Sigmund Freud - Critique Freud

Critique Freud

[Critique Freud]

WAS FREUD REALLY A SCIENTIST?

• Empirical

             - Purely case study

             - Mostly middle class Victorian woman

• Falsifiable

             - Confirmation Bias

             - Ex) Freud believed that what we want to be become our dream.

                      In fact, one of his patients said 'I dreamed that my step mother visit me.

                      But I don't want my step-mother to visit to this hospital' and refuted.

                      After Freud heard what his patient said, he answered,

                      'Because you want to refute my theory, you had that kind of dream.'

• Consistent

             - Definitions of terms changed

• Reductionism

             - Reductive to Id and to Childhood Experiences.

• Freud & Sexism

             - Women as castrated men.

• Freud's psychosexual Theory of development
• Importance of childhood events
• Power of unconscious memories
• Defend mechanisms
• MRI brain study

             - Prefrontal cortex as seat of consciousness

             - Midbrains & Hindbrains as controller of unconscious activity

             - Natural brain Ablation

             - Drams also involve the prefrontal cortex

• Phineas Gage
• Focus on childhood experience

             - Developmental Psychology : Adult experience

• Focus on the Unconscious mind

             - Cognitive Psychology : Focus on the conscious mind

• Hard to study

             - Lack falsifiability

             - Example : Dream

[Personality Theory]

• Determinism  VS  Fee choice
• Pessimism  VS  Optimism
• Causation  VS  Teleology
• Conscious  VS  Unconscious
• Biology  VS  Environment
• Uniqueness  Vs  Similarity