Talk:Sigmund Freud

Categories

Categorising a man like Freud should represent his career and life adequately. He was a qualified doctor and neurologist. He founded the practice of psychoanalysis. As a qualified doctor working with subjects suffering psychological problems he was both a psychologist and psychiatrist. It's part of our category system to have and use overlapping categories; otherwise users find to their surprise an obvious person is not in a category they are searching.

Please do not take out categories that are pertinent and useful.

Macdonald-ross (talk) 06:17, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I agree strongly, and this is a good example of why Wikipedia allows overlapping categories. Kansan (talk) 06:27, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

"As a qualified doctor working with subjects suffering psychological problems he was both a psychologist and psychiatrist." Sorry, but that's simply wrong. Working with people suffering from psychological problems doesn't make anyone a psychologist; it makes someone, if anything, a psychotherapist. Psychology and psychotherapy are not the same thing, and neither one of them is the same as psychiatry or psychoanalysis. If this article makes elementary confusions of that kind, then it is serving its readers very poorly. The fact that people may expect to see Freud categorized as a psychologist doesn't mean that he should be. Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 07:04, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Being a doctor doesn't make anyone a psychologist or a psychiatrist either. The idea that Freud was a psychologist is a popular fallacy, one that Simple English Wikipedia shouldn't be perpetuating if it wants to be a high-quality work of reference. The psychologist category has been removed from the main English Wikipedia article about Freud; it should be here too. Consider the possibility that the category people might expect to find someone in could be the wrong category - getting the facts right ought to take priority over giving people what they expect. Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 07:12, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I see on enWP that Jung is categorised as psychologist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, philosopher and symbolist! I can see a point to all of these. It's consistent with policy in enWP and Simple to apply whatever categories may be useful. I can see we need a 'psychoanalysts' category, though we have only a few biographies for it at present. Macdonald-ross (talk) 08:57, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

That is preposterous. Identifying Freud as a psychologist or a psychiatrist is not "useful" - it is factually wrong. And that is not simply a matter of my opinion, it's what any reliable or competent discussion of Freud would tell you. For example, see Edward Shorter in A Brief History of Psychiatry: "It is Kraepelin, not Freud, who is the central figure in the history of psychiatry. Freud was a neurologist who did not see patients with psychotic illness." Or Arthur S. Reber and Emily Reber in The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology - even though it's a work of reference on psychology, it's careful not to describe Freud as a psychologist, and under the entry "Freudian" we read of the "Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud." Numerous other sources could be found to support the same point. Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 19:34, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Oh, and Jung is a completely different question. As is well known, he saw quite different kinds of patients to those Freud encountered - people who were psychotic and severely disturbed, not simply neurotic. Jung really was a psychiatrist; Freud was not. Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 19:38, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

Freud's sister

I have removed material for the lead. The reason is that the source for the material, Freud's Sister, is a work of fiction, a novel by Goce Smilevski. Polisher of Cobwebs (talk) 02:34, 21 December 2011 (UTC)