Psychoanalysis had many followers and many detractors. One of these detractors was Dr. Max Kesserling, a specialist in nervous diseases in Zurich. He accused Freud of being convinced of the truth of his teachings, and when attending one of Freud’s lectures, he noticed that while Freud encouraged questions, his answers were vague and unconvincing. Kesselring … Read more
Carl Gustav Jung, like Adler, broke off his relationship with Freud. But he was also like Freud in that his philosophical ideas are influenced by Romanticism. Jung proclaimed that he discovered an objective truth about human nature that is between science and religion, and this is the most distinguishing feature of his perspective. His family … Read more
Alfred Adler and Carl Jung both had independent ideas and were not psychoanalytic deviants, as is commonly believed. They collaborated with Freud, but maintained their independence, and after their break, they developed their own systems of psychoanalysis. Freud’s goal was to incorporate into scientific psychology the insights alluded to by Shakespeare, the Greek tragedians, Goethe, … Read more
The Life of Freud Sigmund Freud broke with official medicine and was the first in the history of dynamic psychiatry to do so. The result was a cultural revolution that can be compared to what Darwin had unleashed. Freud’s personality was strongly shaped by the Jewish tradition, he kept the patriarchal ideology, which included man’s … Read more
To what extent can experiments in a laboratory inform us about the human mind? The replication crisis in the social sciences suggest the answer is “to some extent” but not much more. Brian Nosek estimated the reproducibility of 100 studies in psychological science from three high-ranking psychology journals.[40] Overall, 36% of the replications yielded significant findings (p value … Read more
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw This quote leaves a powerful impression on people, because it is very counter-intuitive. Progress, if it is at all possible, we are taught, can only come from rational … Read more
The 19th century gave birth to a new dynamic psychiatry. At the time, Europe was a society that was dominated by men. It was a world for men by men, and women had no say in politics and were not admitted into universities. Male values were celebrated. Among the aristocracy, women and men who had … Read more
The background of dynamic psychiatry can be traced to two centuries back. The 1800’s was a time that is difficult for us to imagine. People were much tougher, since they had no access to the luxuries and comforts of today. Sedatives and narcotics were almost unheard of and public hygiene was at a primitive stage. … Read more
Below are my favorite selection from The Madman by Gibran Khalil Gibran. HOW I BECAME A MADMAN You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen,-the seven masks I have fashioned an … Read more
A source of the first dynamic psychiatry was imagination. Montaigne thought that imagination was a frequent cause of physical, emotional, and mental disease, of death, and of manifestations attributed to magic. Imagination could cause conspicuous physical phenomena such as the appearance of the stigmata or even the transformation of one sex into another. But imagination … Read more