How is psychology different from psychoanalysis?
Getting my dream asks all the time lately. Hear me out, i am going to argue for psychoanalysis over psychology.
Psychology, the supposedly "scientific" study of the mind, is not a legitimate science (LOL). Beyond studying the physical constitution of the brain–its synapses and their firing–there is not really a science of the human mind based in "Facts." that's why philosophy matters, that's why psychoanalysis has and in fact demands a place at the table. my opinion, and that of my profs, is that contemporary "objective"/"empirical" psychology is just lacking in apt description for the human aspect of the human mind.
it's obvious once you learn enough that a lot of our knowledge of supposedly unbiased "facts" is riddled with western ideology. in terms of bias against psychoanalysis, freud was first denounced by the nazis (you'll never guess where the stereotype of him as a perverted old man who wanted to fuck his mom came from!) and in terms of pro-psychology dogma that we're subject to on the regular (at least i am, as an american): every time you get a psychiatric medication ad on your television, every time someone tells you to go to talk therapy no matter the issue or its severity, all the times you've been told a "Fact" about the mind that turns out to be a manipulated statistic (our brains don't stop developing at 25)...psychology's supposed objectivity is pervasive as fuck, and it's never once been objective.
also, the amount of syndromes and disorders with overlapping symptoms is just untenable. the dsm is like 600 pages (might be exaggeration, point stands). in lacanianism, it's three structures, each with their specifications: psychosis, neurosis, and perversion. every structure takes its own approach to language, the unconscious, and the Other, and most of our actions can be intuited as structurally perverse, neurotic, or psychotic. thus we are all, in the eyes of psychoanalysis, "neurotic": nobody is mentally 'normal,' none of us are fully sane, we are all fucked up in some way or another. freud's ever pertinent phrase comes to mind, "behold, the normal neurotic." – yes, most people do cope with living in the world normally, but it is also usually by means of neurotic, psychotic, or perversely motivated actions or patterns of thought. rather than being centered around determinate and determinable reasons behind your actions, psychoanalysis acknowledges, too, that there is an unknowable thing in us subjects–and that it is the very thing that makes us subjects: lack. for more on that see the ask i got on lack HERE, it has a brief definition/explanation (also featuring a paragraph on its relation to desire).
the unconscious is a contentious point. certain psychologists will argue that there cannot be an unconscious, that you can't empirically account for it. not all of them go that far, but it is still the official opinion of Big Psychology that there is no unconscious. IMO, the unconscious is absolutely and undeniably there–for a simple and concise example, recall all the times you've thought "shit, i have no idea why i just said that." that is it! and it speaks! there are just certain things that can be described and accounted for but not objectively "proven."
psychology has been so historically ideological and western-centric, too...anything that society doesn't like is a "mental illness," being homosexual once was, now transgenderism is "body dysphoria/dysmorphic disorder" and HRT is a "treatment"/"cure" for that "disorder." it's just so wrong! lacanian psychoanalysis has never claimed scientific objectivity, rather it offers apt explanation for the reasons things work the way they do.
...psychology is OUT. psychoanalysis is IN.
