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Should I read works of Sigmund Freud? My interest in this is not entirely scientific , but rather simply in order to better understand myself and my desires at the level of the animal subconscious.

most of his work is flawed, if not down right wrong. most of the work was pushing the concept of psychology as an actual field of study. just keep that in mind when you read.

No, its nothing but speculation like 99% of psychology.

The only thing Freud is any good for nowadays is to learn the history of psychology and get some ideas for literary themes (think of all the works with an "id/ego/superego" dynamic between three characters). His stuff's been debunked for decades, maybe even a century at this point.

I think it was Harold Bloom that s-worded for reading Freud as literature rather than as science. Might want to look through some of his stuff to get recommendations.

> Should I read works of Sigmund Freud? You should read Jung because he is better.

>>4658 Jordan Peterson has lectures which are a great introduction to Jungian concepts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYYJlNbV1OM&list=PL22J3VaeABQApSdW8X71Ihe34eKN6XhCi Also, here's Jung's complete works >>3984

>>4659 Peterson is a pseudo-intellectual hack. Everything he says is based on pure woo.

>>4660 Sure, buddy.

>>4660 You're on a chan that has content about "traditionalism", "anti-vaxxers", "RF bs", "marxism", and other "woo". Does it really surprise you that these people also worship Peterson?

>>4659 You're much better off just reading Jung and not going through the contortions that Peterson introduces. He (intentionally?) befuddles the issues and concepts to the point of absurdity. Seriously, stick with the source texts, and never rely on some demagogue for answers. >>4662 Most of these threads end up in the can. I don't think everybody here is so necessarily steeped in bullshit that they cannot recognize a charlatan.

>>4663 I think most of the critique I see of Peterson on the internet arises from the distaste people have of his fanbase and the political image that's been built around him. This has led a lot of people to completely dismiss everything he says, even though his psychological/philosophical lectures don't have anything to do with contemporary politics. So I'm curious to see arguments as to why his lectures are as grossly inaccurate as you say. Though this a loaded topic that often devolves into brewing soykaf so I'm fine with skipping it, if it comes to that.

>>4662 I don't worship anyone, I just enjoy the lectures. And I dislike arguments like these which immediately seek to lazily project all sorts of political caricatures and fringe boogeymen for no valid reason. But again, this is unfortunately a very tired topic so it's expected at this point. I hope people can gain something useful from the series, and not merely avoid it because of meme preconceptions and arguments.

>>4660 Yeah, but look on the bright side. At least we can jerk each other off over how intellectually superior we are to him and his fans.

>>4664 I'm an old school break-out-the-guillotines class-warfare leftist (and an atheist to boot) so many of my friends are often quite surprised when I'm the first to defend Peterson's right to freedom of speech. I find the whole cancel-culture thing deeply worrying. Societies are only truly healthy when ideas have free flow.

>>4668 You're literally the reason why the left has a bad name.

>>4669 Not that guy, but put some more effort into whatever you're arguing and why. It's low-effort replies like these which lead to threads 'ending up in the can' as another poster said. This whole tangent is turning to be a mistake, so hopefully the thread returns to the topic of psychology.

>>4664 and like pottery he did not respond, efforts to discredit peterson outside of his admittedly stupid political image are rare and null.

>>4673 Reading the source if you can is still good advice though

>>4652 Hey OP i think those first replies were pretty good.Both Freud and the psychoanalysis movement have received very valid criticism.Someone has posted links in the documentary thread for The Century of the Self.Its a very nice documentary that deals,from a social perspective,with both Freud and the early psychanalytic movement of the 20th century and how it was used and abused.I think if you watch it you will see clearly why you won't find what you are looking there.If you want a treaty on the human condition(it sounds to me thats what you are really asking for) i d suggest reading the odyssey.The work is very complicated and with many layers of metaphors but i can tell you for sure its not a nautical adventure about a bloke fighting sea monsters.If you opt for it id be more than happy to give you a few interpretations that i have found over the years.

>>4677 actually,to expand a little, most classic literature deals with the human condition, the problem is its masked in layers and layers of metaphors and it is not written like a scientific paper which is why you probably thought psychanalysis was your best bet.So as a more general advice you should start reading classic literature.If you have a more urgent issue psychoanalysis can help so dont disregard it completely but if your interest is purely educational/philosophical i dont think i give you any better advice.Once you start treating great literature for what it is-an approach of humanity- most classic works will start making a lot more sense.Its a long way though,so dont expect to read a couple books and become enlightened.

>>4668 unironically an enlightened response. it's heartening to know someone with your political bent wants freedom of speech preserved, and I hope you can win your fellows over on that point. >>4678 this is one point Peterson gets right, he has some (imo) good lectures on how classic literature works and its function (elements pf a story are like abstractions or condensations of many instances of problems humans have faced, and stories attempt to encode the general solutions to the problems in a way primate brains are more apt to remember than just stating facts). as the thread illustrates he's controversial though so watch/read him or don't, up to you OP. In either case I agree with >>4658. Jung is worth reading before Freud or any Jungian thinker, and what I've read of his book Aion has been very good.

>>4682 >unironically an enlightened response. it's heartening to know someone with your political bent wants freedom of speech preserved, and I hope you can win your fellows over on that point. Thanks. Identity politics gets nothing from me but an eye-roll. I don't give a damn about personal-pronoun crap or codes of conduct or any of that bourgeoisie bullshit. I just want ordinary workers to have living wages, health care, affordable educations, civil rights protections, dignified retirements: all classic "leftist" goals. Hell, I'm even a big fan of the American second amendment and wish my own country had something similar. Governments ought to both serve the needs of, and be afraid of, their citizens. Maybe I ought to abandon my own usage of the words "right" and "left" entirely with regards to politics. Neither word does a proper job of describing any sort of unified ideology. It's all a giant distraction from genuine problems. I have as little in common with the SJW deplatforming tone-police as a laid-off family-man factory worker in the rust belt has with actual fascists.

>"I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador--an adventurer, if you want it translated--with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort" Sigmund Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Feb. 1, 1900

>>4666 Good post, there is phenomenal difference between being able to learn from Jordan Peterson in the field of psychology and psycho-analysis, and taking his opinions on women in the workplace or post-modernism as gospel.

>>4658 Freud has already been thoroughly mined of all value, but Jung is still tragically underutilized. Everyone could benefit from reading Jung. I'd burn all of Freud's work to save a scrap of Jung's. >>4659 Peterson once said something in defense of Freud that I strongly agree with. The idea is basically that Freud was so incredibly influential to his field that he is impossible to appreciate through a modern lens. What he did right belongs to everyone now and the only thing uniquely left to Freud at this point are the things nobody agrees with. Because of this, everyone has a very harsh and unfair idea of what Freud these days.

>>4669 Uh... not really. The left has a bad name because of the intersectionalist woke dumbasses on twitter who want to cancel everyone and get them fired HR-style based on their problematic tweets about trans people or whatever the hell. The real old left that focuses on materialism and class (and are often called "class reductionist" by the ѕһіtty new left as if that's a bad thing) simply have a correct analysis. They want to drain the swamp with machine guns and guillotines. How's that for horseshoe theory? Direct action is a good thing. They have a simple, understandable interpretation of what's really wrong with the world. Class is important. Money and production are important. Those are the reasons why your life suсks. Not the fake left's weird, neurotic, inscrutable esoterica about race and sexuality and culture war crap. Class war, not culture war. Anyway, the devolution of this thread was really predictable. I agree with those saying that Freud was prescientific and flawed, but interesting if you interpret his work in the context of his contemporary world. He was an important figure, and is sometimes unfairly demonized or dismissed, but on the other hand his ideas are not as important now as some of his modern supporters say. It was a step on a path. It's worth reading with a grain of salt as long as you continue and don't stop with him and Jung and Lacan or whatever.

>>4884 >The real old left that focuses on materialism and class (and are often called "class reductionist" by the ѕһіtty new left as if that's a bad thing) simply have a correct analysis. They want to drain the swamp with machine guns and guillotines. How's that for horseshoe theory? I don't know you, but I love you. You've got perception and intelligence and a way with words. I would like to offer one slight correction though. Some of us old-school class-warfare leftists are also big fans of dangling fascists from their necks from lamp-posts. And going forward, I'm going to wear the term "class reductionist" with goddamn pride. I think the major reason for the ascendance of this new fake-left intersectionalist bullshit is that the capitalists have recognized that passive-progressives are easily placated with mass media tokens. Sponsor a gay pride float, run the occasional rainbow-colored "inclusivity" flavored ads in June, and write LGBTetc couples into sitcoms, and the twitterati won't even care how much these corporations are fleecing them financially. In my personal life, it's been a pretty wacky ride. After coming to terms with figuring I'm bi, I started hanging around with my city's local LGBT crowd. Why not, right? They're my people - allegedly. But I quickly became persona-non-grata when I was at a bar and some acquaintances were talking about how the local comic-con's inclusivity policy regarding two-spiritedness didn't mentioned the possibility of more-than-two-spiritedness. One semi-drunken loud "Who fuarrrking cares?" later, and I found myself pretty much banished from their company. Goddamn am I tired of this identity soykaf. They'll endlessly debate the minutiae of policy statements but won't lift a finger to hold a sign on a picket line alongside striking teachers.

>>4902 Agreed on all points; I also take honor in being called "class reductionist." In a culture that revolves entirely around money, what's the most important factor? How much money one has! It's so obvious. All the sophistry and obfuscations of the right and especially the bizarre, inverted new left exist to try delude people away from realizing that fact. Of course race is intertwined with class in the US, but class is still the deciding factor; poor people always suffer. Rich black people are just fine. Why did they stomp George Floyd to death? For passing a counterfeit twenty during a massive economic depression in which unemployment is getting up to around 40%. He died because he was incredibly destitute, and the state brutalizes the poor without ever tiring. The new left dumbasses wanna fix it by cancelling the song Africa by Toto. Saw that trending today. Can you imagine a more impotent gesture than cancelling a decades-old song? Yeah I'm sure that'll help people achieve rights and basic dignity. Mission accomplished, you haunted twats. It's idiocy. They're a bunch of vampires. But also they supposedly think they can fix it by increasing representation in culture. Always image and optics, never substance. It's so clearly pulled from a corporate HR playbook that it's maddening. Such as in your example with comic-con. So they'll hire some token black and brown people to write and act on TV. Whatever the hell works. But do you think they're gonna hire some old, toothless creole guy who lives out of an rusted-out van in the swamps in Baton Rouge? Hell no. They're gonna hire a (rare but existent) very wealthy black person from a large coastal city who—it's just the truth—has no significant problems whatsoever. Maybe a microaggression or two. Wealthy people have nearly always been just fine throughout history—regardless of their identity. There were trans royalty in the 1400s and guess what? Nobody persecuted them. Class is the only common factor in all these things. We can throw out the tedious stacks of books on theory and other sophisticate drivel which only exists to keep actual poor people out of the movement which is ostensibly meant to represent their interests. It does not, of course. It was captured sometime in the middle of the previous century, but it had saboteurs inside long before then. I think that when intersectional politics first started, it was probably devised by some academic savant-like spastic who is totally out of touch with the way the world works, was raised very wealthy, and was totally separated from both the real suffering of people and also the effects of their philosophy on the world. They were a patsy, a useful idiot. But once the ruling classes heard about intersectionalism, they probably started drooling. What better way to totally divide and annihilate common people's power? Now not only must their politics be based on a minority group—say, black people—they must be based on a minority within that minority. Say trans black sex workers. So we're talking about like 1% of 4% of 15% of the population. A fraction of a fraction of a fraction. How is such a base ever meant to execute will? It can't. Even if it is just, it is doomed to fail. Even if suburban rich women who take on politics as a hobby rally to their cause for a few weeks, at the end of the day they'll pursue their own best interests and hang the poor out to dry like they always have. All they succeed in doing is parading around and embarrassing this minuscule identity group, probably causing even more people to vaguely resent them. And of course no actual individuals from that tiny tribe is ever involved in the planning. Certainly not poor ones who have difficult lives. How could they be? They have to work three jobs and live in a cardboard box. The lower class, by their inherent nature, always makes up the vast majority of the world. They outnumber the ruling class a thousand to one. The petit bourgeois make up a good chunk, but they are fickle and we know from plenty of historical precedent that they sway to the side of whichever faction seems to be imminently victorious. They are empty and unprincipled, and all they want is to maintain their moderately-comfortable lifestyle. They don't want to conquer the world and suck the blood from the masses like the upper class, nor do they desperately want to escape from the meat grinder like the lower class. But if they're conscripted to make a bunch of emotional propaganda broadcast through the most insanely effective communication medium ever built and trick the lower class into not only dividing itself on race, but on race and sex and sexuality and all other identity factors (which continually multiply; every year will see more of them made "valid," yet that validity will never help a single soul) then you can make the all-powerful people powerless. You can turn the masses into atoms and bulldoze them over with zero resistance. I'm glad you shouted out "who cares" in that bar. They need to at least be aware that not all of them fall in line with this misguided and doomed ѕһіthouse of a philosophy. From my experience, many people nervously harbor those thoughts and need the support of others in order to own them and pursue them outside themselves. So maybe you helped some people that day. I also have a lot of bi friends who the gay community treats like ѕһіt, lol. Not like they're "oppressing" them or anything, but they do have a cliquishness that seems to reject bi people. You'd think they would know better. It's kind of a bummer, my sympathies. In my mind, the internet is the greatest counter-revolutionary tool ever built. I honestly don't believe we'll ever be able to achieve anything other than accelerating decay and schizophrenic frustration until we annihilate twitter at the very least. Hence the picture. Might be a good step, and it would be pretty easy...

>>4884 It's weird to suggest these demented lefties aren't the cause of your problems and describe at the same time as the reason solutions cannot be advanced. >>4902 You cannot defeat ideology with petty protesting.

>>4904 At what point did I say they weren't the cause of our problems? They definitely are. And protest? No. Direct action, yes. The deed is most important.

>>4905 >At what point did I say they weren't the cause of our problems? Here >Those are the reasons why your life suсks. Not the fake left's weird, neurotic, inscrutable esoterica about race and sexuality and culture war crap. Class war, not culture war.

Please find another thread to discuss lefties/righties, thanks.

>>4906 By that I mean real, eternal problems in people's lives, like being desperately poor. Not the exogenous problems created by spectacle politics. The cause of our current political impasse is a different thing. In other words, they are the primary obstacle towards finding solutions for those preexisting problems at this moment. The right isn't trying to solve them at all, but the left is acting as a disingenuous shield to prevent true reform at all costs. It's an iron fist/velvet glove type situation. >>4907 That's fair. I mean it's a natural subject that flows from Freud's work, since a lot of that initial schism was founded on twentieth-century ideas about psychology. But it's probably a good time to steer back. Thanks for the reminder.

>>4660 >Peterson is a pseudo-intellectual hack. Everything he says is based on pure woo. You're saying this in a thread about psychology. Particularly in a reply chain about Jungian archetypes. The fact you lack the self awareness to realize just how monstrously stupid your statement is here says everything one needs to know about the value of your contribution. Even if it weren't clear that you're ideologically driven to slander Peterson like so many are, although it is, the aforementioned alone vindicates him against your so called accusations. That being said, Peterson is an idiot in the realm of politics, and has even devolved into something of a con-man in his last years. But his early videos on psychology are perfectly good and solid, he was plenty respected in his field, and the foundation of said videos still exists. If nothing else he always offers sources and statistics one can easily corroborate for his talks on psychology, I think he makes good arguments for Jung in his biblical and evolutionary analysis.

Everything you need to know and will ever know about psychology is compiled in part II, III, IV of spinoza's ethics, even though psychology is not mentioned. A more comtemporal but less denser is found in Bourdieu's work, every page from this man will rewire your brain with such force you'll feel like you've getting reborn. >>4903 I like you, I know people who would love to hang out with you, are you interested?

>>4910 Uh... Hello agent

>>4912 im very lazy about wording

I think that a big part of his work was based on projection lol.

>>4884 Not the poster you were responding to. Even though he didn't actually flesh out what his argument was, I think I know what he was getting at. Throughout this entire post, you talk about how class matters, but don't you see how similar that is to the identity politics of today's left? You're simply grouping people, simplifying them, into neat little groups, just using different traits. Whereas the new left uses race and sexuality, you use finances. It's the exact same thing from an outside perspective; all they're doing is adding the additional observation that race is sometimes correlated with class (I'm not, by the way, asserting that they *should*). I understand that your point of view is the older of the two: that's why the new one is simply an extension of yours. It would not be possible without yours having existed with prevalence. They've just taken it a bit further. You can't spend your entire political life arguing that everybody fits into your neat, idealistic boxes of class; and then complain when someone comes along and argues that everybody fits into their neat, idealistic boxes of race, or sexuality, or whatever. It's collectivism all the way down; grouping people into X, Y, and Z, and pitting them against one another based solely on that fact. That's what upsets people about the new left, that's why they've gone so wrong. Their foundation, the nature of which I've already described, and which you know well, is rotten.

>>4917 It's not random twitter users who group people by class, it's how society is structured. Are you saying class doesn't have a real life influence?

>>4918 Nowhere in my post did I say that class didn't matter. Obviously class exists, matters, and can, to a small extent, explain some societal issues. What I *did* say, however, was that the previous poster's viewpoint is very similar to the "new left" of today: the very group of people that he was criticizing. That was the purpose of my post; if you were to actually read it, the entire post is structured as a comparison between the previous poster's worldview and the worldview that he criticizes. The last couple of sentences talk about my opinion of the previous poster's worldview in general, which I equate to the worldview that he criticizes himself. My criticism of his worldview is *not* that class doesn't matter or doesn't exist, it's that it's a very simplistic way of looking at a much more complicated problem, and misuses the concept of class to paint an entire society with broad strokes, so to speak.

>>4652 Whether his ideas are true or not is debateable but his nephew, Edward Bernays, is referred to as "The Father of Public Relations". He's the reason why consumerism exists and he used the works of his uncle amongst others. The documentary The Century of Self (https://invidio.us/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04) explains it beautifully.

Freudian 'psychoanalysis' (not to be confused with the generic term 'psychotherapy') is better classified as religion or philosophy than as science. Jung is no better. (Imo).

I'd recommend you read Adler, he's one of the OGs with Jung and Freud but he's generally overlooked. Not as narrowly intellectual as Freud is, with all his weird theories. He states that the greatest and hardest goal for humans is to truly understand and know themselves... Try "Understanding Human Nature"

>>4883 And if you're interested in Jung, don't jump in to Aion or the Red Book or whatever because you will have no idea what's going on, start with Man and His Symbols or an Essential Jung collection. And for >>4652 because your interest is mostly in yourself and your own subconscious (rather than the "ideas" involved) you may realize that if you already have (or have ready access to) an existing spiritual practice you will have an easier time engaging with it instead of continuing to read Jung. Indeed he repeatedly recommended as such.

>>4956 This documentary depresses me severely. For a brief moment we could have had the promised liberation from drudgery and labor for income when we gained the ability to produce a surplus over what people wanted, but Bernays and his ilk taught advertisers to brainwash the masses into wanting more and more useless garbage, thus the soykafshow we have now.

>>4985 I'm in middle of embracing Stoic philosophy and am bettering myself by getting a job while studying on the side, serfs never wanted to think for themselves and they'll always go back to it despite having liberated from it.

>>4652 >Should I read works of Sigmund Freud? If you enjoy fiction.

>>4652 Yes but only so you understand Lacan a bit better