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Freud's influence on psychology as a discipline was to fork a non-scientific branch

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he was exposing his ideas in the Victorian Era

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a time when men were gentlemen and women were ladies

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there was a properness as to how things were supposed to happen

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the topics sex and aggression were not talked about, they were not polite, not the sort of things people discussed

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then along comes Sigmund Freud telling this dark story of mankind

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"the tendency to aggression is an innate, independent, instinctual disposition in man, it constitutes the powerful obstacle to culture"

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"No mortal can keep a secret, if his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips, betrayal oozes out of him at every pore."

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someone trained to analyze at a psychological level can see things about a person that they cannot even see themselves

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perhaps not surprisingly, this fascinated many people in the Victorian era, they couldn't help but to be drawn to this very provocative notion of humanity, and once they got there, Freud had a quite complex story of how he thought humanity worked

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the virus: psychic conflict

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three

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id

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the "it", a primitive part of us which has biological drives wants them all met: food, comfort, water, sex, aggression

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the id behaves according to the pleasure principle, and the id wants to gratify these desires immediately

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we say primitive because this is perhaps how things happened in primitive times

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super ego

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the super ego is the part of us that wants to be the perfect us, that people like and respect, does things competently, has leadership qualities

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the conflict is that following your id is generally not going to get you admired in terms of what your super ego desires, a conflict between the primitive side of us and the side of us that society has endeavored us to be

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ego

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the job of the ego is to try to find ways of satisfying the id without compromising the super ego

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this is not always an easy job and there are many complex ways in which this plays out

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e.g. you are brought up very conservative and religious but when you grow up, you find out there is a thing called pornography, and a part of you, your id, wants to see it and experience it, but another part of you, the super ego, wants to be seen as an upstanding member of society who does not view pornography, so then your ego sets out to find a way to view pornography while still being respected, e.g. maybe you could become a crusader against pornography which would necessitate that you get a sense of what pornography is so that you can speak out against it.

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all throughout our lives, we are trying to satisfy both the id and the super ego

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when we cannot resolve these conflicts, we develop psychological problems

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we don't consciously know about the conflict going on, but it is going on nevertheless and it's shaping our behavior

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Freud's influence on the development of psychology

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Freud looked past the symptoms, and instead looked for the cause in terms of a narrative

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when you go to the doctor, he will look for symptoms, and then superficially treat them with remedies

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what Freud wanted to do was to not just deal with the symptoms as a doctor, but be able to explain the cause and deal and thus have the vocabulary to deal with it

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this kind of medical treatment often doesn't care why treatments work, just that they work, Freud wanted to find out why by attempting to discover the underlying cause of psychological problems

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Freud's non-scientific approach led psychology to an identity crisis

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was psychology to be more like a experimental science (pre-Freud) or more like a general health care approach (Freud)?

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much backlash to Freud trying to make psychology an approach to health care involving untested narratives instead of keeping it an experiment-based science

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the problem was that the vast majority of Freud's ideas were scientifically untestable, i.e. you are never going to find an "id" or and "ego" or a "super ego" which you could repeat experiments on

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the argument against Freud was that he was simply interested in ideas which you could never verify as being correct or not, and to a scientist that makes them almost worthless