Posted by Ginny on May 27, 2000, at 11:22:23
The conversations about Freud vs. Jung vs. Adler remind me of chit-chat among connoisseurs, say, of wine. The connoisseurs choose to participate and agree among themselves as to a private vocabulary and rhetoric. They agree not to question whether wine matters. If one couldn’t care less about wine, all the talk about “black cherry and pepper notes mingled with pleasant earthy flavors and soft tannins,” and whether this wine goes with that food, is meaningless, even silly.
Freud, Jung, Adler, Rank, and all psychotherapists buy into the same vocabulary and rhetoric. Once you presume the existence of an unconscious and presume the legitimacy of any psychodynamic theory, the rest is chit-chat. By that I mean to suggest that such questioning is insufficiently distanced.
What if there is no such thing as an unconscious? Not Freud’s id, not Jung’s tribal whatever, not whatever Adler proposed, but no unconscious whatsoever, none, zero? What if it’s all just hormones and brain chemistry and genes? If that’s even potentially true, the fundamental question is not Freud vs. Jung, but Freud et alia vs. Darwin. It seems to me as an interested, screwed-up lay person, that the explanations put forth by the evolutionary psychologists are vastly superior to any psychotherapist’s. The jig is up.
Trouble is, evolutionary psychology doesn’t lead to therapies for sad, peevish people, and natural selection doesn’t give a rat about my unhappiness (except to the extent that I am too fucked-up to attract a husband and have kids).
What’s a girl to do? Tonight I will cook a lamb shank, and with it I will drink a good Merlot, with nice acidity and suppleness, pretty flavors of dark cherry and plum, and savory herbal notes on the finish.
Cheers,
Ginny
poster:Ginny
thread:34863
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000526/msgs/34863.html