Question

The Story of Psychology Book:

What value should we place on Freud’s theories? Are we better off having known Freud? Or did he hinder the future of psychology? Please argue from a scientific perspective.

Answer 1

Sigmund Freud emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind, and a primary assumption of Freudian theory is that the unconscious mind governs behavior to a greater degree than people suspect. Indeed, the goal of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious. Freud's theory is good at explaining but not at predicting behavior (which is one of the goals of science).The unconscious mind is difficult to test and measure objectively.

Despite the skepticism of the unconscious mind, cognitive psychology has identified unconscious processes, such as procedural memory (Tulving, 1972), automatic processing (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Stroop, 1935), and social psychology has shown the importance of implicit processing (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Such empirical findings have demonstrated the role of unconscious processes in human behavior.

Freud's take on defense mechanisms still holds relevance. Few people, including psychologists, would deny that we all too regularly employ such defenses as denial, repression, projection, intellectualization, and rationalization. The same can be said for his ideas on transference and catharsis.

And though we no longer subscribe to Freudian dream interpretation, some of our dreams are so blatantly driven by our conscious and subconscious desires and fears that it’s obvious Freud was onto something.

In summation, there are five broad areas in which the work of Sigmund Freud remains relevant to psychology: the existence of unconscious mental processes, the importance of conflict and ambivalence in behavior, the childhood origins of adult personality, mental representations as a mediator of social behavior, and stages of psychological development.