Esther Yoder Strahan wrote:
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.
The "centrality" of unconscious processes in modern cognitive psychology derives not from Sigmund Freud, but from the earlier work of Hermann Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt, both of whom hypothesized "uncounscious inferences" back when Freud was a but a boy. The revival of the unconscious cognitive in the 1960s and '70s came about not as a result of the acceptance of Freudian theory by scientific research psychologists (indeed, by that time even the many psychiatrists had fallen off the wagon) but, rather primarily a result of the urge to re-introduce cognitive processes into psychology without rehashing the fruitless arguments about consciousness that had given rise to behaviorism in the first place. Helmholtz and Wundt provided the perfect precedent.
Regards, -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-5115 ex. 66164 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.yorku.ca/christo Don't blame me; I voted for Kodos. -Homer Simpson, "Treehouse of Horror VII" ====================================== --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
