I’ve not read Hugo, so I can’t comment on him, but this is a shockingly bad interpretation of Dostoevsky, who was, metaphorically speaking, the cold sore portraitist par excellence. And ‘volition’ never comes into it. Dostoevsky’s great characters never know entirely why they act and think as they do. So many of the great characters suffer from a ‘heightened consciousness’, yet this latter never provides the escape from their hellish and labyrinthine interior worlds.

There are many ways that psychoanalysts have gone about building theories and testing them. Some use the mainstream methods of other psychologists. Some accrue evidence for or against particular hypotheses. Certainly, a number of ideas in psychoanalysis have been falsified (like the seduction theory) from within psychoanalysis.

Regarding your last paragraph, I doubt Rand did that regarding Dostoevsky. She admired his technique and ability as a writer. Ayn Rand states: “Among novelists, the greatest are Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky….” – The Romantic Manifesto.
Continuing:
“The distinguishing characteristic of this top rank (apart from their purely literary genius) is their full commitment to the premise of volition in both of its fundamental areas: in regard to consciousness and to existence, in regard to man’s character and to his actions in the physical world. Maintaining a perfect integration of these two aspects, unmatched in the brilliant ingenuity of their plot structures, these writers are enormously concerned with man’s soul (i.e., his consciousness).”

Ayn Rand had particular views on the purpose of art. She defined art as being a selective recreation of metaphysical value judgements from memory but she thought the purpose was to inspire and provide spiritual fuel. Because like Aristotle she views the differentia of man to be his ability to reason. This is man’s nature and should lead to his flourishing. So this led to her advocating art that glorifies reason and volition, she wanted to paint a picture of the ideal man.
Dostoevsky was however quite malevolent in his story lines, so considering his skill and his acceptance of highly volitional characters, Ayn Rand would have particularly disliked him. She disliked Edgar Alan Poe too. Basically, she believed in a “benevolent universe” as she puts it.

This example from Ayn Rand explains it well IMO:
“If one saw, in real life, a beautiful woman wearing an exquisite evening gown, with a cold sore on her lips, the blemish would mean nothing but a minor affliction, and one would ignore it.
But a painting of such a woman would be a corrupt, obscenely vicious attack on man, on beauty, on all values—and one would experience a feeling of immense disgust and indignation at the artist. (There are also those who would feel something like approval and who would belong to the same moral category as the artist.)

Why did the artist add the cold sore? Rand would see this as mocking beauty per se. A malevolent view of the world.

Your last sentence is simply ad hominem. Rand is not a mainstream philosopher. She is studied in a handful of universities, but not many. This may change though, many modern philosophers are not studied at length. I’m sometimes quite pleasantly surprised to discover some modern philosophers I’ve never heard of with whom I share a great deal of common ground with.

People have certainly made the comparison between Kant and Plato, but I’m a bit undecided, myself.
The problem with conception is that it can never grasp the thing in itself. Kant believes in an ‘external’ reality, but he doesn’t believe that one can get at it directly, since everything we can process is registered through our perceptual (i.e. space and time) and cognitive (i.e. Kant’s categories) apparatus. This has the effect of creating two worlds – a world that we can grasp (that of appearances) and a world beyond us (the world ‘in itself’).

I think Freud is interesting in connection with Kant, since Kant makes the proto-Freudian move of claiming that all we know of consciousness (apart from Kant’s categories) is appearance. This leaves something radically unknowable at the other side of consciousness.

Are you saying that according to Kant some aspects of reality can be known via perception but some can’t such as moral considerations?

I think that Kant calls himself an ‘empirical realist’, and believes that perception as applied to science, etc, can be perfectly valid. Kant seeks to delimit metaphysics, and believes there are problems it cannot solve, but does not say the same of science and mathematics. His moral philosophy is a different story. I don’t think that Kant’s moral philosophy derives directly from his metaphysics. He basically argues that one should ‘act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’.

Freud was deemed unscientific by Popper on the grounds that psychoanalysis was allegedly unfalsifiable. Popper was wrong on that. Certainly, Freud’s methods wouldn’t pass for ‘scientific’ among mainstream Anglophone psychologists, but then, the latter have their problems with science also.

THR, your assertion that Rand clearly “didn’t understand anything she read” is just a little bit over the top don’t you think?

I think that, at a profound level, if one reads Dostoevsky or Tolstoy merely to see if they affirm your views on capitalism, and denounce them as ‘evil’ if they don’t, then yes, there is something fundamental that you don’t understand. This applies to Rand without any mitigating factors. In addition, she’s also brazenly intellectually dishonest or stupid, misrepresenting other philosophers repeatedly. This is why there are many great critiques of Kant, but Rand’s monomaniacal efforts are not among them.

From memory I think Rand approved of Nietzsche’s individualism, but she did not approve of the Romanticist philosophers generally. Predecessors such as Hegel have horrific political ideas. Nietzsche’s will to power ideas are ultimately contradictory to Rand’s ideas. Peikoff’s book, the Omminous parallels details some very disturbing quotes from Romanticist philosophers including Schopenhauer – probably from his views on eugenics – I can’t remember. Fichte comes to mind.

I don’t currently see any value in Freud. His hypotheses seem unscientific from what little I have read. ie: if you’re not behaving in an anal way, then you must be repressing it. How convenient.
Feel free to educate me further.

THR, your assertion that Rand clearly “didn’t understand anything she read” is just a little bit over the top don’t you think?

Also, as far as I’m aware Rand thought Dostoevsky was a brilliant author – but highly malevolent eg/ Crime and Punishment. I thought she highly admired his skill in integrating theme/character/plte. Dostoevsky married a young women he did not love out of pity. She eventually comitted suicide.