do you think freud is a reliable source?

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do you think freud is a reliable source?

-- milo taylor (milocoolguy@yahoo.com), October 08, 2004

Answers

The question is too vague to answer. Certainly Freud is the best place to go to understand his ideas and theories. I would suggest that you read what some of the history of psychology textbooks have said about him--textbook writers generally rely on intensive critiques in their evaluation of historical figures. An excellent single evaluation of Freud's influence is Gardner Murphy's article in the American Psychologist. It is listed at the link below, along with other comments related to your question

http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00Ag4w

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@cox.net), October 08, 2004.


Hi Milo, I think of Freud having been a very creative person, who never-the- less was a product of his time period (mainly first half of the 20th century). Also as creative as he was, many of his ideas can be traced to his contempories or people before him. I respect his ideas quite a bit, but also respect the developments in psychology and related fields since his time. This is were the following common scientific perspective comes in handy: being open minded, but skeptical. It may also help to sometimes evaluate specific parts of his theories independenly of his more general principles. Another words, you can accept or test parts of his theories, without necessary accepting whole larger sections of it. I hope this helps. Paul

-- Paul Kleinginna (prk@frontiernet.net), October 12, 2004.

Hi, Freud is a reliable source for studying psychoanalysis theory and methods of investigating unconscious. Just read a few books of him and try to analyze your behavior in the light of his ideas and you'll see for yourself.

-- J. Jones (aropa@freudfile.org), October 13, 2004.

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