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)     

Questions for Freud: The secret history of psychoanalysis.

Review of book: Questions for Freud: The Secret History of Psychoanalysis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997, xiv + 239 pp. Reviewed by Hannah S. Decker. (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)     

Language access and theory of mind reasoning: Evidence from deaf children in bilingual and oralist environments.

This investigation examined whether access to sign language as a medium for instruction influences theory of mind (ToM) reasoning in deaf children with similar home language environments. Experiment 1 involved 97 deaf Italian children ages 4-12 years: 56 were from deaf families and had LIS (Italian Sign Language) as their native language, and 41 had acquired LIS as late signers following contact with signers outside their hearing families. Children receiving bimodal/bilingual instruction in LIS together with Sign-Supported and spoken Italian significantly outperformed children in oralist schools in which communication was in Italian and often relied on lipreading. Experiment 2 involved 61 deaf children in Estonia and Sweden ages 6-16 years. On a wide variety of ToM tasks, bilingually instructed native signers in Estonian Sign Language and spoken Estonian succeeded at a level similar to age-matched hearing children. They outperformed bilingually instructed late signers and native signers attending oralist schools. Particularly for native signers, access to sign language in a bilingual environment may facilitate conversational exchanges that promote the expression of ToM by enabling children to monitor others' mental states effectively. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud, Psychoanalysis and Symbolism: Book review.

Review of book: Agnes Petocz (Au.) Freud, Psychoanalysis and Symbolism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 284 pp. Reviewed by Nigel Mackay. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud: Darkness in the midst of vision: Book review.

Review of book, Louis Breger (Au.), Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision. New York: Wiley, 2000. 480 pp., $30.00. Reviewed by Donald P. Spence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The nature of psychology: The great dilemmas.

Research about the nature of psychology, its subject matter, its level of analysis, its scientific laws, its relationship with other disciplines, and its social relevance has been a matter of great concern and interest during the development of psychology. This problem can be analyzed in terms of the dilemmas of the psychological discipline, which have been choice points, crossroads, alternative decisions that bring psychologists face to face with the following issues: (a) the subject matter of psychology: psyche, mind, or behavior?; (b) the role of scientific methodology: is psychology a natural science, a social/behavioral/human science, or a part of the humanities?; (c) the universality or particularity of scientific laws in psychology: are laws universal or culture-bound and contextual?; and (d) the balance between science and profession: is psychology a basic science, a socially relevant profession, or both? (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud, civilization, religion, and stoicism.

Freud's debt to stoicism has been seldom discussed. His attitude toward science had a distinct ethical slant taken from the ancient world, via Freud's humanistic education. Freud's method involved detachment but did not imply moral coldness and indifference any more than stoicism did. The stoics wanted to be therapists of the mind just as physicians cared for the body. For both Freud and the stoics, reason was in battle with the passions and required clear sight to have a chance of prevailing over them. In contrasting religious worldviews with the scientific approach, Freud failed to see his own approach as ethical. Freud made extensive forays at individual and collective levels but in the years since Freud's death, the psychoanalytic vision has narrowed. At 150 years after his birth, the authors can still admire Freud's exceptional ethical courage and recognize that if psychoanalysis is to survive, it needs to regain his cultural range and spirit of critical inquiry. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi: Book review.

Review of book: Ernst Falzeder and Eva Brabant (Eds.; Peter T. Hoffer, Trans.) The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sandor Ferenczi. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 473 pp. Reviewed by Paul Roazen. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fresh Freud: No longer lost in translation.

The new translations of Freud into English highlight the question as to the nature of Freud's quest and achievement. They show a livelier Freud than the Strachey translations (Freud, 1953-1974), who used everyday language in his work instead of trying to establish a new technical vocabulary for an esoteric new discipline. However, with the new Penguin editions thus far, fresh Freud is no longer lost in translation. The Standard Edition was created importantly to create an authoritative international trademark and was made more natural "scientific" in appearance. The fresh translations show a Freud in tune with Karl Popper's (1976) approach in his later work that viewed science as essentially problem solving. The example of "Mourning and Melancholia" (Freud, 1917/ 1964, 1917/1981, 1917/2005) is discussed as an exercise in exploration, conjectures, criticism, construct formation, and problem solving. Translation issues are discussed. Instead of being a particular trade mark, the very fact of there being new and different translations opens Freud's works to further questioning about their meanings and intents in the marketplace of ideas and practices. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What Freud called "the psychology for neurologists" and the many questions it raises.

Freud wrote his Psychology for Neurologists (which Strachey called A Scientific Project) in 1895. He wrote it in a feverish state within a month, yet quickly buried it. His intensity in writing it and in suppressing it has not been explained, but intriguing hints about it from Freud's correspondence with Fliess are discussed here. The work remains, however, foreshadowing many of Freud's important psychological concepts. Further, although it is often dismissed because of archaic neurological ideas, many neurological guesses that Freud presented in Psychology for Neurologists are in keeping with neuroscience of today. Aspects of mechanisms of the brain, understanding dreams, developmental perspectives and clinical ramifications all relate to what Freud said in this draft for a monograph. (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, father, and mother: Quantitative aspects.

The frequency with which Freud used father and mother in his psychological writings was investigated. Overall, he used father much more frequently than mother. This difference began with those writings that followed his father's death and his self-analysis. A most striking, though transitory, reversal followed immediately upon the death of his mother. The data suggest that Freud blended objective, scientific, and sublimated, personal issues in his parental psychology. An ancillary result shows the yearly creation of the pages of his psychological writings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conceptual beliefs about human values and their implications: Human nature beliefs predict value importance, value trade-offs, and responses to value-laden rhetoric.

Beliefs that may underlie the importance of human values were investigated in 4 studies, drawing on research that distinguishes natural-kind (natural), nominal-kind (conventional), and artifact (functional) beliefs. Values were best characterized by artifact and nominal-kind beliefs, as well as a natural-kind belief specific to the social domain, "human nature" (Studies 1 and 2). The extent to which values were considered central to human nature was associated with value importance in both Australia and Japan (Study 2), and experimentally manipulating human nature beliefs influenced value importance (Study 3). Beyond their association with importance, human nature beliefs predicted participants' reactions to value trade-offs (Study 1) and to value-laden rhetorical statements (Study 4). Human nature beliefs therefore play a central role in the psychology of values. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Psychoanalysis: Freud’s cognitive psychology.

Reviews the book, Psychoanalysis: Freud’s cognitive psychology by Matthew Hugh Erdelyi (see record 1985-97974-000). Few psychoanalytic clinicians or experimental psychologists ever bother to develop a historical or meta-theoretical perspective on their discipline, or pause to ponder the obstacles encountered and avenues taken or ignored en route to a synthesis between psychoanalytic, experimental and cognitive psychology. For those who have already pondered these issues somewhat, Erdelyi's book is a positive pleasure, full of penetrating insights, programmatic suggestions and astute historical reflections. For those new to the area, it is the best available introduction to the field, grounded, as it is, in a fluent grasp of the various methods and models of unconscious mental processes in these increasingly convergent fields of inquiry. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Introducing a brief measure of cultural and religious identification in American Jewish identity.

The authors conducted 3 studies to develop and investigate the psychometric properties of the American Jewish Identity Scales (AJIS), a brief self-report measure that assesses cultural identification and religious identification. Study 1 assessed the content validity of the item pool using an expert panel. In Study 2, 1,884 Jewish adults completed the initial AJIS and various measures of ethnic identity, collective self-esteem, and religiosity. Using confirmatory factor analyses, the authors selected and cross-validated 33 items that loaded highly and differentially on the 2 theorized latent factors. Study 3 assessed the AJIS's short-term stability and its relation to social desirability. Tests of reliability and construct validity provided initial psychometric support for the measure and confirmed the theorized primary salience of cultural identification. Participants reported significantly more private than public collective self-esteem, and the most Jewish-identified participants reported greater private self-esteem, acculturative stress, and perceived discrimination than did their more assimilated counterparts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sigmund Freud and Minna Bernays: Primal curiosity, primal scenes, primal fantasies--And prevarication.

Attacks on Freud's theories on sexuality began when Freud launched his studies on hysteria in the last decade of the 19th century and are still ongoing. The latest cavil is embedded in a sensation exploded in the summer of 2006 by Franz Maciejewski of Heidelberg, Germany. It was publicized in front-page reportage by New York Times columnist Ralph Blumenthal (2006): "A Century-Old Swiss Hotel Log Hints at an Illicit Desire That Dr. Freud Didn't Repress," additionally editorialized as adequate "to impugn [Freud's] reputation" (p. A4). In this article, arguments ad hominem, bordering on Freud-bashing, concerning Freud as a person and his relationship with his sister-in-law Minna Bernays, are separated from arguments ad rem, regarding the merits of Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. The evidence presented by Maciejewski is found to be flawed and to not rise above the level of conjecture. Similarly, his construction that the alleged sexual affair between Freud and his sister-in-law was tantamount to incest, and thus source of theory of the Oedipus complex, has no standing either. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Freud, religion, and the presence of projective identification.

This article contends that Freud's discourses on religion--particularly toward the end of his life--have the earmarks of projective identification. Evidence for projective identification is gleaned from these works and from Freud's letters to friends and colleagues. The author argues that the sources of Freud's projective identification lay in 2 distinct childhood traumas: the relative absence of emotional consolation from his mother and the failure of his father to protect him. Old age and approaching death threatened to evoke feelings of helplessness and anxiety, which Freud handled, in part, by attacking the foundations of religious experience. This enabled Freud to acknowledge disappointment and hostility toward religious believers, while disclaiming the loss of and need for emotional consolation and protection. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Illuminating language: A review of Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct.

In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker has undertaken the daunting task of informing lay audiences about forty years of progress in the study of the psychology of language. Toward this goal, he offers a striking array of incisive, revealing examples and insights about the distinct character of human language. These examples serve more than to inform and amuse us about language: They are interwoven to create Pinker's thesis about one of the oldest themes of modern psycholinguistics: namely, that human beings are uniquely equipped, by virtue of their genetic endowment, to use language. This capacity is Pinker's "language instinct." Further, the reader will be able to grasp these analyses because they are preceded with effective overviews of modern grammatical theories of syntax (chapters 4 and 7), morphology (chapter 5), and phonology (chapter 6). The principles and examples of these chapters provide the infrastructure on which Pinker builds his arguments concerning linguistic universals, language acquisition, neural mechanisms, and evolution. Overall, The Language Instinct will provide experimental psychologists with worthwhile updates of those domains of language research that they do not closely follow, with myriad examples with which to embellish undergraduate lectures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)