[lbo-talk] ghost of Freud

Dennis Claxton ddclaxton at earthlink.net
Tue Oct 21 17:15:30 PDT 2008


Last bit of a nyt article from 1999 about a debate between Solms, who wrote the Freud essay from Scientific American that shag posted a week or so ago and I just reposted, and Hobson, emeritus psychiatry professor at Harvard:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07E6DF153BF931A35752C1A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

[....]

Though Dr. Solms and Dr. Hobson still disagree, in some ways the new research has brought their respective assessments of the dreaming brain closer together.

Dr. Solms, for example, concedes that there is as yet no evidence to support Freud's assertion that unconscious motives are disguised and censored, to prevent their intrusion into consciousness. This is the part of Freudian dream theory that, at the moment, seems weakest, he said.

Dr. Hobson, for his part, said that he never claimed dreams were meaningless: he has filled 109 volumes with his own dreams over the years, hardly the act of someone who dismisses dreaming as unimportant. ''Dreams are transparently meaningful,'' Dr. Hobson said, ''chock full of emotional salience.''

He is not opposed to the idea of unconscious mental process, but questions whether ''there are parts of my unconscious mind that are inaccessible to me and that are critically important in understanding my behavior.''

Perhaps, he suggested, the emotions in dreams, and in particular anxiety, serve as rehearsals of basic, evolutionarily determined survival mechanisms. ''One theory emerging here is that REM sleep enables you to run all the crucial programs for behavior two hours a night,'' he said. ''How much time does a pianist practice each day?''

Dr. Hobson rejects, however, the notion that the forebrain can act entirely on its own in inciting a dream. And he doubts that the appearance of vivid dreams in non-REM sleep means anything other than that sleep and waking form a continuum, with some REM processes stretching into other parts of the cycle.

Most of all, he bridles at the idea that advancing the understanding of dreaming means resurrecting Freud. ''My problem with psychoanalysis is historical,'' he said. ''I was trained in an era when it was unquestioned. I thought it was a scientific theory and I found out little by little that it was a speculative hypothesis.''

Still, for both sides, it is perhaps time to put Freud aside, suggested Dr. Braun of the National Institutes of Health, who served as commentator in the journal's Solms-Hobson debate.

''Stepping back a short distance,'' Dr. Braun wrote, ''this is what I see: Hobson, a consummate biological psychiatrist, now argues against reductionism and passionately advocates the study of subjective conscious experience. Solms, a psychoanalyst, is attempting to recast dynamic psychology in neurochemical terms.''

''It sounds to me like these gentlemen are approaching common ground,'' Dr. Braun wrote. ''Perhaps it is simply the ghost of Freud that is getting in the way.''



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