Freudians
Article
Freudians is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 25, 2022 and July 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Generations of Freudians made good livings by flattering their patients’ preconceptions”; “Freudians discovered so many things”. It most often appears alongside 21st century scientific psychiatry, Aboriginal, Aboriginal Australia.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 25, 2022
- Last seen: July 15, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 21st century scientific psychiatry (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal Australia (1 shared issues)
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- Aboriginal society (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigine (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigines (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigines of Australia (1 shared issues)
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- America (1 shared issues)
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- American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting (1 shared issues)
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- Appalachian towns (1 shared issues)
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- Arabanoo (1 shared issues)
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- Arguments About Aborigines (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
I don’t know whether there’s something to be gained from picking over experiences like these, but it’s natural and human to want to do it. Generations of Freudians made good livings by flattering their patients’ preconceptions that their dreams had to mean something. As a psychiatrist, I try not to engage with patients about the meanings of their hallucinations, because my words carry some sort of scientific authority and Science very much does not have an opinion on this. But somebody ought to do it, and “let mildly psychotic people do it for each other” seems like a good solution.
In the early twentieth century, anthropologists embarked on a more ambitious project - demonstrating that something about primitive culture proved that their own political faction was right about everything. Marxists discovered idyllic tribes untouched by capitalism, peacefully sharing their communal resources. Missionaries discovered that every primitive religion was merely a distorted form of Christianity, with a few extra gods and rituals added in to serve local appetites. Feminists discovered that women everywhere developed unique indigenous forms of resistance to patriarchal domination. Postcolonialists discovered that all the other anthropologists were racist. Freudians discovered so many things that it would take ten books of this length to even begin to talk about them.