Dr. Freud

I found Sigmund Freud’s Intro to Psycho-Analysis to be very interesting, not so much on a level of accuracy, but more on a historical level. His ideas are the first of his kind to be thought of, and while a lot of them are not accurate, they were the first step towards psychology as we know it today.

One of the examples of Freud’s inaccuracies is the sexuality of an infant. I find the idea of a newborn child getting a sexual thrill from suckling its mother’s breast to be not only repulsive, but also incorrect. There are plenty of other reasons for why a baby will seek out milk from its mother, many of which are far more logical than sex. For example, without a mother's milk, the baby would not survive because it would not have sustenance, and it would die. Looking at Freud's theory from a strictly evolutionary standpoint, it would be far more suitable for the baby to want food than for it to want sex, as an infant is not even at the proper stage of 'self awareness' to be capable of performing a sexual act, the only thing the child should be concerned with at that point in its life is staying alive. Again, this is looking at it from an evolutionary perspective.

Freud also mentions the topics of young girls being envious of young boys’ penises, and how boys will become terrified of losing their penis at the sight of another human being who does not have one. Sure, girls might be curious as to what the small organ protruding from a young boy's body is, and she may even wonder why she does not have one, but this hardly qualifies as envy; the most one could conclude from this is that the young girl is curious. One thing that I think would be interesting to hear Freud talk about is the transsexual community, how would he explain a child's lack of desire for a penis? Not only would the child not be afraid to lose it, but the child may even desire to. His theory seems to be based on the idea that every child wants a penis, which does not seem very well founded in my opinion.

Freud makes a lot of claims throughout his book, a majority of which are based on badly supported evidence. For example, he performs numerous analyses on people who he claims are 'ill', but nowhere that I read did I see a mention of any control group. I have taken statistics classes before, and I know from experience that having a control group is crucial in performing any experiment. For example, I could feed cake to children throughout their childhood, and then when the child is fully grown, I could claim that cake cause children to grow, however, one thing I forgot to do is test this theory by raising a group of children without feeding them any cake, which, if I had done, I would have seen that cake has no effect on the overall growth of a child. Freud makes a lot of claims in his book, but he has no well founded evidence to back it up with, even he admits on a few occasions that some of his ideas are a bit mucky. If he thought his ideas were a bit ill-founded, then why would he start advocating them as Gospel truth instead of first trying to find proof?

Again though, I read this book not as a psychology book, but more as a historical piece, so I was not expecting a lot of his theories to be necessarily correct.