"Word Association" -Sigmund Freud (Dan Aykroyd) and Anna Freud (Laraine Newman) Saturday Night Live 

Everyone has a theory...or so it seems in the field of psychology. In our first week of our TEDV 527 class, we studied the major theories explaining the stages of human development and behaviorism. Some theories have fallen out of favor or discredited, while others remain widely accepted, but for the most part they have all have contributed to our understanding of human behavior and thought processes (APA Monitor, 1999).

Freud was a significant figure in the history of psychoanalysis and to psychology in general. When I first had to study him in freshman level psychology class in college, his theories made no sense and made me uncomfortable. Not just because I was uncomfortable with the psychosexual nature of the stages, but where was the proof of the stages of development he presented? His fantastic theories (fantastic, not in a good way) for the most part, were discounted. Freud is still famous, but because he is now part of the popular culture. I recall the Saturday Night Live episode about Freud (starring Dan Aykroyd as Freud and Laraine Newman as his daughter) and his daughter’s dream about bananas (“Sometime’s a banana is just a banana, Anna.”) Jokes and puns about Freud abound. “‘Your Freudian slip’ is showing!” He has become a parody of himself, but wasn’t he just a part of how science works (though people still debate whether psychology is really a science because it is difficult to quantify some data (i.e. how much pain are you in?) or should work? Scientists propose, test and provide a falsifiable theories? The so-called hard sciences and math are not absolutely quantifiable...hello Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.) But did Freud “do science” correctly? Not only did he have poor methodology and was wrong in some of his conclusions, he even falsified data. His theories on female sexuality and homosexuality have even proved damaging (Dvorsky, 2013).

As I read I continually found reasons why Freud was wrong. But what did he get right? Is his legacy to be a founding giant who set the framework for studying development, but got it wrong? Even Lamarck (famous for his theory on inheriting acquired traits and vilified in textbooks) got some things right. And today, experiments in the emerging field of epigenetics are showing some support of transgenerational inheritance! (Hughes, 2014) Three examples of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance can be found here.

The existence of the unconscious mind (which was proposed by French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, but and later broken down even further by Freud) was one thing he got right. Before the turn of this century, brain scanning technology has revealed much evidence for the reality of the unconscious. As just one example, it has shown how complicated tasks that demand all our concentration become progressively more "unconscious" as we practice them, with activity in areas of the brain used to coordinate complex tasks quickly diminishing. How many have us have gone on “autopilot” after a long day to find ourselves almost home and not remembering the trip? (Matthews, 2008) Perhaps we are not “masters of our own domain.” (a Seinfeld reference)

So Freud and Lamarck got some things wrong but so have many other scientists. The key is not have such memorable or  “out-there” theories that, if you really are off the mark, not many people will remember you for it.

Works Cited:

American Psychological Association. December 1999. “Behaviorism: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline” APA Monitor, Vol. 30, 11            

               Dufresne, Todd. (2004, February 28). Psychoanalysis Is Dead ... So How Does That Make You Feel? The Los Angeles Times. 

Retrieved from http://articles.latimes.com/2004/feb/18/opinion/oe-dufresne18

Dvorsky, George. (2013, August 7). Why Freud Still Matters, When He Was Wrong About Almost Everything. Retrieved from        http://io9.com/why-freud-still-matters-when-he-was-wrong-about-almost-1055800815              

Hughes, Virginia. (2014, March 6). Epigenetics: The sins of the father. Nature 507, 22–24. 

doi:10.1038/507022a

Matthews, Robert. (2008. November 16). Freud: he wasn’t all wrong. The National. 

Retrieved from 

http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/science/freud-he-wasnt-all-wrong#full

Westen, Drew. (1998). The Scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science.      
      Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 333-371.