And Freud's take on defense mechanisms still holds relevance. Few people, including psychologists, would deny that we all too regularly employ such defenses as denial, repression, projection, intellectualization, and rationalization. The same can be said for his ideas on transference and catharsis.
To deny this would be hallucinatory, ludicrous — and completely unfair to his legacy. Take his views on homosexuality, for example. Though many critics are loathe to admit it, he was actually very progressive for his time. Unlike most of his peers , Freud believed that homosexuality resulted from arrested development — but he refused to characterize it as an illness, and did not believe that it should be criminalized. Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development.
Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest among them Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc. It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too. As for Freudian psychotherapy, it lives on — but barely. These days, only 1 in about 20, Americans still use it. Elyn Saks, a law professor who suffers from schizophrenia, says that without it, her mental health would be seriously compromised.
Then, armed with that information, they can make desired changes. People do sometimes describe feelings or behaviors in therapy that conform remarkably to aspects of Freud's psychosexual theories such as a patient of mine with erectile problems whose associations to a sexual encounter led to an image of having sex with his mother, followed by some unpleasant anal imagery.
Nevertheless, psychotherapists who rely on theories derived from Freud do not typically spend their time lying in wait for phallic symbols. Atkinson, E. Smith, D. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, , and was published in revised form in the 14th edition and the 15th edition The version posted here has been updated since the original publication.
With books like The Interpretation of Dreams , The Psychopathology of Everyday Life , and the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis , works which achieved high levels of popular success, Freud changed our image of ourselves.
Whereas Copernicus showed that the Earth did not lie at the center of the universe, and Darwin showed that humans were descended from "lower" animals, Freud claimed to show that human experience, thought, and action was determined not by our conscious rationality, but by irrational forces outside our conscious awareness and control -- forces when could only be understood, and controlled, by an extensive therapeutic process he called psychoanalysis. Freud also changed the vocabulary with which we understand ourselves and others.
Before you ever opened this textbook, you already knew something about the id and the superego, penis envy and phallic symbols, castration anxiety and the Oedipus complex. In popular culture, psychotherapy is virtually identified with psychoanalysis.
Freudian theory, with its focus on the interpretation of ambiguous events, lies at the foundation of "postmodern" approaches to literary criticism such as deconstruction. Freud's cultural influence is based, at least implicitly, on the premise that his theory is scientifically valid. But from a scientific point of view, classical Freudian psychoanalysis is dead as both a theory of the mind and a mode of therapy Crews, ; Macmillan, No empirical evidence supports any specific proposition of psychoanalytic theory, such as the idea that development proceeds through oral, anal, phallic, and genital stages, or that little boys lust after their mothers and hate and fear their fathers.
Does it detract from our appreciation of his genius that the freelance historian Peter Swales has shown that there most probably was no such young man, that the memory lapse was probably committed by Freud himself and that the woman he was worried about was Minna Bernays, the sister of Freud's own wife? Well, not to Lear. His reaction is, "I couldn't care less. I could imagine someone in Freud's position changing the story in that way.
But it's just not very important [to our appreciation of his work]. If Einstein had a romance with his sister-in-law, it wouldn't change what we thought about the speed of light.
But this is Freud! His own thoughts and emotions were precisely the raw material from which he derived much of his theory. He is our postmodern Plato, our secular Saint Augustine.
He fascinates us endlessly, even those who have made their reputations in part by denouncing him, like Frederick Crews, emeritus professor of English at UC Berkeley.
Explaining Freud's enduring interest, he observes caustically, "Academic humanists find that by entering Freud's world of interlocking symbols and facile causal assertions they will never run out of shrewd-looking, counterintuitive things to say in their essays and books. Don't we all need an excuse now and then to sound smart by referring to interpreta-tion as "hermeneutics"? Kramer finds echoes of Freud in T. Eliot's dreamlike symbolism, in the emotional transference of boss to father to son in Joyce's "Dubliners.
Soprano, take your hands off Dr. Melfi's throat, please. She adds that in any case she finds that the language of analysis is being supplanted in popular culture by the jargon of neuroscience. People talk about getting their endorphins going. Someone acting rashly is said to be "frontal," referring to the part of the brain involved in impulse control.
Admittedly, hermeneutics isn't exactly where the action is in American society today. In the id-driven worlds of politics, athletics and business, Freud is the ultimate non-bottom-line guy; he pays off five years down the road in the non-negotiable currency of self-knowledge. When President George W. Bush told an interviewer in that he wouldn't "go on the couch" to rethink his decisions about the Iraq war, it so outraged Dr.
Kerry J. Sulkowicz, a professor of psychiatry at NYU Medical School, that he wrote a letter to The New York Times pro-testing this slur on analysis, with the implication "that not understanding oneself is a matter of pride. Freud's writings on group dynamics and sibling rivalry can serve the thoughtful CEO well, Sulkowicz adds.
It helps, though, if the source is somewhat obscured. And this is just a small sampling of his theories and ideas that have been debunked in the decades since their presentation. But, Freud has, for the most part, fallen completely out of favor in academics. Simply put, no one taking psychology seriously would use him as a credible source.
Freud was absolutely correct in his assertion that we are not masters of our own mind. Freud also argued for the idea that the brain can be compartmentalized, that brain function can be broken down into individual parts. But, his larger thesis of psychic compartmentalization has gone to influence such thinkers as the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky , who talks about the society of mind.
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