Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.

I am your host, Massimo Pilducci.

And with me, as always, is my co-host Julia Galef.

Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Massimo, our topics today include sex, love, masturbation, penis envy, castration, and edipal complexes.

Nice. So our spam mail is going to go up and hopefully so is going to be for the number of

hits because who is not interested in masturbation and the adipus complex anyway.

Yeah, castration might lower our number of listeners.

That's true. Good point.

So it's a trade-off.

So what is it about that all these things have in common?

So the common thread running through all of those salacious topics that we're going to cover today is psychoanalysis and specifically the Freudian science question mark that underlay it.

So we're going to talk about to what extent Freudianism and by extension psychoanalysis are scientific,

what principles you could look to to make that call,

and why psychoanalysis seems to have such a strong hold still in the field of psychotherapy?

Okay.

Although right there, I think that we should in fact be making a distinction that might come out more clearly later on between Freud's specific theories about the human psyche on the one hand and sort of the broader general practice of psychoanalysis. Because the problem with psychoanalysis is that literally it just means talk therapy,

which means that it's done in a huge number of different ways, not all of which are in fact

necessarily pseudo-scientific or certainly not all of them are underlined by a particular

theory of how the human psyche works. Some of them are sort of the emergence,

...