Posted: Apr 06, 2010 12:53 am
katja z wrote:
No answers here but two questions that boil down to "wow really?" I mean, did he really retract the link of hysteria to traumatic childhood experiences and even more, was the unconscious really an established idea at his time? That's not how his contribution was presented to me at school
Any reading suggestions on the history of the notion of unconscious processes? It would be interesting to compare that to developments in 19th century and early 20th century literature, especially psychological realism to early modernism.
With the sexual abuse stuff, Shrunk has already mentioned Freud's Seduction Theory. Pretty much all the details of his idea, and the proposed mechanisms for how these events cause mental disorders were completely wrong, but as far as I know he was one of the first to posit sexual abuse as a cause of mental disorders.
As for the "unconscious" affecting our functioning, there are a couple of things you have to keep in mind before looking at some writings at the time of Freud. The first being that most will not refer to their concept as the "unconscious", but they refer to the same thing. And secondly, Freud's ideas of the "unconscious" were more extravagant and more incorrect than his contemporaries.
So, the most obvious research we can look to for discussions on unconscious processes affecting behavior is that of the biologists, for example Darwin's evolutionary ideas had some important implications for behavior (which were later developed by the sociobiologists/evo psychs). Perhaps the most clear example of this is physiologist Ivan Pavlov's work with classical conditioning, which is an "unconscious" process.
But looking closer at psychology, we have a prime example in Wilhelm Wundt who set up the field of experimental psychology. He often included unconscious processes into his theories of perception (as did Helmholtz) - more information here. William James focused mostly on consciousness (whenever you refer to "a stream of consciousness", you are referencing his thoughts), and he is sometimes credited with the initial development of the idea of the unconscious (explained briefly here).
And perhaps the most damning evidence of all, even wikipedia acknowledges that Freud did 'discover' the unconscious.
(This is also ignoring the claims of Freud's plagiarism which means that, if true, not only was he not the first person to investigate the concept, it wasn't even his unoriginal idea).
endless psych wrote:
However some of Freuds ideas, on humour for instance, have some degree of merit even if only on a philosophical level. Babys and bathwater innit.
I never liked his ideas on humour, but maybe that's just me..
