It was the neo-Freudian, Carl Jung, who proposed the idea of syncronicity, and it is playing itself out with my General Psychology class. This week we’re studying Meyers’ Chapter 12, on personality. I just got done lecturing about Freud’s ideas of how our personality works: the Id, Ego, and Superego. Imagine my delight when I found a link to this Newsweek article in the excellent Mind Hacks:
Freud: At 150, He’s Still Captivating Us
The theoretician who explored a vast new realm of the mind, the unconscious: a roiling dungeon of painful memories clamoring to be heard and now and then escaping into awareness by way of dreams, slips of the tongue and mental illness. The philosopher who identified childhood experience, not racial destiny or family fate, as the crucible of character. The therapist who invented a specific form of treatment, psychoanalysis, which advanced the revolutionary notion that actual diagnosable disease can be cured by a method that dates to the dawn of humanity: talk. Not by prayer, sacrifice or exorcism; not by drugs, surgery or change of diet, but by recollection and reflection in the presence of a sympathetic professional. It is an idea wholly at odds with our technological temperament, yet the mountains of Prozac prescribed every year have failed to bury it. Not many patients still seek a cure on a psychoanalyst’s couch four days a week, but the vast proliferation of talk therapies—Jungian and Adlerian analyses, cognitive behavioral and psychodynamic therapy—testify to the enduring power of his idea.
I mostly downplay Freud’s ideas (mostly because of their resistance to testable hypotheses, but it is still important to know (and to celebrate) just how influential he was on the formation of our ideas of psychological therapy.
Technorati Tags: Mental health, personality
