Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [132]
His demonstration of the importance and pervasiveness of unconscious mental factors was so effective that this once revolutionary idea is almost taken for granted today. The best art and literature of our time portrays human beings as creatures in conflict with themselves, subject to forces beyond their personal conscious control, and unaware of their own identities… Sigmund Freud was among the small handful of individuals whose work vitally affected not just a single field of specialization, but also an entire intellectual climate.96
The central component of that climate remains as real today, many psychologists and psychiatrists feel, as when Fancher made that statement in 1979. As Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and psychiatrist at the University of Chicago says, Freud’s reputation rests on the “core idea” that human life is “essentially conflicted,” but that the conflict is hidden from us because it stems from wishes and instincts that are actively repressed because we cannot tolerate recognizing them consciously.97
Yet others, even though they prize certain central concepts of Freudian psychology, fear that with the decline and fall of psychoanalysis those concepts are in danger of being forgotten. Eli Zaretsky, for one, feels less than optimistic that we will preserve the profound understandings Freud and psychoanalysis brought us. “Can [those understandings] survive the decline of psychoanalysis? Have the global speedup, the near collapse of the boundary between the public and the private, and computerization, which reduces the psychology of meaning to the transfer of information, eviscerated intrapsychic experience? Do our new insights into race, nations, and gender obviate the need for individuals to understand their own unique individuality?”98
Offsetting this rather gloomy view, there has been, lately, a surprising development: a resurgence of interest in psychoanalysis—both as therapy and as psychology. (Newsweek ’s March 27, 2006, cover, heralding a long and deeply researched article,99 consisted of Freud’s portrait and the headline FREUD IS NOT DEAD.)
In part, the revival represents a renewed interest in modern and greatly modified forms of analytic therapy. The American Psychoanalytic Association has actually grown a little in the past half-dozen years and now has 3,400 members, and a rival group, the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, has 1,500.
But in part—and far more important—a number of elements in Freudian psychology have recently been validated by contemporary neuroscience, making real his 1905 fantasy that psychological phenomena would someday be explicable in physical terms. In a review of this evidence in Scientific American, Professor Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town says:
For decades, Freudian concepts such as ego, id, and repressed desires dominated psychology and psychiatry’s attempts to cure mental illnesses. But better understanding of brain chemistry gradually replaced this model with a biological explanation of how the mind arises from neuronal activity. The latest attempts to piece together diverse neurological findings, however, are leading to a chemical framework of mind that validates the general sketch Freud made almost a century ago. A growing group of scientists are eager to reconcile neurology and psychiatry into a unified theory.100
Solms goes on to list several ways that neuroscience has validated Freudian ideas, among them the following:
—Neuroscience has shown that the major brain structures essential for forming conscious memories are not functional during the first two years of life, accounting for what Freud called infantile amnesia. As Freud supposed, it is not that we forget our earliest memories; we simply cannot recall them to consciousness. But this does not prevent them from affecting adult feelings and behavior. “It is becoming increasingly clear,” writes Solms, “that a good deal of our mental activity is unconsciously motivated.”
—Neuroscientists have identified unconscious memory systems that account for some irrational phobias.