative force put into the sewer contributes to its total being