Dear Tipsters,
I seek your collective wisdom. On the advice of a friend wishing to
enlighten me, I recently read Drew Westen's (1998) Psych Bull article
entitled "The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a
psychodynamically informed psychological science." He asks the reader to
set aside critiques of Freud himself, since it's not fair to criticize a
guy who died in 1939. Instead, he enjoins the reader to examine
contemporary psychodynamic theory, and in the article he seeks to present
evidence of its utility for modern psychology. He argues that there are
basic propositions which were initially Freudian and have now become
mainstream, including things like the centrality of unconscious processes.
He states that either we are "all Freudians now... [or]...one could equally
contend that psychology has independently come around to some of the basic
propositions of contemporary psychodynamic theory and has done so in an
empirically sound way so that contemporary psychodynamic thought remains
superfluous" (which latter fallacy he seeks to refute).
There are a number of things that bother me about his comments. Unless I'm
missing something, Westen's logic seems somewhat tortured--e.g. in his view
Pennebaker's work on journalling is supportive of basic psychodynamic
concepts, as is the entire social cognitive literature on priming effects,
cognitive neuroscience's findings on parallel distributed processing, etc..
To me this seems analogous to crediting Leonardo da Vinci with all
achievements in modern aviation.
So, I am looking to TIPSTERS for suggestions on good recent critiques of
contemporary psychodynamic theory, about which I know very little. I would
be grateful if any of you out there who have more depth and breadth in this
area and could suggest readings.
Thanks!!
Esther
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Esther Yoder Strahan, Ph.D
Chair, Department of Psychology
Heidelberg College
310 East Market Street
Tiffin, Ohio 44883-2462, U.S.A.
Tel. 419-448-2238
Fax 419-448-2236
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