Hmmm... a person whom we know today, greatly deceived people regarding the Anna O case (Anna O = Bertha Pappenheim), or lied about the Wolf Man and the Rat Man, who knew perfectly well that some of his methods were not working (as he confessed in many of his letters we have today), but insisted in using them, and, last but not least, a lot of pseudoscientific stuff he said plus the fact that most of the other scientific stuff he said which was eventually refuted. I mean, its not like he greatly harmed some families in Europe with the this dream shows that your parents molested you sort of interpretation! I do give him credit, though, on several aspects: he pointed at the importance of subconscious and unconscious processes, he underscored the importance of projection, repression, and the symbolic meaning of dream events. Yet, even in this case, we should use his writings with a grain of salt. Not only was contemporary psychology in its early stages, but we know today that subconscious and unconscious processes work in a very different way than he and many of his followers envisioned (a lot of it has been demystified by neuroscientific works). I also credit him for his theory having affected culture in general, and I dont discourage his works being taught in the Humanities in *this* sense ... but I think that he should not be taught as if his views are *still* considered scientific despite everything we know now. I say this because this man is *still* being celebrated today as if he were a hero. ~ sigh ~ Well, if you want to know about a lot of what has been found on Freud, here I give you some links (although this is not an exhaustive list): -On Anna O. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_O. (I also highly recommend the book by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen _Remembering Anna O.: A Century of Mystification_.) -On Wolf Man en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Pankejeff -On Rat Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Man -On Freuds lack of discipline in using his methods (which would question all his own studies), needless to say the kinds of behavior he had which today would be considered breaches of professional ethics (even by his own days standards): nytimes/1985/11/12/science/freud-s-mind-new-details-revealed-in-documents.html nytimes/1984/01/24/science/freud-secret-documents-reveal-years-of-strife.html And this is just a tiny part of the whole discussion. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend Frederick Crews _The Unauthorized Freud_, and Richard Websters _Why Was Freud Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis_. These are not the only two books, nor all of the links, about Freuds own dark side, but these are enough for now. These are great starting points about the demystified Freud.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 21:39:49 +0000
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