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...Yes, that was the foundation of Freud's entire body of thought. Jung was a close associate of Freud's in the early part of his career. He was intimately aware of all these issues. (Hanson thinking that he's providing an original insight here is a bit like someone walking up to an engineer who's knee deep in troubleshooting a critical production issue and asking them, "have you tried turning it off and turning it back on again?")
Although the problems of introspection are extremely complex, it's also clear that people are able to successfully introspect on certain things at least some of the time. Otherwise, they would never be able to accurately report their own emotional states, they would never be able to tell you any of their stable preferences or dispositions, they would never be able to accurately report on biographical memories, and in short, it's hard to see how interpersonal interaction could ever function at all. So, keeping in mind that introspection will sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, we have to simply dive in and get started, and address individual problems as they arise.
There are certain well known biases in the MBTI community, in particular it's common for people to mistype themselves as INxx types because these types are seen as the most "intellectual" (which is, well, one way of putting it I suppose. Personally I think that the INxx types all represent distinct flavors of autism spectrum disorders, or at least they represent personality types that are "on the way" to autism spectrum disorders). But there are many other cases where people are honest about their own traits and honest about their own strengths and weaknesses.
So it is not as big a deal as one might think. Got it.
I agree that there is a lot of information in reports of subjective experience, I think most people would agree. Some people are mistakenly believed to disagree with this just because they believe that it is easy to be led astray by such information.
Can I ask for a recommendation on Freud and/or Jung here? I have never tried to read them, and my knowledge comes only from popular depictions (which seem to be unfair, tbh). I did read The Denial of Death, which made quite a bit of sense to me. What’s the best way to learn about the work of Freud or Jung for someone who is worried about it being just woo but willing to give it a chance?
Well, no, it's... a very big deal. It's the deal. But asking for a comprehensive explanation of how psychoanalysis relates to introspection and the problems thereof is kind of like asking "what does physics say about matter and how it moves?" How much time you got?
For listening material, and also probably the easiest place to start: look at the backlog of episodes for the Why Theory podcast, pick one that interests you (quite a few of them specifically analyze different works by Freud and Lacan), and just dig in. (Lacan was another important psychoanalytic thinker who took himself to be developing and expanding upon the work of Freud.) They're fun to listen to and they usually stay relatively grounded in terms of concrete examples.
For reading material:
For Freud, many of his works are self-contained and you can start almost anywhere, although I'm fond of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Totem and Taboo.
The book that actually turned me onto psychoanalysis in the first place was Bruce Fink's A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. It... does have a decent amount of woo jargon, but as the name implies, it's focused on showing how psychoanalysis works in a clinical setting, so you can skip the theory parts if you want and just read the case studies, if you want to get an idea of how this stuff actually works as a therapeutic practice using real life stories.
The Jung book that MBTI was based on is called Psychological Types.
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