... how I failed to observe Freud's birthday on Saturday: Freud has never impressed me. Since I first read him, when I was in high school, I have never been able to figure out why any rational human being would for a moment think that the Oedipus Complex was anything other than arrant nonsense. (Seriously, tell me when you first realized you wanted to kill Dad and have sex with Mom?) Now I know people will say, "Well, you believe in the Incarnation and the Resurrection." But they don't claim to be scientific statements. They are articles of faith.
At any rate, Roger Scruton says much that I might have said myself about the not-so-great man: Sigmund Fraud.
I agree. Freud attained his following by listening to and indulging the concerns of what were essentially super-yuppies: rich, lonely and basically frivolous people. I've always wondered how much he had to say was based on projecting his own personality onto the rest of us. I don't think his 'work' could be called scientific. He created that impression maybe, but no substance.
ReplyDeleteFreud's work may, ultimately, have been "arrant nonsense" and unscientific, but he did start us on the path of the scientific study of the human mind. Gotta give him that.
ReplyDeleteWell, maybe - though Book III of St. Augustine's Confessions anticipates everything worthwhile in depth psychology. It is astonishingly "modern."
ReplyDeleteI have read quite a bit about Freud, including a couple of weighty biographies, and I think (not sure, and happy to be corrected) that he was the first person to explicitly connect the mind to physiology, and hence, with this insight, founded a whole field of enquiry. (He was a physiologist originally.)
ReplyDeleteI think that has to count for something, if it is true, even if he did get it all wrong, as these sorts of "paradigm shift" insights are all too rare. (I will take a rain check on that issue, not being so sure.)
I am not so sure that Augustine can't give Will a run for his money in this instance. Nor would I be surprised to learn that Will knew Gus's work.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure, either, if Freud was the first to explicitly connect mind and brain. Surely, people before Freud must have noticed that brain damage can adversely affect thought processes? But even if we grant the old boy that much he sure didn't do much with it. I also agree with C.S. Lewis that he lousy literary critic to boot.