[altonzheng]

> Protip: never psychoanalyze anyone! This likely applies even to psychoanalysts.

Beside your point, but wondering if you could expand on this. I have a tendency to do this, and while it's fun, I'm starting to get the sense that it's a bad habit, possibly because I sense I'm overly confident on something that might be 100% wrong and it feels... invasive?

[m_fayer]

I've asked myself the same question. While I don't go as far as "never", I do it much less than I used to.

Thinking this way can certainly lead to worthwhile and actionable insights. But I think any skilled amateur will overestimate their abilities. Therapists build their insights on top of huge amounts of biographical information that they gather in intense, concentrated sessions. Their observational skills are trained, and they use them to gather as much information from posture, tone, and expression as they do from narrative. Even if an amateur's observational skills are good, they won't have the right context (the session) to gather that kind of information. So the amateur will be lacking in both theory, and information - compared to the pros. And yet the amateur often has more confidence than the pro - leaping at the first theory that "clicks", not considering alternatives, and with an unwillingness to revise.

The next pitfall comes if/when you decide to act on your insights. And once you have those insights, it becomes tempting to act on them. Then, when you do act, you're almost by definition being manipulative. Your behavior towards the other person is no longer a straightforward reaction to what they're sending your way, but is instead following an agenda constructed to fit a diagnosis that is unknown to them. If they knew what you were up to, they would most likely object, even if your agenda was "for their own good." At best it's paternalistic. Therapists do act on their insights in opaque ways (and often screw up despite all their training) but the particulars of the patient-therapist relationship resolve the ethical violations that us civilians are likely to stumble into.

So, I would say that the tendency to psychoanalyze needs to come with heaps of humility, openness to revision, and a reluctance to act on the resulting insights in 9 out of 10 cases.

[noumenized]

"Therapists build their insights on top of huge amounts of biographical information that they gather in intense, concentrated sessions."

Agreed with all of your post, I think this is the most crucial point here. Genuine, skilled psychoanalysis is less about being some master discerner of psychological motives, and instead being very good at giving the subject of analysis a lot of psychological safety to express their innermost thoughts and most personal life experiences. Unless you build that kind of (responsible and professional) intimacy for lack of a better term, you're largely just projecting imo.

[noumenized]

Not OP, but as someone who holds this view (who also used to engage in the practice): a lot of armchair psychoanalysis is based less on a genuine understanding of the other person's life and circumstances, and more on the assumption of what their life and circumstances must be combined with a surface-level knowledge of psychoanalytic practice.

Armchair psychoanalysis ostensibly seeks to understand the subject of analysis, but rarely makes the effort to first understand the subject on their terms or in a way where they can articulate their own experience; instead, someone usually has their presumptive conclusion about the subject in mind ("they're just doing this because they haven't gotten over being bullied as a kid" or whatever), and tries to wrangle the limited information they have about that person into their conclusion.

[kixiQu]

I think you have to detach to get value out of it -- not "what's the reason this person is like this" but "what are three different mechanisms by which a person might become like this". A bit like how a history student of a certain level isn't asked "why did WWI happen" but "contrast the materialist and post-revisionist explanations for the origins of WWI".

[prtkgpt]

I agree on not calling out anything psycho. Not sure about invasive though.