Of course, this was also in a non-trad program, so perhaps it’s more that they put some of the decent, as well as some of the crappy, professors into those non-trad programs (it tends to be very extreme, from great to horrible, probably because it is harder to find good faculty to teach part-time). But all the same, there were students taking the idiot Freudian seriously, some of them! Amazing.

And scary.

What needs to happen is to legislate that only “empirically supported” stuff should occur in clinical practice. Do that, and it’ll put the final nail in the coffin of Freud (well, except for the English lit departments, that is…some just seem utterly hopelessly radical and extreme…and you’d expect that they’d just actually read decent literature, psychoanalytic babble not part of the discussion!).

Humanities are concerned with _interpreting_ data (most of the time discourse as text or as spoken words, more rarely as images or music etc.) generated by one individual or by one group and with recovering the meaning hidden within that data, and recently with defining what “meaning” is and what, and if, can be “recovered”.

Psychoanalysis offers a good set of questions that can be asked in relation with that data. Of course, the answers are most of the time as dumb, meaningless and useless as those got by Kahneman and Krueger, and tricks such as the “Easterlin paradox” are employed in the Humanities, too, and quite as often as in Economics.

And I highly doubt that Pinker’s evolutionary reductionism, if debunked, will have the same cultural staying power as Freud’s psychoanalysis. Freud provided a number of powerful metaphors that fit well with our intuitions about subjective experience and are still at least somewhat useful to students of philosophy, social theory, and intellectual history. Pinker has not.

I think we’re focusing on different aspects of Pinker-like folks. (Though I was hardly clear!) You seem to be objecting to a general ignorance of philosophical problems. I can’t stand the I-am-a-scientist arrogance either. But in any case I find Pinker’s “scientific” arguments to be pretty poor; some bits, like hand-waving evolutionary psychology, are the worst sorts of hocus-pocus and stereotype-reinforcing mythology that it would be nice to eliminate in favor of testable scientific explanations. (Popper’s too strict about this but that’s another discussion.)

Like Pinker today, Freud made claims to be scientific, and there failed. I wonder if just-so-stories out of sociobiology might someday be dismissed as psuedoscience, but then twistedly live on in another field. That would make me sad. On the other hand, maybe no one outside of arrogant-scientist-world likes them; then we are safe!

Sorry for confusion about “humanist” — I’m using it to mean “someone who studies things that are taught/researched in humanities departments”, not in the pro-Enlightenment sense. This was the sense that I heard in the claim “Freud was one of the greatest humanists” (from an English professor).

Is there a better term for this category of scholars than “humanist”? Feel free to suggest my regard of this as a category at all is bunk…

In any case, why do you think people don’t like contemporary psychology as much as Freud?

People working in literature, philosophy and sociology departments still teach the theories of Freud, Lacan, and others because they fit intuitively with many aspects of our lived experience, and help us make sense of things that other discourses are inadequate to. Standards of evidence are different in disciplines where hypotheses aren’t neatly testable by controlled experiments. And it gets extremely annoying when scientists like Pinker attempt to comment on deeper moral and philosophical questions that they have only a very shallow understanding of.

Also, I think you’re right that Freud wasn’t a humanist – if anything I’d call him an anti-humanist taking the Enlightenment down from within. His biggest achievement was to turn reason on itself and show that it is only a small, often weak rudder steering our deeply irrational psyches.