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We all have that one friend, you know
the one who's a bit more organized and stubborn and who sometimes gets upset if they or
You screw up. You might have even heard someone insult them by calling them anal. But wait, that doesn't make any sense
Why does being rigid and organized have anything to do with butts?
Well, if you were to ask Sigmund Freud quite a bit
But also he'd be wrong that insult of calling someone anal though does come right out of Freud's work
It's related to anal retentive fixation, which is supposedly the result of unresolved conflicts between you and your caregivers during potty training
But like so many things Freud thought it's kind of bogus
So, why do we still spend so much time talking about the student psychology classes?
The short answer is that there were a few things Freud got right that were really important
but also
Psychologists now want to take the lead on debunking some of the nonsense he started in their field if you haven't heard of the guy
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who popularized loads of ideas about psychology across the United States and Europe
Some of his ideas were pretty reasonable and are still supported today
for example Freud believed that the experiences you had growing up can influence how you behave now, but even more of his ideas were
Kind of out there like Freud also thought that while growing up your unconscious mind spent time focused on each erogenous zone like the mouths
anus and genitals
He also suggested that children work through sexual frustrations with their opposite sex parent and that women suffer from penis envy
Really so it can seem really weird or even harmful that psych classes devote time to his work
But there are reasons for it
One reason is historical Freud did get some things right and that became the foundation of future more trustworthy research. For example
Freud popularized the idea that people are influenced by an
Unconscious mind meaning that your thoughts and behaviors might not all be under your conscious control
He wasn't the first to introduce the idea
But he was among the first to talk about it without mentioning like ghosts or demons instead
He thought your unconscious mind grew from your experiences and modern attachment theory grew directly from those ideas in other words
Psychologists now think that the experiences in your relationship with your caregiver can influence how you develop relationships later in life
Although no one today could legitimately
Argue that it has to do with your erogenous zones
It's still based on the insight that unremembered experiences as a child can influence you as an adult
which was a fairly new idea at the time another reason that Freud is still taught today is because
Sometimes Freudian therapy can still kind of work
Most of Freud's theoretical ideas about how the mind operator were based on his clinical work with patients
that kind of therapy is called psychoanalysis or
psychodynamic therapy
It involves a lot of talking and sorting through
Supposedly unconscious processes and although Freudian theory is now mostly abandoned some meta analyses have shown that
Psychodynamic therapy can be effective at least depending on what you compare it to for example
a 2012 meta-analysis of 11 studies found that
Psychoanalytic therapy was somewhat effective for a variety of disorders if you compared it to treatments that didn't involve talk therapy
But it didn't seem that useful if you compared it to anything else another
Meta-analysis in 2008 looked at more than 23 studies that compared long-term psychodynamic therapy to shorter therapies
And it found that spending more time in psychodynamic treatment was generally better for personality functioning and reducing symptoms
There are plenty of caveats to this though for one
Even if the overall results were promising the studies in the meta analyses did seem to vary a lot
Some found that Freudian therapy worked really well and others not so much that suggests there could be other variables at work
Also, most of these studies compared Freudian methods to shorter treatments or to no treatments at all. Ultimately the takeaway here
Is that if you're looking for a therapist?
You might find that someone practicing a more Freudian style actually works well for you or you might find better results elsewhere regardless
because these types of therapies do still exist the idea is they're based on are important to know about
Finally one last reason you still hear about Freud in class. Is that psychologists are trying to take
responsibility for the mess their field made and are trying to clean things up a bit in the past century Freud and his ideas got
really popular
So students come into psychology courses with all kinds of ideas about the guy and your professors need to point out which ones are flat-out
Wrong Plus Freud isn't just in psychology class anymore
2008 study of course descriptions at 150 colleges and universities found that 86% of courses referencing psychoanalysis
Were taught outside psych departments. The researchers found that Freud's work is brought up across the humanities including in English departments
So the hope is that if you learn about him in psych class
You should be able to sort out fact from fiction if you run into him in another course if you're suffering through the boring parts
Of intro psych wondering why you're spending so much time talking about this old dead bearded wrong, dude. Don't worry too much
your professor is just trying to give you some historical context about how psychology has grown and
clean up some of the messes the field is made if you've watched a few episodes of scishow psych you've probably picked up on the
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