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BITWASTES_PSYCHO

                                             October  30, 2021
                                             December 28, 2021

                                                   BITWASTES

David Auerbach's "Bitwise: A Life in Code" (2018)
makes some remarks about psychotherapy:

                                             (p. 121)

    "Freudian psychoanalysis had yielded symbolically sexualized
    dream imagery, a psychodynamic model of the unconscious at
    war with itself, and a powerful account of neurosis ased in
    childhood, adolescent, and adult sexuality, usually in some
    deformed or defective state.  We carry so many of these
    early psychoanalytic concepts with us unwittingly today--
    the super-ego, repression, Freudian slips, the unconscious
    itself-- that they have become inextricable from our     
    culture, even if Freud's all-consuming vision of sexual  
    neurosis has faded."                                     
                                                               SLOW_JUNG

                                                (p.127)

    "... the degree of sympathy we extend to the mentally ill
    is far greater now that it was in the pre-Freudian era.
    Nontheless, there is little of the theoretical work in
    Freud and his followers-- what Joyce called "Jungfraud's
    Messongebook" in _Finnegans Wake_-- that stands up to
    scientific scrutiny."


Auerbach talks about "the shift from *psychoanalysis* to
*psycho-pharmacology*:

    "The individual, unpredictable, and inexorable course of
    analysis, with its personalized, irreproducible hours of
    dialogue, was ill suited to any sort of standardized,
    quantifiable treatment regimen, and therefore a very bad
    match for the increasingly actuarial health insurance
    industry.  For those wealthy enough to pay out of
    pocket, psychoanalysis remained relevant, particularly
    in places like New York where it was nearly a cultural
    signifier."

In a footnote, Auerbach comments:

    "New York is the only city I have lived in where
    people talk openly about their therapists and          Interesting that's
    their relationships with them."                        survived into the
                                                           post-Woody Allen era.


In another footnote, Auerbach provides an
interesting capsule book review:


    "George Makari's _Revolution in Mind: The Creation of
    Psychoanalysis_ paints an unflattering portrait of the dawn
    of psychoanalysis, showing its pioneers to be ingenious but
    often undisciplined creative minds grasping in the dark
    toward the incomprehensibilities of the psyche, trading
    creation myths among one another in a farcical race to
    create a unified theory of the mind _ab ovo_.  The result
    was a secular mythology of the mind whose greater contours
    remain with us today.  Sigmund Freud, for all his
    intellectual caprice, still comes off as the sharpest mind
    of the lot, Alfred Adler as the most sensible.  One
    psychoanalytic theorist was far more aggressively specious,
    racist, and arrogant than the others: Carl Jung."


                I think "caprice" cuts
                Freud too much slack.
                                                THE_FREUD_SYNDROME



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