Freud, biology, and sociobiology.

Concurs with T. Parisi's (see record 1987-21061-001) suggestion that human psychodynamics cannot be profitably reduced to physiological events, but argues that Parisi's understanding of Freud and his conclusions regarding evolutionary sociobiology are seriously flawed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud, sociobiology, and contemporary psychoanalysis.

Contends that G. K. Leak and S. B. Christopher (see record 1982-29262-001) presented a well-reasoned synthesis of Freudian concepts and sociobiology. However, the present author feels that they failed to point out that metapsychological concepts (i.e., id, ego, and superego) are only a part of Freud's work and that there is a dearth of additional material that should be considered. To reduce Freudian constructs to less complex, more easily understood components, psychologists frequently attempt to present Freud's ideas as contrasting dualities (e.g., clinical vs metapsychological, humanistic vs mechanistic, hermeneutic vs positivistic). The author further asserts that these problems in interpretation may be a result of an inadequate translation into English that present Freud's concepts in a depersonalized, mechanistic, scientific manner. (10 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Will sociobiology really revive Freud?

Asserts that G. K. Leak and S. B. Christopher (see record 1982-29262-001) have demonstrated an excellent grasp of key areas in modern sociobiological thinking. However, the present author feels that they have unfortunately chosen to join the ranks of recent popularizers (e.g., D. P. Barash, 1979; E. O. Wilson, 1978) of sociobiology in stressing aspects of the theory that place heavy emphasis on biological determinism as opposed to behavioral plasticity. It is concluded that this emphasis leads Leak and Christopher to ignore the power of evolutionary theory in predicting and explaining individual differences. (10 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Why Freud failed: Some implications for neurophysiology and sociobiology.

Many parallels have recently been drawn between Freud's early work and the goals of the contemporary neurophysiology of mind and sociobiology. In this article it is argued that the portrayal of Freud as a reductionist and a biological determinist is incorrect. As a consequence, so is the perceived alignment of Freud with neurophysiology and sociobiology. But it is also true that, in his early work, Freud faced many of the same problems and issues that confront those interested in theories of mind and of human nature, and an understanding of how Freud faced these issues may inform our increasing interest in views of mind and behavior emanating from the life sciences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The challenge of sociobiology.

Challenges S. L. Washburn's (see record 1979-12215-001) criticism of the suggestion of E. O. Wilson et al (1976) that sociobiology has important implications for social scientists by arguing that such a focus does not have to mean a recurrence of social Darwinism, eugenics, and racism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud and disability.

Reviewed several books about Freud's work and Psychological Abstracts to provide an analysis of Freud's writings and theories as related to persons with physical disabilities and identify references to disability by Freud and pertinent supportive literature. Although Freud wrote very little about disability per se, many of his ideas can be applied directly to understanding attitudes toward disability and adjustment to disability processes. The relevance of concepts such as castration anxiety, fear of loss of love, ego strength, secondary gain, and the death instinct are specifically discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud on the Acropolis.

The relevance of Freud for the present and the future is often questioned because of the assertion that "our patients have changed," that is, that Freud's theorizing is too rooted in the past, and theoretical or technical innovation is necessitated by the contemporary problems our patients bring to us now. An appreciative reading of an underappreciated late Freud paper, "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis," suggests that Freud's theory is more flexible and broadly applicable than Freud's critics have described. Bridging the gap between an analysis of cultural and individual ills is always problematic, but as the "Acropolis" paper shows, Freud's theory can accommodate a wide variety of cultural and historical conditions because of the emphasis on compromise between competing generational claims, no matter what the specific content of the claims themselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud and the intentionality of affect.

Freud implicitly adopted F. Brentano's (1874 [1973]) thesis that the essence of the mental is intentionality (i.e., mental representation), while rejecting Brentano's Cartesian assumption that intentionality must be conscious. But, how can a feeling like free-floating anxiety, which does not seem to represent or be about anything, be fitted into Freud's representational framework? Several possible answers are examined, including: (1) affects are ideas, (2) affects are always attached to ideas, (3) consciousness is perception of internal mental states, and (4) affects are perceptions of internal bodily processes. Only the "bodily perception" account is systematically developed by Freud, is consistent with Freud's other doctrines, and is intrinsically plausible even in the context of contemporary debate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Looking for Skinner and finding Freud.

Sigmund Freud and B. F. Skinner are often seen as psychology's polar opposites. It seems this view is fallacious. Indeed, Freud and Skinner had many things in common, including basic assumptions shaped by positivism and determinism. More important, Skinner took a clear interest in psychoanalysis and wanted to be analyzed but was turned down. His views were influenced by Freud in many areas, such as dream symbolism, metaphor use, and defense mechanisms. Skinner drew direct parallels to Freud in his analyses of conscious versus unconscious control of behavior and of selection by consequences. He agreed with Freud regarding aspects of methodology and analyses of civilization. In his writings on human behavior, Skinner cited Freud more than any other author, and there is much clear evidence of Freud's impact on Skinner's thinking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud and the image of man.

Discusses Freud's contributions to the modern image of man. Two figures stand out massively as the architects of our present-day conception of man: Darwin and Freud. Freud's was the more daring, the more revolutionary, and in a deep sense, the more poetic insight. Freud presented the image of man as the unfinished product of nature: struggling against unreason, impelled by driving inner vicissitudes and urges that had to be contained if man were to live in society, host alike to seeds of madness and majesty, never fully free from an infancy anything but innocent. What Freud was proposing was that man at best and man at worst is subject to a common set of explanations: good and evil grow from a common process. It is our heritage from Freud that the all-or-none distinction between mental illness and mental health has been replaced by a more humane conception of the continuity of these states. Freud's sense of the continuity of human conditions, of the likeness of the human plight, has made possible a deeper sense of the brotherhood of man. It has in any case tempered the spirit of punitiveness toward what once we took as evil and what we now see as sick. We have not yet resolved the dilemma posed by these two ways of viewing. Its resolution is one of the great moral challenges of our age. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud versus Adler on dreams.

Comments on the article by L. T. Benjamin, Jr. and D. N. Dixon (see record 83-32709) that describes Freud's attempt to help an American girl named Mary Fields by interpreting her dream in which there was some conflict between Fields and her parents regarding the man with whom she was involved. For Freud, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious mind, and they represented a disguised fulfillment of a repressed wish. The authors discuss the Adlerian perspective on dreams which states that the purpose of dreams is to support the lifestyle against the demands of logic or common sense, and sees dreams as an attempt to make a bridge between an individual's lifestyle and present problems. From an Adlerian perspective, Field's dream had a connection with her problem, which was her anxiety over her attraction to and desire to see her friend, and also the possible negative outcome of this dilemma. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Chinese Freud? A fable.

The author creates a fable involving the translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet into Chinese in order to understand and reveal more fully some of the current difficulties in approaching Freud's work and thought. The article also points out the ironic nature of many of the criticisms of Freud and the almost uncritical support of other psychoanalytic figures who themselves fell prey to errors Freud has been accused of making. The author argues for the recreation of a living dialogue with Freud's work to serve as a wellspring and guide for an enlightened and coherent perseverance of psychoanalysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Teaching Freud: A lesson.

This article addresses the objectives of teaching undergraduates about psychoanalysis and offers some evidence for how those objectives are addressed in contemporary textbooks and achieved in the students. Arguing that there is a poor match between goals, strategies, and achievement, we make some specific suggestions about how to proceed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When a child dies: The sociobiology of bereavement.

Investigated the grief intensity of bereaved parents and their immediate families using ratings made by 263 bereaved parents. Predictions were derived from sociobiological tenets relating to (a) parental investment, (b) paternal uncertainty, and (c) the propagation potential of both parents and children. It was found that (1) mothers grieved more than fathers; (2) healthy children were grieved for more than unhealthy children; (3) male children were grieved for more than female children; (4) health of child and sex of child interacted such that the pattern of grief intensity obtained was healthy male?>?healthy female?=?unhealthy female?=?unhealthy male; (5) similar children were grieved for more than dissimilar children; (6) maternal grandmothers grieved more than either maternal grandfathers or paternal grandmothers, who in turn grieved more than paternal grandfathers; and (7) mothers' siblings grieved more than fathers' siblings. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The sociobiology of bereavement: A reply to Littlefield and Rushton.

This article offers a critique of Littlefield and Rushton's (1986) application of sociobiological principles to bereavement following the death of a child. The following general issues are considered: (a) whether behavior is always adaptive and (b) the distinction between proximate and ultimate explanations. It is argued that grief is a maladaptive by-product of another, adaptive feature and that hypotheses about the severity of grief are best derived from proximate considerations rather than genetic relatedness. The use of a single-item rating scale to measure grief is questioned, and it is noted that interspouse reliabilities reported in the article were low, a problem not solved (as claimed) by aggregation. Criticisms are made of the specific hypotheses, notably in terms of their origins in sociobiological theory. It is argued that functional hypotheses are not alternatives to proximate mechanisms, but enable some proximate mechanisms to be viewed from the perspective of evolutionary biology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud: Appraisals and reappraisals: Contributions to Freud Studies, Volumes I, II and III.

As psychoanalysis nears its 100th birthday, the relevant scholarship should be far advanced. It is by now widely known how much original documentation about Freud is still sealed up at the Library of Congress at the request of the Freud Archives in New York. Still, the state of interpretative scholarship ought not to be as primitive as it is today. Practicing analysts use Freud for their own purposes, and in most journals passages from Freud are regularly cited anachronistically; little effort goes into trying to understand Freud in his own time, but rather isolated words of his are bandied about in the context of today's therapeutic concerns. It is in the midst of this regrettable state of affairs that these three volumes edited by Paul E. Stepansky are noteworthy and reviewed here. The various writers, only a few of whom are clinicians, seek to understand Freud impartially as an object of historical inquiry. Although the essays inevitably suffer from flaws, taken as a whole they represent an admirable shift toward the professionalization of Freud studies. The authors cannot be accused of writing to defend organizationally vested interests. Nor, on the whole, do they echo many of the most sectarian past shibboleths about the history of psychoanalysis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud and Wittgenstein: Language and human nature.

One of the dramatic consequences of Sigmund Freud's work is its seminal role in the search for valid answers about the nature of the human mind and individual personality. His search for a scientific basis for understanding undercut nineteenth-century traditions that placed emphasis on primitive conceptions of race. Central to Freud's work is the theory of language and its function in the mind of the individual and in society. Using the historical contexts surrounding the evolution of Freud's theories from The interpretation of dreams to civilization and its discontents, his self-conception as a Jew, and the dynamics of Viennese society and politics, this essay explores the conflicts and correspondences between Freud's theories and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, his near-contemporary and fellow Viennese, on questions of mind, language, and identity. Freud's legacy will be assessed not in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, or hermeneutics, but explored instead in terms of its importance in politics and ethical and social theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Letters by Freud on experimental psychodynamics.

Offers the author's recall of a personal exchange with Freud when Rosenzweig was a young psychologist, a memory prompted by the article by L. T. Benjamin, Jr. and D. N. Dixon (see record 83-32709) which discussed Freud's characteristics as a correspondent in general. In letters on 2 separate occasions, the author remembers that Freud made a similar negative response to any attempts to explore psychoanalytic theory by laboratory methods. This exchange clearly underscored Freud's distrust of, if not opposition to, experimental approaches to the validation of his clinically derived concepts. These letters are reproduced elsewhere with commentary (S. Rosenzweig, 1985). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud in America: some observations.

Psychoanalysis is a "highly articulated theoretical system, one so extensive in scope that it threatens to overwhelm us with insights." Psychoanalysis has been modified in this country. A major antithesis is "between Freud's view, which emphasizes the limitations imposed on man by his nature, and the American vision, an optimistic one, which is captured by the idea of infinite possibility." "Freud seems quite satisfied if the patient achieves a relative internal harmony—that is, he seeks to uproot the neurosis. The American aim is much less moderate; indeed we may even call it inspirational; again and again we hear such terms as 'self-actualization,' 'self-realization,' 'spontaneity,' and 'creativity.' " (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)