By: Hypatia

Hypatia — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:24:03 +0000

Kramer as great (and seemingly similar) intro to Freud, def. worth reading:http://www.amazon.com/Freud-Inventor-Peter-D-Kramer/dp/0060598956

By: bowser

bowser — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:30:09 +0000

“It seems that some of the techniques and clinical observations are still remarkably accurate and useful to the modern psychologist”
[p]Just a technical point here, but these techniques do not comprise a “theory”. They are just that, methods for observation. A method is not a theory.[/p]
Also, I question that Freud’s ideas were theories, in the scientific sense of the word. A theory make predictions that can be measured, replicated, and verified. Indeed, that is what makes science what it is.
Psychoanalysts are notorious for explaining away evidence contrary to the ideas of psychoanalysis by appealing to the ideas of psychoanalysis itself… Any scientist who does research and collects empirical data that refutes these “theories” is ‘suffering from a reaction formation’, etc.
Freud’s ideas cannot be falsified because the objections to them are always dismissed by explaining them away in terms of the ideas themselves… any such body of knowledge that has these properties cannot be called a theory.
Also, “It describes the process where we re-experience certain feelings and relationship patterns we developed with important people in the past when we meet new people who share similarities with the original person.”
This doesn’t say that Freud was right about this, not in terms of what he claimed was the basis for this kind of behavior. As you say in your post, it “describes”, it doesn’t explain. I’d bet serious money that such studies explain such behavior by framing it in a context of learning, conditioning, etc. rather than any ‘psychosexual repression’ or other such, again, unrefutable, ideas. The contribution here is a term applied to a behavior, not an explanation or prediction of that behavior.
Yes, had Freud been a philosopher, he would have been taken more seriously, but not many people in psychology and cognitive science take philosophers seriously these days anyway. Which in its own way, is rather sad.

By: Anspik

Anspik — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:02:42 +0000

what is fascinating is how everyone and anyone feels free to comment on freud’s work like they studied him for years

Comments on: A small dose of Freud

By: Hypatia

By: bowser

By: Anspik