Miles Jackson wrote:
>
> On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Carl Remick wrote (about Freud):
>
> > In short, behold the genius: a domineering, destructive quack.
> >
> > Carl
> >
>
> I can't believe I'm defending Freud, but this is a pretty
> goofy ad hominem argument, isn't it? Is "being nice to
> others" a necessary precondition for the growth of scientific
> knowledge?
>
This is a footnote to my reply to Doug a few minutes ago.
I quite agree with Miles here. I don't know and, actually, I don't care, whether or not Freud personally was (as the subject line suggests) a fraud. Very important discoveries can be made by very nasty people, and Freud could be an utter fraud and psychoanalysis still be a valid understanding of human consciousness. Carl is using exactly the kind of arguments which I criticized Doug for using. Ad hominem arguments can be used against both valid and invalid theories, and in either case merely throw dust in the air without contributing anything useful.
Carl's arguments are almost enough provocation to send one looking for good things to say about Freud. It is particularly embarassing to see a critique of Freud depending on material from the popular press.
One more thing. Several posters seem to have misunderstood my point about memory. All our memories are not continually in our consciousness but may be brought to conscious awareness, and no hardwired 'rule' (as in the case of a calculator) will create my memory of Mrs. Edith Kendall(senior english teacher in Benton Harbor over a half century ago), and in fact it's probably been several years since I thought about her. There are various hypotheses to explain this fact, one of which is the existence of an "unconscious," from which we can dredge up such memories. Another is Gerald Edelman's theory of neural darwinism. And so forth. The question is valid and important, and a decent historical understanding of Freud would allow for the validity of the question and the difficulties of answering it.
Carrol
> Miles
>
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