On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
> We can be
> faithful to the Freudian legacy not by re-interpreting his works, but by
> repeating them - treating Freud as a contemporary. This is the hallmark of
> the new, and the most productive form of dialectical criticism.
>
Okay, here's what bugs me about this kind of celebration of Freud:
1. It assumes that knowledge is a thing produced by some smart guy or gal, and we need to cherish that brilliant person's insights. In my view, this completely misrepresents how knowledge develops. Especially in scientific fields, knowledge is a communal process that emerges from collaborations and conflict among many different people; it is not a nugget of wisdom created by an individual.
2. Imagine if physicists took the attitude about Newton that Kenneth does about Freud above: "People say the Newtonian conception of time and space are dead, but Newton was brilliant, he was an important physicist, therefore we shouldn't replace his concept of time and space with new, incompatible ideas (e.g., curvature of spacetime around massive bodies)". Today's wisdom is tomorrow's naive misunderstanding. If that applies to the Newtonian conception of time and space, that surely applies to Freud.
Miles