Re: Psychology questions psychuking

• From: ZAMM_Phaedrus <no_reply_at_yahoogroups.com>
• Date: Thu, 01 Aug 2002 05:44:50 -0000
• Message-ID: <aiahsj+btj3_at_...>

I own several intro level psychology text books. Pulling one of the 
shelf [Psycholgy (Fifth Edition), Wortman/Loftus/Weaver, 1999], 
Sigmund Freud remains in the top ten of people cites in the index of 
names in the back, as he is cited eight times. Of those mentioned, he 
is the only person that I have heard of, and I tend to be better off 
in the non-econ social sciences than most people. I also recall having 
to learn stuff about Freud when I took Psych 101.

That being said, Freud seems to have more value a literature than as 
psychology these days. i recall someone (possibly Bloom, the Western 
Canon guy, I can't find the book right now), claiming that Freud is 
the most important literary figure of the 20th century, on par with 
Shakespeare or Cervantes in their times. I don't necessarily agree, 
but I neither would I say that he is unimportant in a literary sense. 
In much the same way, I consider the usefulness of Karl Marx in 
political philosophy to be mostly someone to disagree with these days, 
yet I think that he has great value in sociology as someone who 
established basic frameworks of analyses, even one comes up with 
vastly different conclusions.

At 10:45 AM 7/31/02 -0700, Matt Weiner wrote:

><<Or the good old defenses? I suppose one could even
>write a kick-ass question on the "id." 
>>>
>I was under the impression that Freudian psychology
>questions are to psych majors as questions on
>phlogiston are to chem majors. I think it was a psych
>major who told me that. Personally I support asking
>questions about currently relevant concepts rather
>than history or people in both physical and social
>science, but this does cause accessibility problems so
>I can see why it's not the only type of question.