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Freud's greatness lies not in developing a natural science of the mind, but in creating a hermeneutic system that interprets previously meaningless human behaviors (dreams, slips, symptoms) as symbolic expressions of unconscious desires, bridging the gap between positivistic materialism and subjective experience.
- Freud successfully reconciles scientific positivism with the irreducible subjectivity of mental life by treating the psyche as a coded language rather than a mechanistic object
- His key achievement is showing that diverse phenomena—hysteria, dreams, parapraxis—all follow law-like patterns of unconscious symbolization, making them interpretable rather than arbitrary
- Freud's work is fundamentally hermeneutic (multi-vocal, requiring judgment) rather than scientific (univocal, testable), and this is its strength, not weakness
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Freud's fundamental importance lies in synthesizing two antagonistic strains of late 19th-century German thought: positivistic scientific materialism (exemplified by Mach and Avenarius) and speculative German idealism focused on internal mental events (developed by Brentano), thereby legitimizing psychological discourse about subjective experience within a scientific framework
“the fundamental importance of freud is that it brings together two incompatible or perhaps antagonistic trains of german late 19th century early 20th century thought and the two strains that it brings together are positivism the kind of rigid scientific materialism characteristic of late 19th century german science which was championed by people like mach and avenarius and also the other theme or trend which it brings together is the trend of german speculation”
Descartes held that introspection is privileged and transparent—that we have certain knowledge of our own minds—but Freud systematically challenges this by proposing that introspection yields systematically unreliable data distorted by unconscious forces, thereby splitting the unified Cartesian subject into conscious and unconscious components
“for descartes who is the philosopher systematic skepticism the one thing that he couldn't be doubtful of the one thing that he couldn't call into question was his own existence introspection for descartes looking into the contents of your own mind of your own experience was privileged and transparent in other words from descartes view if you don't know what's going on inside your head who does”
Freud's key innovation is constructing a translation scheme between manifest content (surface structure of conscious experience) and latent content (deep unconscious structure), allowing him to read previously meaningless behaviors—like compulsive hand-washing—as symbolic communications of unconscious desires
“what freud wants to do is construct a scheme of translation between what the manifest content of your experiences are and the latent content in other words between the surface structure and the deep structure if you have a dream about uh fighting mike tyson well that's the surface structure but the latent structure of that may be that you're dreaming you're displacing your feelings about your boss or about politics or about some other authority structure”
Freud initially theorized that hysteria was caused by repressed childhood sexual trauma (seduction theory), but then shifted to viewing hysteria as resulting from repressed unconscious sexual fantasies when he realized many patients' claims of abuse were likely fantasies rather than actual events
“he published in 1895 the studies in hysteria on anna oh he studied publishes that with breuer and then the same year a little bit thereafter he works at his seduction theory of hysteria right the idea is that these hysterical women are hysterical because earlier in their life they had been somehow sexually traumatized by some figure in their family and that they had repressed these memories”
The German word Wissenschaft means 'organized body of knowledge' and includes physics, chemistry, but also literary criticism and theology, whereas English 'science' typically denotes natural science; Freud's work is Wissenschaft (organized interpretive system) but not science in the modern English sense
“the problem comes from the german word science too i guess i should note this and those you have the german the word for science is viscenshaft and in english we call science science now when we talk about science nowadays just in common ordinary language english where we use it we mean things like physics and chemistry maybe biology and astronomy and things like that we don't mean things like literary criticism usually we wouldn't call that a science and most people wouldn't call theology of science right whatever you want to call it well in german it doesn't work that way they don't parse knowledge like that the german word visenshaft means an organized body of knowledge that includes things like physics and chemistry and astronomy but for the germans there's also things like literature vision shaft which is literary criticism in our language there is also theology visenshaft theological science in that sense of the word science yes psychoanalysis and whole freud's whole project is scientific it's an organized body of knowledge in the sense that literary criticism is an organized body of knowledge”
The unconscious is what bridges the gap between the child and the adult, which is why it can be very fruitful for generating a theory of neurosis—the child's forgotten trauma is preserved in unconscious form and emerges as adult symptoms.
“now look here at the idea of the unconscious the unconscious is what bridges the gap between the child and the adult that's why it can be very fruitful for generating a theory of neurosis”
Psychic energy in Freud's theory is metaphorical rather than literal—not energy in the physical sense (like electricity or light) but a mental/psychological metaphor; literalizing these hydraulic metaphors generates mistaken biological readings of Freud
“he makes use of many hydraulic metaphors i would emphasize that these are metaphors in other words psychic energy right is not energy in the sense that light is energy or electricity is energy right it's a metaphorical sort of an energy it's a mental energy so be careful when we being metaphorical about this do not literalize the metaphors many of the mistaken biological readings of freud come from literalizing these metaphors”
Human beings are innately driven by the pleasure principle—infants are little monsters of desire wanting bottle, warmth, care constantly—and are civilized only when they encounter the reality principle through socialization, not corrupted by society but tamed by it
“freud believes i mean since he gives up on this rusowy an optimistic view of human nature that human beings are little monsters of desire and they want they want they want they want they want a bottle they want to be changed they want to be warm they want to be held they want to be taken care of they want to go to sleep they want to wake up they want they want they want they want they want and they are not corrupted by society rather society civilizes them and tames them and turns them into social animals”
We will never discover guilt, love, hate, and lust through physics; understanding these quintessentially human phenomena requires poetic/literary methods, not scientific ones; physics cannot reduce psychological truth to biochemistry in any practically useful sense
“what's a good scientific account of guilt or lust i mean i think it's a regulative rule a thousand centuries from now we may find out that it's a chemical but between now and then what are we supposed to do very sensible observation so what freud is trying to do is offer us a vision shaft of the mind an organized body of knowledge which interprets things that have previously not been interpreted”
Civilization necessarily frustrates human sexual and aggressive desires to exist at all; since people desire incest everywhere (evidenced by universal incest taboos), taboos against incest reflect real human nature, not arbitrary cultural invention; therefore humans cannot be happy outside civilization but also cannot find happiness within it—a fundamental double bind
“civilization's going to tell you stuff like you can't have sex with your parents you can't have sex with your siblings you can't have sex with your children that's called incest and we don't allow that and what freud says is the problem is that people are constructed so that they want this and he says look if people were not constructed so they desired it we wouldn't have a universal taboo against it note that when we look at anthropologically through all cultures we don't find a taboo against sprouting wigs and flying and the reason we don't have a taboo against that because nobody ever does it we have a taboo against incest everywhere because people always have a desire to do that elsewhere would be superfluous”
Sexuality in Freud's theory means pleasure broadly understood, not merely adult genital activity; infants experience sexuality as oral pleasure (breast, bottle) and anal pleasure; humans move developmentally through oral, anal, and genital phases, with the genital phase as the final healthy form
“freud plays kind of flashed and loose with the idea here of sexuality for for most of us sexuality is um something is an adult activity right i mean almost by definition you have to go through puberty to have what we call as usual technical specific uh sexual activity freud says no he means sexuality in the large extended sense of pleasure all right”
The question of whether patients' reports of childhood sexual abuse were real or fantasized is epistemically undecidable based on available evidence; the historical evidence admits both interpretations, making definitive judgment impossible
“there's been recently quite a bit of controversy about this and i won't enter into this controversy because of the fact that i don't think it's a noble proposition these women that freud talked to were they or were they not really sexually abused frankly i don't know the evidence we have is just inconclusive it is possible to read it either way or more likely some of them probably were telling the truth some of them probably weren't and we don't have one logical decision procedure which allows us to find out who's who”
Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious because they project otherwise repressed feelings; in children, dreams straightforwardly express wishes (wish fulfillment), but in adults the superego censors unacceptable wishes, causing them to be displaced, condensed, and symbolically reformulated before appearing in dreams
“he says the dreams are the royal road to the unconscious it is in dreams where we project our otherwise censored feelings so dreams are a way of expressing our unconscious wishes and these wishes are almost always sexual in nature right so it's wish fulfillment now in children dreams are real straightforward they dream about a mountain of candy why because they would like a mountain of candy it's real easy to figure out how children children's dreams work wish fulfillment with adults when the superego gets added to your psyche so that you begin to feel ashamed or uncomfortable or guilty about your sexual longings these things are transposed or displaced or symbolically reformulated”
Freud's work on hysteria revealed that psychosomatic symptoms (paralysis, hysterical laughter, obscure illnesses with no organic basis) disappeared when patients were hypnotized and made to talk about their experiences, suggesting that non-physical intervention (talk/hypnosis) could produce physical results, implying a mental rather than purely organic origin of the disease
“women particularly upper middle class women in vienna and the more affluent parts of europe seem to be coming down with a kind of disease that didn't seem to have any organic source these women were having psychosomatic paralysis of parts of the body they would break into hysterical laughter they would take to bed with obscure illnesses that no one could find an organic foundation for”
Brentano, though now read as a secondary figure, was extremely important as Husserl's teacher and as teacher to numerous influential German intellectuals at the end of the 19th century; he introduced the concept of intentionality as a defining feature of consciousness
“he's not uh usually read anymore he's kind of a secondary figure in the history of philosophy but why he's important as a teacher he was freud's teacher he was also edmund husserl's teacher and he was the teacher of a number of influential german intellectuals at the end of the 19th century and what brentano added to freud's positivistic hard shell um materialism is a certain fact or a certain set of assertions about the mind brentano said this he said look i like science as much as the next man but the problem is is that the intentional qualities of the psyche can't be eliminated in other words they're here to stay guilt and anger and fear and love and lust”
Parapraxis (slips of the tongue, forgetting names, making mistakes) are not accidents but meaningful activities expressing unconscious desires; forgetting someone's name is not arbitrary memory failure but a symbolic representation of dislike for that person
“parapraxis power practice is the complicated name for mistakes right people make mistakes all the time freud develops in 1905 or actually in the early parts of that decade in 1901 he publishes jokes in their relation to the unconscious 1905 he publishes the psychopathology of everyday life and what he says here is this the mistakes that you make are another symbolic representation of your unconscious desires so when you forget someone's name it's not that that's an accident on your part it's not your memory just failing arbitrarily that is a meaningful activity and he reads that as being your dislike of the person who's named you have forgotten”
There is an economy of the psyche that tries to maintain dynamic equilibrium between waking life (where the superego directs activities) and sleeping life (where the id's desires express themselves as the 'bacchanalia' of desire).
“in other words there's a sort of economy of the psyche right and it tries to maintain a sort of dynamic equilibrium between your waking life in which the superego directs you to various kinds of activities and you integrate all your desires using the ego and your sleeping life in which case we have the sort of bacchanalia of the id all your aggressiveness and sexual desires come out”
Freud's 'Totem and Taboo' (1914) proposes that the incest taboo originated when the primal horde killed the primal father and then felt guilty, establishing the taboo as a reaction to this primal murder; this has no empirical reality and is as implausible as Santa Claus, making it the most poetic and least scientific part of Freud's work
“he tries to account for that in a thing called totem and taboos 1914 he says what happened is this there was the primal family the primal horde and they killed the primal dad and had sex with the primal mom and gang raped the primal mom actually and out of their primal guilt they constructed the primal incest taboo now i know that sounds stupid but it is stupid and that's actually what he says if you go back and look at totem and taboo this has as much empirical reality as santa claus there's no such thing as the primal horde there's this thing is as the primal family this is this thing is the primal incest taboo none of these things happened it may be a kind of metaphorical way of accounting for this but it's very implausible”
Overdetermination in dreams means that dream elements have multiple causes: a dream about a tiger may simultaneously represent intellectual problems, one's wife, boss, and children—not sequentially but as a single condensed symbol, making dream interpretation necessarily ambiguous
“called condensation and it's connected with the idea of over determination all right yeah your dreams are over determined they have more than one cause it's a plurality of causes here”
Monotheistic religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is fundamentally an infantile neurosis—a projection of unconscious longing for a permanent universal father figure (god) who is omnipotent and omniscient, similar to how infants view their actual fathers before maturation
“the argument that freud makes is that the monotheism of judaism and christianity in islam is in fact a really an infantile neurosis it's an inflated desire for a permanent universal daddy god is the big sky daddy that supervises everything and runs everything he's omnipotent and omniscient he's just a wonderful guy just the way you thought your daddy was when you were one”
If we cannot know ourselves with certainty (contra Descartes), then self-knowledge becomes radically ambiguous, and we face a fundamental interpretive problem: we have senses, fears, loves, hates, lusts, and emotions, but if we don't know them in any certain way and they're distorted, how do we interpret that raw data and find our way out of that labyrinth?
“suppose you don't know yourself where does that leave us that makes are the active introspection radically ambiguous what shall we do now how are we going to interpret that raw data because we definitely have senses we have fears and loves and hates and lusts and all kinds of emotions how are we supposed to interpret that if we don't know it in any kind of certain way if it's distorted how are we going to find our way out of that labyrinth”
The ego develops defense mechanisms when confronting the reality principle: because unlimited pleasure-seeking is impossible (cannot have all food, sex, drink desired), desires are frustrated, and the ego distorts consciousness through defense mechanisms to manage this conflict between desire and reality
“when the ego confronts the world it wants to operate on the pleasure principle it wants to gratify its intrinsic natural desires but it keeps on running up into barriers and impediments to that you cannot have sex with everybody you want i mean just do the math it's just not going to work you can't have all the food in the world you cannot have all the drink in the world even though you might want an infinite amount of pleasure it's not possible when we encounter the reality principle and our desires are frustrated we generate defense mechanisms”
Freud's pessimism is fundamentally anti-Rousseauian: Rousseau claims we are corrupted by evil society and wants to change civilization; Freud claims humans are evil by nature and civilization, despite its constraints, actually makes us better than we would be without it—yet 'not very good'
“this leftover residue of unsatisfied longings which are not only unsatisfied but unsatisfiable that's the human condition and there is a sort of grim anti-russoin implication there rousseau wants to fundamentally change society why because we're all corrupted by an evil world first says look you were evil to begin with the world did with you what it could and it made you better than you would be and even that's not very good right so there's a real negative kind of an emphasis here”
Freud began his self-analysis after his father's death in 1896, treating his own introspection as the foundation for understanding all psychology, though this raises epistemological difficulties about how one achieves transparent self-knowledge of the unconscious
“from his work on hysteria and his work on the talking cure he starts another big phase in his life when his father dies in 96. freud then begins his own what he's called self analysis which is a very important thing because introspection is ultimately going to be the foundation of every psychology even though many psychologists would like not to say so they are all ultimately founded on their experiences themselves”
Freud's claim that dreams with unknown strangers always represent the father is unfalsifiable because there is no possible test to determine whether this interpretation is correct
“if you would ask professor freud how do you know that in all dreams when you have a dream about an unknown stranger how do you know it's always your father well you can't go to the lab and find that out there's no test you could possibly do so the scientific critics will say well look if you can't test it then it has the same status as say religion”
Scientific people like Freud tend to think the world is homogeneous and in theory psychic life ought to be reducible to biochemical events, which is 'sensible enough' (most of us believe it), but this idea is 'a bluff'—we do not yet know how to describe guilt, lust, or rage in biochemical terms.
“well scientific people like freud tend to think that no the world is all one homogenous thing in theory and in theory our psychic life ought to be reducible to biochemical events sensible enough most of us believe that now but in some respects this idea is a bluff and this is why brentano is a very important influence on freud and other thinkers he says look maybe a thousand centuries from now our science will be advanced enough so that we can actually describe guilt or lust or rage in terms of biochemical events and synaptic firings but for now it's a bluff we don't know how to do that”
All biological, positivistic, scientistic readings of Freud are wrong; the attempt to make Freud a scientist is completely impossible and a big misreading; once we get beyond this misreading, we can really begin to appreciate him.
“now before i leave you i think i want to talk about some of the difficulties here and there are many of them and i tried to give a kind of an appreciation not just a criticism of freud because there's a lot here that is worthwhile but i think first off that there that all the biological positivistic scientistic readings of freud are all wrong so everybody who wants freud to be a scientist i just think that's completely impossible i think it's a i mean it's a big misreading and i think once we get beyond that misreading we can really begin to appreciate him”
Physics can test claims like 'water boils at 100 degrees Celsius' by going to the lab with equipment; if you have doubt, physics speaks with one voice and you know how to get answers by testing; but you cannot test Freud's claim that 'an unknown stranger in your dream is always your father' in any lab.
“for example do you really analyze dreams in the way you analyze blood i think it's a metaphorical sort of analysis i know what you're doing in analyzed blood you break it into its component chemical parts it's not what you do when you analyze a dream you don't put it into a centrifuge and whirl it around what you do when you analyze a dream is that you if professor freud or dr freud asks you to free associate and he uses free association as a way of kind of fishing for the the translation scheme for your dream”
Most people cannot sublimate unconscious sexual and aggressive desires into creative art, philosophy, or culture; sublimation is available only to the small gifted percentage whose psychic injuries drive artistic creation; therefore most people experience civilization as mere frustration without creative outlet
“sublimation some small percentage of society is so gifted that they are able to take their unconscious sexual and aggressive desires and sublimate them transform them into something creative and beautiful and socially desirable this would be called things like art religion and philosophy in other words he's going to say that all the great artists are wounded distorted psyches that are compensating for various kinds of psychic defects by projecting this beautiful stuff onto the sistine chapel there is an argument to be made for that although perhaps it is a little bit reductive it is not at all clear that that's what all art is sublimation of sexual desires but even to bracket that problem most people don't have that kind of talent most people simply don't have the possibility of sublimating their sexual desires in art or philosophy”
Mass sublimation can occur through socially approved outlets like watching football: aggressive impulses aroused during the week are discharged safely through watching violent sports, preventing workplace violence and maintaining social order
“maybe you can get them to subliminate in things like football on sunday afternoons a bunch of men feel aggressive and they don't want to go back to work feeling that way so they all watch real big guys beat up each other get a catharsis for their aggressive feelings and then they don't that way they don't punch out the boss monday morning right so that kind of sublimation you can see how that might be a kind of way of channeling aggression in socially useful ways”
All unconscious activities follow isomorphic patterns: my dreams are different from yours, but both refer back isomorphically to each individual's specific unconscious desires, suggesting the unconscious operates by universal rules while expressing individual content
“all of our unconscious activities the unconscious element of our mind have a common structure which can be discerned that's why all of our mistakes refer back to our specific unconscious activities our dreams even though your dreams are different from mine refer back isomorphically to your unconscious so the unconscious works by certain definable laws that's what freud's great achievement is”
Freud developed a three-part model of the mind (id, ego, superego) that is isomorphic with earlier symbolic representations like Plato's division of the soul into gold/silver/bronze and Christian divisions of god/man/devil, with each representing different psychic drives (social/moral drives vs. sexual/aggressive drives)
“what they are is symbolic ways of representing different psychic attitudes right one is the or the first two are the product of pre-scientific societies freud is the prime product of 19th and early 20th century germany but what it really is is a reformulation of the same basic ideas we have drives towards sociality and towards what we might call moral behavior which is the super ego or god or the gold in plato and we have drives towards sex and death which is the id in freud but it's also the devil in christianity and it's also the bronze and platonism all amount to the same thing all the structures of the soul”
Internal subjective experiences (guilt, love, hate, desire) are inherently difficult to express in language because language evolved for external public phenomena; this intrinsic ambiguity in expressing private internal states generates an irreducible categorical difficulty in psychoanalysis that cannot be overcome by better methodology
“when i start to talk about my fears my loves my hates my dreams my lusts all that kind of stuff i'm taking something that's private and internal and trying and making it external and the problem is that language has a very hard time making the jump from what's inside me to what's outside here all right this intrinsically and always generates a certain degree of ambiguity and it also generates a certain category of entities for which our speaker is going to have a hard time giving a satisfactory scientific account”
Freud's fundamental philosophical concern is the Delphic oracle's command 'know thyself'—he wants us to stop being enslaved by the pleasure principle and encounter the reality principle by achieving self-knowledge; resistance to psychoanalytic interpretation signals unconscious content, functioning as a 'bird dog' pointing to repressed wishes
“freud is primarily concerned with the delphic oracle and its utterance that we ought to know ourselves what freud wants us to do is say stop being enslaved by the pressure by the pleasure principle let me bring you to the reality principle let me tell you what you really are i know you don't want to believe this and i actually have a name for the fact that you don't want to believe this called resistance but the fact that i see resistance this is a sort of bird dog you know when someone goes hunting and you get a dog to find a bird that you can't see well dr freud talks to you until he finds resistance and as soon as he finds resistance that's the bird dog that points to your unconscious longings”
Aristotle's concept of phronesis (judgment) applies to psychoanalysis: moral judgment involves discernment that resists formulaic rules; similarly, psychoanalytic interpretation requires judgment that cannot be eliminated—good analysts can disagree on interpretations while both exercising sound judgment
“aristotle's idea of phrenesis aristotle great philosopher thought that all moral judgment involves something called phrenesis which is translated into english as judgment you know you have to have a certain amount of judgment there's no one formula for right and wrong i mean we can get certain parameters to it but the nitty gritty of it resists formulaic treatment well may i suggest that psychoanalysis is the same kind of thing it involves a certain kind of judgment and i wouldn't want anybody to become a psychoanalyst it didn't have what i would describe as good judgment but the difficulty is that i can imagine people having good judgment but not completely agreeing about everything all right”
Dream analysis differs fundamentally from blood analysis: blood analysis breaks material into chemical components, but dream analysis involves free association to fish for the translation scheme between manifest and latent content—the methods are not analogous despite using the same word 'analysis'
“do you really analyze dreams in the way you analyze blood i think it's a metaphorical sort of analysis i know what you're doing in analyzed blood you break it into its component chemical parts it's not what you do when you analyze a dream you don't put it into a centrifuge and whirl it around what you do when you analyze a dream is that you if professor freud or dr freud asks you to free associate and he uses free association as a way of kind of fishing for the the translation scheme for your dream in your dreams manifest content into his latent content”
Freud never accounts satisfactorily for where the Oedipus complex comes from evolutionarily; amoebas do not have Oedipal desires, great apes likely do not, yet humans universally do—Freud provides no adequate mechanism explaining this transition
“let's be scientific about it for just a moment let's assume the facts of darwinian evolution and that we started as amoebas and then turn into raccoons and they turn into apes and they onward and upward and they eventually become us professor freud never really accounts for where the psyche comes from you know i assume that amoebas don't have an olympus complex and i'll work on the assumption that the great apes don't although i i really don't know right let's assume that it's restricted to human beings okay at some point in time apparently human beings didn't have this and then now they do what i'd like is a satisfactory way of explaining how it is we come from not having it to having it where the hell does it come from”
If Freud's reformulation of the problem of other minds is solvable for the self, it is solvable for all people—a great epistemological breakthrough if it works.
“although he makes the cartesian problem harder if it is soluble for the self it is soluble for all people a great epistemological breakthrough if it works”
Freudianism is fundamentally a hermeneutic principle of interpretation rather than a science, because it offers a realm of possible interpretations rather than a single univocal truth, making definitive closure of interpretation impossible
“it's more hermeneutic a principle of interpretation than it is a science and the difficulty that emerges is that principles of interpretation offer a different offer a realm of possible interpretations”
The splitting of the subject by Freud is almost perfectly analogous to the splitting of the atom happening at the same historical moment: splitting the fundamental unit of matter generates new epistemological problems; splitting the integral unit of the psyche generates unusual and previously undiscovered epistemological problems.
“and this is almost perfectly analogous to the splitting of the atom which is happening at just about the same time in one case we split the fundamental unit of matter and generate new and interesting epistemological problems from that splitting of our enter our integral unit well what freud does is split the integral unit of the psyche he splits the subject into its component parts like splitting the atom of our mental world and strangely enough it generates unusual and previously undiscovered epistemological problems”
Freud's argument is that all great artists are wounded, distorted psyches compensating for psychic defects by projecting beautiful things (like the Sistine Chapel); while an argument can be made for this, it is reductive and not clear that all art is sublimation of sexual desires.
“he's going to say that all the great artists are wounded distorted psyches that are compensating for various kinds of psychic defects by projecting this beautiful stuff onto the sistine chapel there is an argument to be made for that although perhaps it is a little bit reductive it is not at all clear that that's what all art is sublimation of sexual desires”
A typing mistake might be parapraxis (unconscious expression) or it might be nothing—sometimes a 'tre' instead of 'the' is just a random error; Freud's system is dogmatic if it insists all mistakes are meaningful, but this creates the problem that we cannot distinguish meaningless accidents from meaningful ones
“when i was typing up this the outline for this lecture i made lots of typing mistakes are all my typing mistakes parapraxis i mean are they all messages from my unconscious that's kind of hard to believe because some of them were just stupid they didn't mean anything i mean they were just like you know t-r-e instead of t-h-e what does that mean i don't know now maybe we're committed to the procrusty and idea that it all means something but i don't know how you would find that out that seems completely dogmatic”
Freud grew up in late 19th-century German-speaking Europe when science was at its 'epistemological high'—he put on a 'white lab coat' metaphorically to give his treatment of internal psychic facts scientific legitimacy, but this was a strategic choice, not an accurate characterization of his method
“my estimation is that freud grew up in late 19th century germans speaking europe and developed in early 20th century german speaking europe at a time in a place where science was at its all-time epistemological high everybody genuflected you know to the shrine of science what i think freud did was kind of metaphorically put on the white lab coat so he could get his treatment of the internal facts of the psyche taken seriously right i think that it is a mistake to try and do that now when we look back on it most of the claims won't work if we want to read it as a scientific activity”
Charcot and Breuer were leading figures in the scientific study of hysteria before Freud; their clinical observations of hysterical women form the empirical basis of psychoanalytic theory
“he studied with charcot he studied with uh breuer he studied with a number of leading figures in the scientific study of the mind”
Freud's social philosophy is not merely an epiphenomenon of his psychological theory but an important element integrated into it; the connection between self and society through extrapolation from individual to collective is at least as old as Plato
“freud connects this conception of the self with the conception of society the connection between self and society extrapolation from one to the other is at least as old as plato all right so you can't ignore the fact that there's a social philosophy connected with this that is in many respects not just an epiphenomenon but an important element of it”