Bijou Drains
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Chelmsford “If the practice of psychological investigation involves the observation of one’s own mental happenings, aren’t those happenings altered by the very act of observation? And isn’t this something that observation has to avoid to count as scientific?”
That is one of the major criticisms of reflective models of the mind, any reflection or analysis of what happened in our mind is by its very nature reconstructive. When I child does something “naughty” we say to the child “why did you do that” and the child responds “I don’t know” and then we say to the child “well, you must know”. But actually half of the time we don’t know why we do the things we do and when we reconstruct we tidy up the thoughts, add bits in, etc.
Part of the problem is that we tend to think in a mixture of different parts of the thought process, visual process, language, auditory thinking including noise, feelings, olfactory thinking and processing. However we nearly always explain our action through one modality language. Language is by its nature a representation of the thing not the thing itself. When we use language to say that we are bored/happy/angry, we are using a description of the feeling not the feeling itself. By its very nature the description must always be at least slightly inaccurate, therefore any recollection of events will be coloured by this inaccuracy.
Skinner and the classical behaviourists dismissed any form of attempt to gain insight to mental functions from recollection or commentary on description of mental events. They put forward the view that scientifically we can only describe behaviour from the point of view of the observer and any attempt to understand the internal mental activities would by definition be unscientific.
The classic refutation of how we need to take mental functions when we observe behaviour is by using a thought experiment.
In the thought experiment you imagine a group of Skinnerist psychologists carrying out an observation of motorist behaviour using traffic lights. By purely observing the behaviour and not trying to understand the internal motivation of the motorists, the Skinnerists would come to the conclusion that red light means stop, green light means go and amber light means speed up!
Wez – Do I think that the unconscious mind has an impact on our development of personality? I think that the sub conscious mind is also influencial (even though Freud did not use the term subconscious frequently and then only in German).
Is Freud’s model of the mind particularly useful in understanding it, absolutely no. Do I agree with the following concepts, the oedipus complex, the electra complex, the idea of penis envy, absolutely know.
I know that childhood events, including separation, trauma and loss are massively important in understanding the development of personality, cognition, language skills, sociability, physical growth, the immune system, etc.
Did some of Freud’s initial thoughts move the study forward to some extent, yes, but the development of Attachment Theory and the work of people like Bowlby, Rutter, Van Izendorn, Sagi, is far more important than the semi mystic ramblings of people like Freud, Jung, etc.
“Nobody is suggesting that Freud or Marcuse were correct in everything they said any more than Marx was.”
We might not agree with everything Marx said but we agree with the basics of the Marxian argument. The basic elements of Freud’s work, his model of the mind, his view of psychosexual development is demonstrably wrong. That doesn’t mean that he got everything wrong, just a large proportion of it and most of the foundations of his work.
I think that psychology and Marx have very clear links. However psychology and psychoanalysis are two different things.
To me Freud had some pretty interesting insights and the concepts of the unconscious mind, defence mechanisms, transference and projection, catharsis and trauma are useful starting points, however compartmentalisation of the brain/mind into the ID, Ego and Superego, his psychosexual stages, etc. etc. have not aged well.
In 1996, the journal “Psychological Science” reached the conclusion that, “There is literally nothing to be said, scientifically or therapeutically, to the advantage of the entire Freudian system or any of its component dogmas.” I agree.
Quite why seemingly rational and thoughtful people place such emphasis on the work of Freud, escapes me. Yes he came up with some thought provoking ideas, his view of the conscious and the unconscious was very interesting and opened up areas for discussion, but a good deal of his main work was unscientific, conjecture.
The Oedipus and Electra complex is quite clearly a way to fit the “facts” to meet the needs of the theory. Even if it was correct (but it isn’t) the whole approach is based on the late Victorian upper middle class social structure which was a small part of societal structure for a small window in history. Most families did not live like that then, didn’t live like that in the past and don’t live like that in the future.
Take the Little Hans study, what a whole load of horse shit (sic). Little lads play with their diddlers, big deal, they’re interesting, you can piddle up the wall you can squirt them about, what’s not to like. It doesn’t mean they want to murder their father and have sex with their mother. If little girls had diddlers, they’d piss up the wall as well.
Rutter wrote about Bowlby that “Bowlby himself in his first volume was very firm in terms of the importance of psychoanalysis in what he wrote but in 1988 he said that psychoanalysis was never more wrong than in its theory of child development, so he became more distant from psychoanalysis, in some ways and not others. He, like me, remained positive about mental mechanisms but he regarded the theory of psychosexual stages as “total bunk” and it was. “Total bunk”; those are my words, not his but that is more or less what he thought.” Couldn’t put it better myself.
We’ve gotta get out of this place – The Animals
Won’t get fooled again- The Who
Police and Thieves – The Clash (Junior Murvin)
Left us to burn – The Daintees
Ghost Town – The Specials
Ohio – Neil Young
What’s Going On – Marvin GayeHeard all of them at various discos
A very different political viewpoint, but some fantastic music. Will miss Mr Harley, must have seen him 20 or so times live
Hi imposs1904,
If, as I understand, you are currently in the US and cannot access BBC iplayer, you can purchase a VPN (there are some free ones as well), then set the vpn to the UK. You can then stream BBC player programmes. I use this technique to access Gaelic Games coverage through the RTE player. Apologies if I am teaching my granny to suck eggs.In fact he is actually stating that he is prepared to use them. If any of the nuclear powers had the weapons and stated that they were not prepared to use them, it would be pretty stupid thing for them to say.
I can’t work out what line the Independent is taking, the main owner is the son of a Russain oligarch, although there seems to be an anti Putin approach. Either way I don’t trust them
I don’t think the SPGB was wrong from 1904. Although large areas of the world were not industrialised (parts of China and parts of Russia actually had moved over to capitalist production), large areas of the world had (most of Northern Europe, North America, parts of South America and AUstralia, New Zealand, etc).
At that point a very large proportion of the goods being produced in the world were being produced either as part of capitalist production or directly by capitalist producers. Raw materials may well have been produced in underdeveloped countries, however the ways in which they were produced was based on the key elements of waged labour, as opposed to peasant production.
If in the early 20th Century the working class of the countries of the capitalist countries wished to institute a system of production for use, within the then existing scope of the areas where capitalism existed, this would not have been “Socialism in one Country” but Socialism in very many countries, within which practically all of the goods and services required in this area of the world were produced within the same area. Therefore those living within those parts of the world, production for use woud ahve been possible.
Yes, there would have been challenges facing such as situation in terms of industrialisation of large areas of the world, but I am pretty sure that this wouldn’t have resulted in the catastrophic slaughter that came as a result of the state capitalist system in places like China and Russia, or the private capitalist system in India and other areas of the world.
