From Yahweh to Yahoo! by Doug Underwood

Author:Doug Underwood [Underwood, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780252075711
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2008-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12

The Mind of the Inquiring

Reporter: Psychology and the

Science of the Soul

Like many famous people, Sigmund Freud had little use for the popular press. “Why [do] you still believe anything you read in an American newspaper?” he grumbled to a disciple in 1928. The article that had provoked Freud's scorn was a New York Times account of the controversy created by Freud's latest book, The Future of an Illusion, where the Viennese founder of psychoanalysis contended that religion amounted to little more than a childish illusion and the projections of wish fulfillments of ancient peoples. The headlines of the article read “Religion Doomed/Freud Asserts/Says It Is at Point Where It Must Give Way before Science/His Followers Chagrined/Master Psychoanalyst's New Book Deplored for Dissension It Is Expected to Cause.”1

In a figurative sense, Freud was having done to him what his critics say he did to religion. The press's tendency to stereotype and simplify yet to believe itself the organ of objective science mirrors Freud's own tendency to reduce complex human behavior into tidy psychological formulas that he offered up as scientific explanations. Freud's hostility to religion consistently was dressed up in his work as scientific inquiry. Yet today, in many academic and intellectual circles, Freud's claims about religion are perhaps the only aspect of his psychoanalytical theories that are not seen as anachronisms—brilliant but outdated ideas about the functioning of the human personality that succeed as philosophical speculation and literary symbolism more than as scientific explanations for the operation of the psyche.

Ironically, Freud's theories and the religion he so detested share the same lack of scientific basis, no matter how much “projection” and “wish fulfillment” (favorite Freudian terms) went into Freud's own hopes to see his ideas treated as empirical fact. Freud based his theories about the workings of the human psyche on interviews with neurotic Viennese women and presented these theories in a fashion that cannot be decisively proven or disproven in the empirical sense of the term, just as there is no way to prove or disprove elements of faith based on reports of religious experience.

Largely because of Freud's scientific pretensions and the press's desire to see its own methodology treated as a form of empirical science, psychological speculation constitutes a major part of the media's coverage of everything from crime to politics to lifestyle. In much of its coverage, the press treats psychological theorizing about why people behave as they do—asking experts why people go on a killing spree, why people are unhappy in the workplace, why married couples fight and what can be done about it—as if it is a reflection of precise scientific analysis. In embracing Freud or at least the psychological field that Freud did much to advance, many journalists have found a comfortable place from which to probe life's imponderables and to discover patterns in human behavior. In doing this, the press has elevated psychology to such an honored position in the social order that some would see it as new theology to explain human mystery and enshroud the meaning of life.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.