Important Question. Serious Answers Please?

Question

Ok so i asked "what is Freud's uncanny theory?" and a user on Answers had this opinion about him:

"Yes, the "uncanniness" of it, is that he has been proven through psychological research to be wrong about nearly all of his theories. The only ones not proven wrong are the ones that can't be confirmed or disproven through research. This was the problem with Freud - he just theorized, made things up from one or two observations of people that were not healthy mentally! And then tried to generalize this to the average population. If you know anything about statistics, research methodologies and science, you would know that Freud is a joke!

Keep in mind that he smoked more than 12 cigars a day and he was addicted to cocaine. He took his life in the end, through an increase in pain medication because he couldn't stand the pain from the cancer and the cocaine addictions. He is an embarrassment to the science of Psychology!"

What do you think?

Agree/ Disagree and why?

Answer 1

What I think is....Please correct me if I am wrong on this one, but was your original Question about Freud's "Valley of the Uncanny" effect? Because that is one of the few expressions I have heard of within Freudian psychology that uses the word "uncanny" and aside from actually *knowing* what it is, I think what happened here is that your "Answerer" just didn't have Clue One what the blue hell he/she/it was talking about, had an agenda--likely a Behavioral one--to push, and so rather than either *answer* your question or admit he just *didn't know* what you were talking about....he prattled on with an Ad Hominem irrelevancy, a personal attack disguised as an argument. My condolences if that is indeed what happened.

It is a sad, sad sign of our times that people, rather than just scratch their heads and *admit*, "Golly, I don't know," they go on the attack instead and do whatever they can to slander and defame any famous or public figures involved in the question. It is a sign that folks just have too much ego and not enough sense to rein it in and *conduct a fair, civilized discussion*.

--So am I saying Freud was perfect? Nope. He was a product of his times--that Victorian era, wherein a *LOT* of folks who could afford to abuse drugs did so, and the rest simply got nasty drunk every *day*. And there is a lot wrong with the science of Freudian psychology in terms of whether or not *any* of his theories are even *provable* or *testable* or not. But....was ANYONE else even bothering to try to help the mentally ill back then? Not really....check your history. Freud was one of the first people *in European culture, EVER* to treat madness as an *illness* and not a crime against God and Society. Before Freud, the mentally ill were often locked up in cellars, beaten, killed, tortured, the works....so while Freud wasn't anywhere near perfect, you know what? *Any* progress beats none, especially when the alternative is Pure Medieval Barbarity.

--So what *is* the Valley of the Uncanny? Only one of a Handful of Freud's hypotheses that actually *is* testable, if only on the level of statistics. Researchers in Japan in 2000 actually did crunch the numbers and do the surveys and the hypothesis seems to hold true so far...

What the Valley of the Uncanny is, is a predictive model. It is a mathematical guess at how people, in general, will behave towards "fake people", or objects that are generally made to seem human.

What the hypothesis says is that when the "fake people" are fairly simple and innocuous (non-threatening), like children's toys, dolls, puppets, plush stuffed toys, etc., that people in general will have a neutral or slightly favorable emotional response to them, to the fakes....

And, on the other side of the curve, when people encounter the idea or notion of a highly evolved, well-designed, "immaculate" fake person that for all intents and purposes passes for human, most folks will also have a neutral to favorable response to that (think your Science Fiction "Androids", like Star Trek's "Data" character, or Andromeda's "Andromeda Ascendant").

But.....for most folks, somewhere in the middle, where the "fake person" is moderately complex but *not* perfect nor immaculate nor passable as human...the impression most folks get intuitively is not one of "pet or doll" like they would at the low end, nor one of "robot or android person" like they would at the high one....

The impression most folks get is one of "zombie" or "monster", and the emotional impression folks get of the mediocre "fake person" stops being either favorable or neutral, and just plain *drops* into a valley wherein most folks are "creeped out".

Hence the name, "Valley of the Uncanny". If you do the surveying yourself and plot out the "favorable and unfavorable" reactions of people to various "fake people", if you survey enough people and crunch the stats, what you get is a bell curve with a *slice* taken out of the middle. The emotional impression, on average, starts out neutral or slightly good, rises with the complexity to a point, hits the "slice" or Valley where the mood tanks and people get creeped out, then goes back up to being fairly high with the more sophisticated/passable "fake people", then drops somewhat as the "fake person" becomes so refined that they are passable as human, and more likely to get a neutral, "So What?" response.

That is the Valley of the Uncanny, for most people, in layman's terms. :) Where it gets interesting is in that there are some folks whose *curve* is different from the norm. Some folks, yep, hit their Valley *right away* and are creeped out or phobic of dolls. Others....don't seem to *have* the Valley present, or only have a shallow one, in their curves, and maintain a good feeling towards even the "messed up" mediocre "fake people".

And some few...their curves are all over the place, sometimes courtesy of high-functioning (non-retarded) autism and/or Aspberger's syndrome, and sometimes just by virtue of being what some would call "technosexual" or turned *on* by "fake people".

But yeah, for most ordinary folks, Freud seems to have got this one right. How about that? :)

Answer 2

Don't want to get into a lot of needless detail here...

What Freud contributed was more the intangibles rather than the specifics of his theories, which tended to reflect his own inner attitudes rather than external reality.

He changed the way people viewed psychology, giving it a consistent form amid the chaos of the time in terms of how the mind and human development was imagined.

He contributed the notion that what happens to us as children does impact us later in life, even if the effect is more unconscious than purposeful. (Our issues do not simply go away or disappear; everything affects us.)

He provided the "spark" that got many more intelligent minds into the field of psychology (Jung, for sure... and I think Adler and some others). Ironically, they all broke away from him, partly because Freud was controlling [and the guy also took the defections very personally].

I think Freud's greatest weaknesses were that he mistook his own personal opinions for objective reality, and he always wanted to be in charge and set the standards for everyone else. His studies did tend more towards finding data to validate his ideas, rather than drawing theories from a large pool of data.

He ended up doing some dumb things because of this (such as psychoanalyzing his own daughter Anna, a big no-no due to the conflict of roles and potential abuse of power between therapist/patient and father/daughter).

And in the end, his life dwindling, his students moving on to larger pursuits, and continual physical pain distracting him (he had jaw cancer), he ended up committing what we'd call euthanasia -- a final desperate act of control over his own life.

He would have made a classical psychoanalytical study for himself. :)

So, as far as the previous poster you have quoted, I'd say they got part of the story right but have purposefully ignored any of the positive contributions Freud did make, simply by being a catalyst for others.

Maybe someone else would have stepped into the gap if he had not been there, but I doubt modern psychology would be the same (if existent) without him.

I would take issue with the way Freud over-sexualized things in his theories, but I wouldn't simply dismiss him.

Answer 3

I don't think he is an embarrassment to his profession - after all his profession is all about trying to understand. It would be very lame to judge a colleague for having afflictions. Freud's contribution to early Psychology is unmatched. He was the founder of psychoanalysis and for it or against it, that is a practice that remains in use to this day.

Answer 4

This guy is right on! ;)

"Mustinheart" below is incorrect. Psychoanalysis is not commonly used in counseling any longer. There are a few "Freudian analysts" left, but less than 10% of counseling uses his theories. Client-centered or humanistic approaches to counseling are more commonly used - these were not Freudian beliefs. And in regards to research and psychological theories of behavior, cognitive and behavioral perspectives are common today. Again, non-Freudian.

"Bradley P" sounds like a "Freudian apologist" which are the only kind of followers that Freud has left!

Answer 5

Yeah! He didn't do anything great. He was a pervert at best!

Answer 6

umm good point i believe I will ponder this as I