“Over the past decade, membership in the Society for Neuroscience has surged by almost 50 percent to 37,500. researchers are probing the brain with increasingly powerful tools, including superfast magnetic resonance imagers and microelectrodes that can detect the murmurs of individual brain calls. Nevertheless, the flood of data stemming from this research has failed so far to yield truly effective therapies for schizophrenia, depression, and other disorders, or a truly persuasive explanation of how brains make minds. ‘We’re still in the tinkering stage, preparadigm and pretheoretical’, says V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego. ‘We’re still at the same stage physics was in the 19th century’. The postmodern perspective applies all too well to fields that attempt to explain us to ourselves. Theories of the mind never really die; they just go in and out of fashion. One astonishingly persistent theory is psychoanalysis, which Sigmund Freud invented a century ago. ‘Freud … captivates us even now’, Newsweek proclaimed just last March. Freud’s ideas have persisted not because they have been scientifically confirmed but because a century’s worth of research has not produced a paradigm powerful enough to render psychoanalysis obsolete once and for all. Freudians cannot point to unambiguous evidence of their paradigm’s superiority, but neither can proponents of more modern paradigms, whether behaviorism, evolutionary psychology, or psychopharmacology.” (John Horgan Discover, October, 2006).
I disagree with the idea that Freud’s theory is still scientifically valid today. I think his theory belongs to the end of the 19th century where it should have been buried.
Freud’s dream theory has been convincingly refuted by Allan Hobson.
In spite of Mark Solms defense of repression we are still trying to find a convincing prove of its existence. Repression is supposed to be and unconscious mechanism created by the Ego in order to protect the person. Repression is characterized by the persons inability to remember the episodic part of the memory repressed. However that is not what we see in cases of Post Traumatic Syndrome. In these cases patients cannot forget the episodic component of the past. What we see in actual clinical practice are human beings that cannot forget the past and that do not repress it either, experiences they have lived often hunt them for the rest of their lives.
Most people have had negative experiences while children in their families. Often this experiences are repeated over many times because they belong to the repertoire of behaviors that are part of their parent’s personality (of one or both parents). These past experiences have help mold their individuals scripts during their lives. Traumatic experiences serve a purpose, they help the person remember to stay away from live threatening situations, similarly to the ones experienced in the past. These experiences play and important role in preserving human live. Most individuals do not repress the traumatic experiences that happened to them but instead remember it too frequently specially when something associated with it is perceived by them.
Elizabeth Loftus the memory expert has expressed her reluctance to believe in the mechanism of repression. We are still looking for the mechanism of repression and still have not found it in any memory laboratory.
Children that have been severely abused exhibit something similar to repression as it can be seeing in cases of multiple personalities. The cognitive and neurological explanation for cases like this is that there is damage to the hippocampus. Integration of the different personalities in cases as this have not been documented, rather the patient usually selects one of its personality modes preferably the most functional one.
Freud’s theory of personality development as well as his Oedipus complex, Elektra complex and other sexual explanations of human behavior lack any scientific value and therefore are not worth discussing.
I like the cognitive explanation of the unconscious it is to me a scientific explanation, repression does not play a role or is part of it.