Is america under hypnotic control?

[Dark Jaguar]

Fairly certain that, today, Freud's ideas are generally considered as invalid, if not entirely worthless.

Well that is true of a lot of them, because he generally didn't do a lot of controlled studies. I believe he actually gave a lot of his patients cocaine and noted their improved moods when they left as an indicator of it's valid use as a depression treatment.

HOWEVER, not everything he said is worthless. There's some diamonds in the rough. "Projection" has some evidence backing it and seems valid, for example. It's just that concepts like Id and Super ego are largely outdated. Current concepts of the subconcious have pretty much outright replaced that old conjecture. There certainly is a subconcious but it has lost a lot of those mystical overtones and is a far more mundane thing, thought of more programmatically. Pretty much anything our brain does that we aren't conciously aware of is subconcious now, such as heart rate control and triggering stomach acid release. However the majority of such activities have little bearing on the parts of our brain having to do with personality.

One thing's for sure, dream analysis is considered pretty much dead as an idea. Nothing ever really backed it up as worthwhile, and interpretting items in dreams as absolute representations of other thoughts is certainly pseudo science material. That sort of thing really stems from ancient times though. Everyone's tried seeing meaning in those strange images in our heads. The evidence seems to favor that the meaning is really more or less a combination of catagorizing memories as we sleep and the low level activity of certain areas of our brain resulting in a lot of generation of more or less crazy procedural thoughts. Our brains go way beyond Spore in being procedural, so when you shut off large portions of it and allow others to run in low activity mode it basically means they still have to work with what inputs they get so it results in a pretty messy assortment since our dreams don't really need to be in any particular form at all to enhance our survival, so nothing's selected for. That also explains the "flow" from scene to scene in a dream. Every scene affects the other very directly. For more information check your local library. Oh, and our brain's workings when dreaming, or drunk, or high or whatever are no more the "real" us than we are when our brains are in normal waking operation. Our waking selves are how we TRULY are when all centers of the brain are fully awake and aren't over stimulated or inhibited. Our sleeping selves are how we TRULY are when large parts of our brain are more or less turned off. I just prefer my waking self, but since I don't really remember my dreams the majority of the time anyway, it's a moot point.

Oh, and subliminal messaging is pretty much considered a hoax. It was claimed many decades ago by some guy he did tests to show that people shown an add really quickly during a movie bought more of that item by a statistically significant amount, and that would be evidence, but he's never been able to provide any evidence at all he did the test, and with a claim like that you'd think he would take the time. Further, and this is a key part of the scientific method, other scientists who got very interested tried to reproduce those results and have all failed. It's safe to say he was faking it. Study after study attempting to replicate those results shows no effect of subliminal messaging. People shown quick flashes of pictures of a snickers bar during a short movie and then asked to pick from an assortment of snacks in front of them (basically a theater lobby scenario) pick the snickers no greater than chance would predict, and when ASKED if they notice any particular cravings they say what they crave is the item shown no greater than chance. These are done double blinded so the interviewer has no idea what the flashing image is either.

And, to get even more off topic, it doesn't help the psychiatry field that there are a billion self styled "therapists" out there who just up and decided to start "helping people" one day and have nothing backing their methods but a nice office and an assuring smile. And, the public in general, unlike with other sorts of doctors, have no information on how to tell what's the junk psychiatry from the established medicine.