anyone see a Mason & Dixon resonance here?

[Ian Livingston]

> I never read Fiedler.  But Freud can't be so summarily dismissed.  He
> was beyond a doubt a ground-breaker, and to conclude that he was
> "thoroughly mistaken" implies that someone else is now NOT "thoroughly
> mistaken."  Has human psychology been conclusively mapped today in
> your opinion?  Have even the faintest lines of it been conclusively
> sketched?

Not at all. To quote a phrase, "You think like a Bircher." To say that
Freud is mistaken in many of his conclusions, that his samples were
inadequate, his methods unscientific and his generalizations
oversimplified, and then to go on and say, as I do, that he is unduly
revered, is not at all to say that anyone understands human
psychology. Freud is the "father" of western psychology, but he is not
the inventor of it. Not by a long shot. He synthesized information
then current in the public domain very successfully and gained great
fame. He just missed the boat at one of the ports of call along the
way and failed to pursue his ideas along their logical paths. James
Mark Baldwin and Jean Piaget went on to chart a much more successful
approach to human psychological development. Still, they only went so
far. Bladwin was ostracized for having got caught in a cathouse;
Piaget's theories remain influential. The study of the mind is still
one of the greatest uncharted territories left for us to explore.
There is much more to it than sex and death, in my opinion.

On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 7:38 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> I never read Fiedler.  But Freud can't be so summarily dismissed.  He
> was beyond a doubt a ground-breaker, and to conclude that he was
> "thoroughly mistaken" implies that someone else is now NOT "thoroughly
> mistaken."  Has human psychology been conclusively mapped today in
> your opinion?  Have even the faintest lines of it been conclusively
> sketched?
>
> David Morris
>
> On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Ian Livingston
>> Freud's methods and conclusions were unsupported and thoroughly mistaken.
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."