Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [133]
—Even if much of our behavior is unconsciously driven, this does not prove Freud’s claim that we actively repress unpalatable information. But neurological case studies supporting the concept of repression are beginning to accumulate. Vilayanur Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego reported a study, now famous, of a woman whose left arm was paralyzed by a stroke but who remained completely unaware of it for days, until Ramachandran artificially stimulated the right hemisphere of her brain; she then recognized that her arm was paralyzed and that she had unconsciously ignored the defect for eight days. But after the effects of stimulation wore off, she reverted to the belief that her arm was all right—and even forgot the part of an interview in which she had recognized the paralysis. Ramachandran, impressed, wrote: “The remarkable theoretical implication of those observations is that memories can indeed be selectively repressed…Seeing [this patient] convinced me, for the first time, of the reality of the repression phenomena that form the cornerstone of classical psychoanalytic theory.”101
—Dreams, which many anti-Freudians explained in terms devoid of Freudian meanings, do, after all, have meaning. Although some dreaming is driven by brain chemistry and reflects random cortical activity, brain scans and other evidence show that dreaming is generated by a network of structures centered on the forebrain’s instinctual-motivational circuitry; this has given rise to a number of theories about dreaming similar to Freud’s. Solms and others have also found that dreaming stops completely when certain fibers deep in the frontal lobe have been severed (as by an accident or brain surgery)—a symptom that coincides with a general reduction in motivated behavior.
Solms’s conclusion: “It appears that Freud’s broad brushstroke organization of the mind is destined to play a role similar to the one Darwin’s theory of evolution served for molecular genetics—a template on which emerging details can be coherently arranged…It is gratifying to find that we can build on the foundations he laid, instead of having to start all over.”
In the end, we have to disagree with Freud’s modest statement that he was not a great man but had made a great discovery. Only a great man could have done so.
* Freud felt that the use of the couch helped focus the patient’s attention on his own ideas, not on the analyst, but he also admitted having a personal motive: “I cannot put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day (or more)” (On Beginning the Treatment [1913], S.E. XII: 134).
* The three works: The Future of an Illusion, 1927 (on the origins of religion); Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930 (on the control of human desires that makes society possible); and Moses and Monotheism, 1939 (on the origins of monotheism).
* Freud’s theory of female psychology has come to be widely considered parochial and culture-bound, and thoroughly disproven by the changes of the past four decades in the status of women and the nature of femininity. Freud himself admitted that his understanding of feminine psychology was “incomplete and fragmentary” and once said, “The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does woman want?’” (Jones, 1955: 421).
* A personal note: I remember being astonished when in the early 1950s I visited the psychiatrist Dr. Karl Menninger to interview him about suicidal patients and found him wearing a white coat.
EIGHT
The
Measurers
“Whenever You Can, Count”: Francis Galton
At the 1884