Savi | She/Her | Neutral Good | 23 | Pisces
This could be the start to something monumental. Or it could be the start to something that's just mental.
I'm Savanna and this blog is a multifandom mess of Sherlock Holmes, Psych, Yuri on Ice, Doctor Who, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kingsman, Martin Freeman, The Hobbit/LOTR, and really anything that tickles my fancy. I love Johnlock and potatoes so if either of those things offend you then you've come to the wrong place, friend!
Tracking the tag: ascandalinthepolicebox
His whole weird theory about penis envy and children being sexually attracted to their parents and secret desires and all that shit actually came straight out of an attempt to ally himself with wealthy and influential rapists and was a direct form of victim blaming.
He had started the research looking into “hysteria” which at the time was really usually referring to women’s symptoms of PTSD. It turned out that the reason so many woman had these symptoms is because so many of them had experienced sexual violence– especially CSA and incest at the hands of their fathers.
At first he was making real progress, and it was through working with these women that he discovered that talk therapy could be used to treat trauma. The symptoms of PTSD were lessened when women were able to safely speak about their experiences out loud and be believed.
But it wasn’t the women who paid for the therapy. It was their fathers, husbands, the same men who were perpetuating the violence in the first place. And Freud didn’t want to validate his patients (the women) if it meant making his clients (the men) unhappy.
So he came up with a new idea. These symptoms weren’t from trauma. The memories weren’t real. These women were just sexual beings as children and had penis envy and it made them lust for their fathers and fantasize about the rape that they had reported to him. That’s where the shittiest parts of Freud’s theories emerged.
Another part of it besides just the monetary aspect, though, was that there was a feminist movement on the fringes starting up at the time and by publishing work about women’s CSA he would be aligning himself with it and therefore losing support, respect, funding, prestige from his male peers and from the psychological community at large. He literally made that gross victim blaming shit up to keep his own reputation with these fucks and to make sure he still got publication and fame.
By coming up with fake theory about little girls fantasizing about incest he not only fucked over generations of women, the feminist movement that was arising, and the entire psychology field for years to come, but he also completely swept away any progress made in understanding trauma and so we didn’t have any clue why men coming back from war had “hysteria” like women during WWI.
And our research on PTSD and trauma is still lacking to this day, especially because of the stigma that maybe traumatized people deserved it or wanted it or imagined it. People don’t want to believe it’s real. Perpetrators of traumatic violence want everyone to forget about it, not acknowledge it, or trivialize it.
And they have Freud’s cultural legacy to help them.
Can you provide academic citations for this? This is really neat.
If you want some more, just google, “Sigmund Freud Seduction Theory Problematic.” There’s lots of academic and non-academic discussion on the topic, but TLDR Sigmund Freud is basically disregarded in almost all aspects of psychology by anyone who actually cares about their patients, so fuck that guy for holding psychology back.
Words cannot express how much I hate Freud. His theories have been entirely disproven by current psychological research, but using him to interpret literary texts is still a widely accepted technique in the field of literary study today.
English departments across the country will not bat an eye at tenured professors bringing Freud into lectures and citing him in scholarly articles and books. Doing a “Freudian reading” of a literary character or theme is regarded as a valid means of understanding and drawing meaning from works by authors as diverse as William Shakespeare, James Joyce, and C.S. Lewis. And it is based entirely on this guy’s unbelievably sexist, flat-out fraudulent, and thoroughly disproven research. It’s insane.
Just so everyone on my dash is aware that Freud’s theories are pseudoscience.
I too hate Freud and everything he stands for. I just wish people knew why I hate him so much.
I always find it very interesting that ‘Freudian readings’ are still taught as part of Lit 101 classes across the country, when everyone knows he’s been by-and-large debunked. It’s like why. won’t. he. die.
fuckin’ a to this.
We had to read Freud in my graduate-level lit critcism and theory class, and as expected i hated him, but holy shit, yes. this is still taught and no one blinks an eye at it. And i’m like…okay, i’m down for analyzing a text from a psychological standpoint, but surely there are other psychiatrists and psychologists that we can draw from now? I know I used some Carl Jung (who undoubtedly has his own problems) to analyze a short story by Doris Lessing and it didn’t get weird and victim-blamey and gross.
Yeah, you think Freud is bad, imagine being treated by Lacan.
Psychoanalytic criticism is its own cottage industry now, but Lacan has overtaken Freud as the Big Boy, partly because he made everything so muchore complicated. There’s a feminist strain of it (Melanie Klein, Julia Kristeva) which basically uses some Freudian/Lacanian concepts to talk about non-rational, non-linear aspects of subjectivity that derive from the experience of pregnancy and childbirth. Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is partly a response to Kristeva’s theories about the semiotic and female subjectivity, and by response I mean takedown.
However, from about the 1990s on, psychoanalytic theory has been challenged by other critical approaches that pay a lot of attention to the specifics of the author’s time, place, audience, conditions of production, etc. The basic complaint these historically-based methods have about psychoanalytic criticism is that no theory that claims to be able to tell you UNIVERSAL truths about humanity can be right. (This critique would include Carl Jung, who believed in a universal collective consciousness. It also includes Northrop Frye and his imitators, who believe that all human culture derives from a set of common archetypes based on the natural world.)
The argument can be made that Freud, Lacan, Jung, etc. were better at literary criticism than they were clinically because the idea of the subconscious allowed people to read below the surface and to discover ‘deeper’ meanings for symbols etc. But they do a better job of interpreting literature (or film, etc.) by other white men, who share their ‘universal’ assumptions and experiences. And then there is the fact that because Freudian theory was so widely accepted at the turn of the 20th century, many 20th century incorporated Freudian ideas into their art–so it’s no surprise that Freudian critics can find them there. Lacanian theory works great for Hitchcock movies because Hitchcock is obsessed with the same things Lacan was obsessed with. Harry Potter’s patronus journey could have come straight out of Freud’s “Totem and Taboo;” but that doesn’t mean Freud was right, it means that fantasy long ago ingested Freudian theory about fathers and sons (same goes for Star Wars and the X Files). “Oedipus and Hamlet” is largely responsible for the fact that nearly every modern production assumes an Oedipal relationship between Hamlet and Gertrude.
In the world of clinical psychology, of course, so much has happened since Freud that I can’t really talk about it here. But for an alternative account of how family psychology works, there’s Donald Winnicott, whose work is central to Alison Bechdel’s less-read sequel to Fun Home, _Are You My Mother?_
teenlock au where sherlock asks john to help him practice for a date with vic trev by going on a practice date together except there is no vic trev and sherlock just wants to go on a date with john 💘 meanwhile john is outrageously jealous
john jealously asks sherlock to describe vic trev and sherlock’s like “shit didn’t think thru this part of the lie v well” so he just blatantly describes john and john gets jealous of himself
john *glaring with gritted teeth*: so what is this … “victor trevor” like?
sherlock: ummm he’s… blond! and he wants to go to medical school and he’s got these amazing blue eyes and he’s really brave and his jumpers look really soft like maybe if he was cuddling with me and
john: this guy is clearly a tool i hate him
sherlock: he once told me my deductions were amazing 😍
