| HN Mirror

> You haven't answered what Freud was right about.

I don't know how to answer this. For example, he proposed two structures of mind topographical and dynamic (I'm not sure how they named in English, and I'm too lazy to search), and proposed how that layers interacts. His ideas of psychological defences, inner conflicts... Is it counts for "Freud was right", or it is too obvious now and does not look as important ideas? All the views on a mind working are highly influenced by Freud, sometimes it is hard to find his ideas in our views, because we are too accustomed for them and therefore we are unable to see them.

> To cite just a few examples: women (penis envy, hysteria, female orgasms);

Yes, and no. Histeria and similar conditions even for now are treated with regard to psychoanalitic views -- unconscious conflicts based on repression or some other psychological defence. Psychosomatic -- I attended for classes in psychosomatics and sow patients with psychosomatic conditions. The behavioral approach does not do well, because it ignores the roots of conflit which lead to strange behaviour, and one cannot cure anorexia or hysteria relying on drugs or behavioural training. Behavioural approach can change sympthoms, for example, to make a bulimia from anorexia. Or help patient to regain control of paralized hand, but then patient would start having seizures. If conflict had not resolved, than it manifest itself somehow. Patient needs to go through the breaking of psychological defenses to understanding of conflict and to resolving that conflict. The only signigicant difference from psychoanalysis is that conflict does not nessessarily comes from psychological trauma experienced at age of 6 month.

> psychosexual stages, including the idea that homosexuality is anal fixation

There are a lot of authors who developed that ideas and the stages of developmet remained the same in general, explanations was changed.

> the id, ego, and superego;

Whats wrong with them?

> the oedipus complex;

Yes, I also do not like it. But a developing sexuality of a child and a sexuality of a parent do interact somehow. The oedipus complex seems not the best way to describe this interaction, but Freud was the first researcher in the field. If we can call him a researcher -- his empirical methods was controversial indeed.

> schizophrenia

And even now no one knows what shizipheria is. Seems that diagnosis "schizophrenia" is a way to say "we don't know whats wrong with him". I agree, Freud was wrong about schizophrenia, just trying to point that modern authors also do not know.

> Then it's not science.

I think I understand your point, because I moved from tech and math into psychology, and years ago I also could say something like this -- "it is not a science". But now I think that this phrase means "is not the physics and it is not the math". Yes, social sciences are different. They are continuously failing to make formal models, written with pretty greek letters in the math language. Lack of formalization leads to a lot of problems, but I see no way to formalize the field. And I know that there are a lot of people who are much stronger than me with math and they do not see the way to create a formal models either. There are formal models for local phenomena, but very limited ones.

The lack of formalization comes from complexity of the object of research. Should we claim that science that failed to be a formal and strict because of complexity is not a science? If so, than what we should do next? To stop any attempts to make a science in this area?

Human mind is much more complex object to deal with in research than quarks. At least there are only six flavours of quarks, while all humans are different. All the social models are models which works only conditionally. In many situations no one even know what that conditions are. For any given model we can find conditions when that model would give us correct predictions. And for any given model we can find conditions under which model would fail. It is means that everything is true and everything is false. Boolean logic fails and the law of excluded middle does not works.

Social sciences are dealing with problems for which science has no ready-made tools. The reproducibility crisis is a social sciences invention, it is impossible in physics and is inevitable in social science. Now social sciences are searching for tools to fight it. Physics does not need such a complex tools, because it digs deeper, not forward. Physicists laugh at philosophy now, because they need no philosophy any more. Philosophy now all about social science problems.

So, maybe social sciences are not sciences. But at least they are meta-sciences, they are trying to build science which would be able to deal with social problems in scientific ways. And we have nothing to replace social sciences in their area.