United States or Mozambique ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Let me say at the beginning that I have the greatest and most profound respect for Freudian theories as interpreted by G. Stanley Hall and other men of like scholarly ability, but I have never been able to accept the more extreme form of Freudianism as interpreted by some of the most prolific writers in this field. I have found that the charges made by Habermann are substantially true.
Bernard Hart, who is one of those happy individuals who get the best out of Freudianism, shows the difference between the two kinds of belief by comparing our belief that the earth goes around the sun and that the man who abuses a woman is a cad.
Also how there it became the complex, which, like a stage manager, never appeared before the footlights of the conscious, but determined its content just the same by inhibition or stimulation of any character or scene to be enacted upon it. A complete critique of Freudianism cannot be attempted here.
And do we so thoroughly understand this animal nature? Does not all this material of Freudianism consist of variations upon social burdens imposed on the original human nature? To be sure, at every moment of life, choices have to be made, and choice involves the clashing of instincts and motives, with victory for one or some, and defeat for the others.
Do our inhibitions really inhibit, or do we build up another self or set of selves that rise to the surface under strange forms, under the guise of disease manifestations? Sigmund Freud and his followers have made definite answers to the foregoing, answers that are incorporated in a doctrine called Freudianism.
The disproof of this and of Freudianism are equally impossible. But, on the other hand, have the Freudians presented any proof or argument on the affirmative side of this question? They are over fond of saying, "Freud has proven thus and so," but in what did the proof consist?
That there were such laws his metaphysics assured him; and the existence to-day of a science of psychology substantiates his belief. The most popular of recent psychologies Freudianism is based upon the principle that nothing whatever happens in the mental life of man, waking or asleep, that is not specifically determined by ascertainable causes.
Freudianism has borrowed the time-honored dictum that every sensation has a natural result in action and has elaborated it into the statement that every affective state, every desire and craving of whatever sort, needs a motor discharge, an avenue of outlet.
That the normalists in this country so persistently ignore the unique opportunity to extend their purview into the psychopathological domain at the unique psychological moment that the development of Freudianism has offered, is to me a matter of sad disappointment and almost depression.
Word Of The Day