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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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So it is not as big a deal as one might think. Got it.

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?

Can I ask for a recommendation on Freud and/or Jung here?

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.