Domestic Affairs

Getting beyond Freud to understand human behavior

By Patrick Mattimore (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-11-25 14:16

Having taught psychology for many years, I was pleased to read in Monday's China Daily that "a growing number of Chinese are studying psychology to gain a better understanding of their own state of mind".

What is troubling, however, is that the "man most are turning to is Sigmund Freud."

The problem with Freud is that while his ideas about things like our unconscious motivations, repression of unpleasant experiences, and psychosexual stages of development, have enormous popular appeal, they are scientifically untestable.

Freud believed that our dreams were windows into our unconscious and that our dream images had specific meaning. Freud suggested that the images often had sexual connotations, frequently linked to unresolved childhood traumas.

For example, imagine a dream in which a person at a fairgrounds sees a strange woman he is chasing and with whom he cannot make contact, finally losing sight of her near a flagpole. Freud might suggest that the dream represents an individual's unresolved Oedipal Complex. That is, the woman is the young man's mother and he can't reach her because his father, represented by the phallic flagpole, is in the way.

It is, of course, impossible to disprove the Freudian interpretation. But had the dreamer been say, at a convention that day where he knew few people, got lost several times, and arranged to meet with friends near a landmark skyscraper for lunch, we might be more inclined to interpret his nighttime dreams consistent with the pedestrian events of that day.

In fact, though dream analysis is still in vogue, few dream therapists today would identify dream images as specifically as Freud did and fewer still would consistently imbue them with sexual connotations.

Freud's early work in psychology and psychoanalysis endeavored to understand and cure the human mind by means of hypnosis. Although he later abandoned hypnosis, he used it in his early practice to delve into patients' unconscious and explore beliefs and experiences that he believed the patients repressed because those experiences were too painful to face.

Today, hypnosis is generally considered to be an unreliable method of retrieving memories. Further, thanks to the work of memory experts such as Elizabeth Loftus, psychologists generally disbelieve the idea that people have repressed painful memories that can be discovered through psychoanalysis.

Loftus and her colleagues have demonstrated, through a series of clever experiments over the last nearly forty years, that memories thought to be repressed which later surface during hypnotic sessions, psychoanalysis, or even general questioning, are often false and subject to therapists' suggestions. What's more, Loftus has also shown that it is possible to implant false memories in a significant number of subjects.

The bottom line is that after a certain age (four or five) we do not repress our most painful experiences; we remember them. Further, there is no reason to believe that those experiences we had prior to forming our permanent memories which we "recover" during psychotherapy, actually happened.

Psychologists have learned a great deal about the ways in which humans behave and how to predict and control human behavior since psychology's modern-day founding, acknowledged to be around 1875. Freud was at the forefront of psychology during its first three-quarters of a century, but today there are many better explanations for how we behave and why we behave the way we do.

Patrick Mattimore taught psychology in the US for many years and has frequently presented at the American Psychological Association (APA) and Western Psychological Association Annual Conventions. He has also written for APA’s trade publication, Psychology Teacher Network, and the Association for Psychological Science Magazine, “Observer”.