Kramer

The other Kramer, Dr. Peter Kramer, of "Listening to Prozac" fame, wrote a new book that is critical of Freud, although he stopped short of screaming racial slurs about him.

Critical of Freud? Stop the presses on that one. Now, a hundred years after Siggy started scribbling notes about what he thought was going on, Dr. Kramer, upon review, finds that he was mistaken.

I agree. Yes, Freud was, in some way a genius, but it turns out that he was much more of a marketing genius than a scientific genius.

The scientific geniuses, like say the big ones such as Newton, Copernicus,Darwin,and Einstein, all used scientific methods. They all proposed theories in a manner that could be tested and verified by experiments. Freud, by contrast, made stuff up, and said that things worked that way because that's what he thought. And he thought about it a lot, almost as much as he thought about sex. It was his thinking, and writing and talking and asking, and theorizing about sex, that made him popular. What he had to say about it was, as Dr, Kramer says, mostly wrong.

However, it didn't take a hundred years to figure that out.

What Dr. Kramer says, in this interview here in the paper, is that he misses Freud because no one thinks about grand theories of personality any more. Now, almost everything is neuro-biological. He says that we really don't have the concept of "mind" any more. He admits people seem to use theirs, especially during therapy, but he doesn't really know what it is.

Too bad he feels that way, but he is a psychiatrist, and they kind of get lost in the biology of it all, and forget that all those neurons, synapses, tissues, chemicals and electrical impulses connect in a very dynamic way that we, non-psychiatrists, experience as our minds. We also feel that this "mind" creates "thoughts" many of which we can direct and even express -- as I am doing here.

Therefore, psychotherapy is a process which helps you to use your "mind" to help regulate your "emotions" and your "behaviors" so that you can be "happy" and work and get along with people (which is how Freud described being mentally healthy -- and he was right about that).

The other Kramer was screaming racial slurs, and he should go into therapy so he can get better control of himself.