From Season 3, Episode 6 of My Life on the D-List:
TV SHOW PRODUCER [preparing Kathy for the questions she’ll be asked] What do you love about handbags?
KATHY GRIFFIN That they are a statement that I’m rich.
This reminds me of Albert Einstein saying his two favorite thinkers were Thorstein Veblen and Sigmund Freud. We really are smarter now, just as James Flynn says. Einstein, surely the best physicist of his generation, was unable to see that Freud was bogus, and, although he was right about Veblen, talented comedians now say exactly what Veblen said.
More Kathy Griffin in this week’s EW: “I have not read a book since last week’s Us Weekly.” That makes two of us, Kathy.
Actually modern neuroscience is vindicating much of Freud’s hunches about the human psyche. Psychotherapy itself can be likened to incentive learning, of which my colleague Bernard Balleine studies the neuroscience of in rats. Sure, Freud made some glaring errors that drew ire from the more “scientific” community, but unfortunately he has been derided and misrepresented by most scholars and laypeople alike but without knowledge of what he actually wrote and said.
What hunch of Freud’s is neuroscience vindicating? I’ve read lots of Freud. I kept hoping the next book would make it clear — but it didn’t.
@Aaron,
“Actually modern neuroscience is vindicating much of Freud’s hunches about the human psyche.”
I second Seth’s question – which ones? How many hunches vindicated: >10%, >20%, >50%? Finally, what does “vindicating […] hunches” mean here (how strong of a claim is it – how much distance between his ‘hunch’ and an actual contemporary theory that is well established)?
Andrew, I have no idea what Aaron is talking about. As for Flynn and Einstein, I’m not saying I’m smarter than Einstein. I’m saying that, in agreement with Flynn, that I live among smarter people. To say Freud is bogus is nothing new these days. The curiosity is the opposite — smart well-educated people, such as a Berkeley professor of English, who write long articles against Freud. Don’t they realize it’s obvious? If the average IQ in Einstein’s time had been 15 points higher, I suspect the scoffing of his friends would have set Einstein straight.
I already gave one example. According to Howard Shevrin, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan Psychology Department, the whole enterprise of psychotherapy is largely predicated on leading the patient or client to discovering the source of their problem (anxiety, fear, or other types of emotional conflict) through a dialog with the therapist. According to Howie, the therapist often sees the likely underlying problem early on in the psychotherapeutic process, but just telling the patient would not help them much. It isn’t the cognitive knowledge of the nature of their problem that will help them, but reliving the problem or facing it directly from memory that allows the patient to resolve the emotional or psychological problem. This is very similar to incentive learning (in people and rats). Tony Dickinson, an experimental psychologist at Cambridge University, related a tale of drinking too much wine and eating watermellon as a child on a trip to Spain. The next day, he went back to the market for more watermellon which he was craving, but as soon as he bought one, opened it up and smelled and tasted it, he discovered that he was repulsed by it. He had acquired a conditioned taste aversion to the watermellon, but didn’t realize it until he learned about the new incentive value of the watermellon. This is called incentive learning, and there is a parallel phenomenon in rats which Tony has shown. A rat first learns to press a lever to get a type of food in a skinner box. Then the rat is allowed to eat that food in its home cage followed by getting sick (with injections of lithium chloride). Finally, when the rat is returned to the skinner box, it presses the lever avidly, but when the food is actually delivered it will refuse to eat it. That is, the rat engages in a goal-directed response (lever pressing) until it is faced with the food reward and it discovers that it now doesn’t like it. Bernard Balleine, a behavioral neuroscientist in the psychology department at UCLA (and former Ph.D. student of Tony Dickinson) has dissected the neural circuitry contributing to both goal-directed learning and incentive learning. I believe Freudian psychoanalysis involves a similar kind of incentive learning that the patient must be confronted with (as the rat is confronted with the revalued food) in order to realize and thus resolve (or deal with) their problem.
A second point on which Freud seemed to be correct was on his notion of primary versus secondary process–a central tenet of Freudian theory. These processes map very nicely onto attributional versus relational processes in cognitive psychology (see for example papers by Douglas Medin).
Thanks, Aaron. I find it hard to imagine anyone reading Freud and predicting, even a little, the two phenomenon you mention. Here’s a description of his primary/secondary distinction:
from https://www.answers.com/topic/primary-process-secondary-process. It sounds like an idea about motivation, not about how we think (cognitive psychology).
Hi Seth,
Thanks for the definitions. I actually have not read a lot of Freud. I used to shun him thinking he was at best a quack. But a conversation with Howie Shevrin, one of the leading modern proponents of psychoanalytic theory in psychological research, I have revised my opinion of Freud. It was Howie who described to me primary and secondary process in cognitive terms. One of his collaborators, Linda Brakel, has written a book on the use of psychoanalytic theory in cognitive research. The book is titled “Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and the A-rational Mind (International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry)”.