Freud was a genius

Freud had some insights. Freud's theories started a whole branch of pseudo-science that enabled us all to understand the human being better.

Freud's theories were developed in the rarefied air of the nineteenth century German upper middle class. He never looked at the working class or the aristocracy or anyone from France or Nigeria or Japan or Ancient Sparta or the North Pole. He made declarations about all mankind that assumed his limited little pool of people represented the entire human condition. He was wrong.

When he drew his conclusions, he never tested them. People today can create tests that readily prove him ... Well, no, I can't say they disprove his theories, but they prove that he was not justified drawing many of the conclusions that he drew.

For the record, a similar arm-chair theorist is Piaget. I loathe this guy for the conclusions he drew from the tiny pool of children he supposedly "studied". He believed all human beings developed the same way, so after pronouncing that he only needed to watch his own two boys, he pretty much didn't look at other children and only drew his conclusions from the two he had in his den. He made other stupid assumptions: that intelligence never varies, that intellectual and conceptual growth is rigid and incontrovertible and follows a precise schedule which no other children would vary from.

He did "studies" that every psych student is taught, and his studies are taught as revealing the truth about intellectual development in children. Yet they were foolishly designed and he never tested them by varying the study in a way that could potentially give other results. Thus we are taught that the child can't coneive of the constancy of matter when a liquid is poured from a small measuring cup to a large one: the kid will happily answer the question "Which cup has more in it?" by pointing. Yet the ignorant and idiotic Piaget never took into account the unhappy fact that the child at this age is just figuring out that a truck is not always a truck, that not all cats are dogs, and that some books are really magazines. So when an adult asks him a question about which cup has "more" the kid trusts the damned adult to be asking a meaningful question, knows that inside his own heaar are words that have multiple definitions, tries to assign a definition to the question, and does something the adult considers cute but wrong. Some day, if the kid actually remembers the "test", he will realize the adult was lying to him and couldn't be trusted, but he hasn't figured that out yet.

So the adult doing the study then moves on to the length of sticks. He places a pair of sticks on the table in front of the poor confused baby. They are clearly the same length. The baby can even see that. Heckfire, the damned adult can even see that. Are the sticks the same length? The baby says yes. Then the baby moves one of the sticks forward and asks the baby which stick is longer, a leading question. The baby tries to assign meaning to the word "longer", since obviously the adult has failed to understand "longer" as a concept. Besides, the stupid adult is pointing to the distant end of the two sticks. The semi-verbal baby picks the stick that is sticking out farther at that end. The adult seems to be happy because he moves on.

What Piaget never tried to figure out was whether the same baby, if the adult pointed to the other end of the sticks, wouldn't choose the stick sticking out farther at the other end. And as it turns out, he does.

Piaget's theories are based on bullshit. Piaget was a fool. Freud's theories were not tested either. Freud may not have been a fool but he certainly was no researcher. Yet in the cases of both these men, whole bodies of knowledge are based on foolish theorizing from an armchair.

It has made me ill from the time I was in college. It made me sicker knowing that our entire education system is based on Piaget's bullshit.