The Doctor Is In: Rescuing Freud from Modern Misunderstanding
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Still, I'm not entirely convinced that
The simultaneous presence in every individual of the most evil and the most generous impulses makes society an inherent contradiction
And then yeah, lines like
No brain scan is ever going to destroy a belief in our own subjectivity.
Incidentally, Freud seems to be incredibly popular in circles that either take a highly analytic approach to religion (ashkenazi jews, particularly in NYC) or that exhibit an ascetic rejection of religion (Paris).
The influence and value of Freud's work in the humanities is difficult to understate, but none of this changes the fact that his theories don't yield testable hypotheses and don't predict behavior.
For example, just yesterday I was reading an article showing that people are likely to make naming mistakes involving things from the same category. So if you mistakenly call one thing by another, you're sort of revealing an implicit categorization.
This isn't surprising, and these sorts of errors have actually been used as measurement devices, but it's very much in line with psychodynamic theory, and very testable. Basically the whole idea of a Freudian slip at some level.
Much of modern cognitive theory is based on basic ideas first elaborated on by Freud. People love to criticize psychodynamic theory, but then turn around and fill their work with implicit, subconscious, competing processes.
I'm not saying that Freud got all the details right, or that he wasn't wrong about anything. Many of his developmental ideas, for example, are probably totally off base. However, his basic ideas about modular, subconscious, parallel competing processes are still dominant today, and just go by different names. Old wine, new labels.
Sure, just like the basic idea that the bulk of our mental processes are not amenable to introspection is "basically right". Still, there's a distinction between ideas that influence scientific theory and actually are scientific theories.
The problem is that the mechanisms proposed by Freud are often defined so broadly as to simultaneously a) prevent any useful prediction of behavior and b) allow for subsequent findings to be reinterpreted in a psychoanalytic context. In other words, it's virtually impossible to falsify any of Freud's claims. The notion of superego, for instance, is so general that literally any supervisory process can qualify, yet the id/ego/superego model utterly fails to predict human behavior.
This is the hallmark of pseudoscience. Freud's saving grace is that his theories were subsequently refined into actual scientific theories. Psychoanalytic theory is to psychology as alchemy is to chemistry.
Note that I'm being very serious. Explicit in alchemical theory are several ideas that were essential and seminal to the modern study of chemistry: the notion that there are elemental substances, that substances can be "transmuted" through physical means, that substances interact with each other to produce compound substances, etc.
Still, it ain't science...
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P.S.: here is an answer I posted to cogsci.stackoverflow about what Freud got right. http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/a/8368/2926
Freud believed that everything in adult psychology is an elaboration of something already there in the infant mind. That is dubious, but even if you accept it, there is the problem that Freud did not investigate infant psychology directly, but instead assumed it is basically irrational, asocial and radically out of touch with reality.
In recent decades infant psychology has been the subject of extensive empirical study, and it turns out to be much different from what Freud thought. See, for instance , <i>The Scientist in the Crib</i> by Gopnik, Meltzoff and Kuhl.
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