[lbo-talk] Miles: Very Jung and easily Freudened

[Michael Dawson -PSU]

God, this thread has been dunderheaded.  Does anybody in astronomy rely on
Copernicus for current research questions?  No.  So why all the grousing
about Freud?  Nobody takes him lock,stock, and barrel, but he was a
revolutionary figure in the development of science, part of which does and
should and must address the human psyche and it various determinants.  Along
these lines, Stephen Jay Gould and Jared Diamond say Freud was one of the
top 2 or 3 figures in the history of science.  That's enough for me.

So let's knock off the pointless feather-preening.

Meanwhile, for those of you who think the subconscious and the
psycho-individual level of reality isn't as real and somehow contrasts with
what Marxists have mostly focused on, check out these apples:

www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0001E632-978A-1019-978A83414B7F0101&ref=
sciam&chanID=sa006

Historical materialism anybody?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk>
To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2004 9:46 AM
Subject: [lbo-talk] Miles: Very Jung and easily Freudened


> Miles on fealty to 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."
>
> But even if there is collaboration, you cannot abstract from real
individuals who develop ideas. Your 'communal process' seems to be an
evasion of human agency in the development of ideas. (Little wonder that you
do not like Freud's theories which all turn on the formation of personality.
If you do not believe in personality then you don't need Freud.)
>
> More to the point, Freud the person is being rubbished to rubbish those
ideas we associate with Freud.
>
> Then Miles says:
>
> "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."
>
> But this is a very bad analogy in all respects. First, it is not obvious
in which sense Freud has been superseded. Second it is not true to say that
Newtonian space is redundant. Newton's theories are a good account of space
in all but the sub-atomic level. Einstein doesn't cancel out Newton, he only
amends him.
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk