#i won't talk about my own experience of being a psych/neuro patient

[primrosepollen]

i'm reading "dostoevskij and parricide" by freud because unfortunately it's in my brothers karamazov edition and i must say, if based on what i studied in high school about him i thought he was just a person who was trying to find some logic about the topic of the human psyche but unfortunately arrived to some deeply unpleasant conclusions that were subsequently disproven (kind of a la greek philosophy), now i have the unwavering opinion that he was a callous man, and not even a very intelligent one.

one of the themes of brothers karamazov is that people are complex, they contain both the abyss of abjection and the highs of virtue at the same time. that doesn't make you either a virtuous person or a evil one. and yet freud opens this essay (essay written for an edition of brothers karamazov) by stating that since dostoevskij wrote about "people with violent tendencies" then he himself must have been a evil individual, and therefore all the (documented) love he had for other people must be fake and simulated, and of course, "symptom of neurosis".

another theme of the book is how doctors don't really know what they're doing at best, or at worst make everything worse by ignoring facts that disprove their preconceived diagnosis. and what does freud do? he talks about dostoevskij's epilepsy (which to me is extremely absurd because how are you even trying to diagnose a person you don't know 50 years after he died), which is promptly described as another symptom of neurosis because it doesn't follow the "official symptomatology", so it's not physiological but hysterical, and it must derive from some sort of altered sexual flux (because OF COURSE it does). it doesn't matter to freud that biographical data disproves his theory of "dostoevskij's illness only relapsed during periods of emotional stress", and it doesn't even occur to him that maybe dostoevskij had an atypical epilepsy, or that freud's "symptomatology" was incorrect or lacking, or that maybe he had a totally different illness but there still wasn't a name for it so he went for the closest one. no, all this doesn't even cross this guy's mind, because he's right and the patient is always wrong. he actively dismisses everything that contradicts his premade theory with a "the patient is neurotic and can't be trusted with anything he says. also people with mental disorders are always idiots and dostoevskij wasn't an idiot so he must be hysterical".

what's really laughable (read: tragic) about this is that dostoevskij wrote a WHOLE chapter about how you can't trust psychiatrists because they will diagnose you with kookoocrazy disorder just because you looked the wrong way in their opinion, not to mention all the other ways doctors outright don't care about patients, not to mention the absolutely respectful and loving way he talked about mentally ill people, and freud wrote a whole ass essay about taking pride in acting in that same reprehensible way. an essay that was meant to be published with the book. unbelievable. tone deaf, arrogant, callous and extremely stupid too.

#sigmund freud #fëdor dostoevskij #brothers karamazov #i won't talk about my own experience of being a psych/neuro patient #i won't talk about the countless ways psychiatry was and is just a tool to victimize the weak and undesirable #people smarter than me have said it #i'm not reading another word of what that poor excuse of a person wrote about one of the most beautiful and loving books ever written