shag quoted:
> When Freud introduced the central notion that most mental processes that
> determine our everyday thoughts, feelings and volitions occur
> unconsciously, his contemporaries rejected it as impossible.
This is hagiography. The notion of unconscious mental processes had been around for many years before Freud; there was nothing outrageous or novel about it. Freud loved to portray himself as an intellectual revolutionary surrounded by critics and skeptics, but in fact he was more or less in the intellectual mainstream. Few of his intellectual colleagues were "shocked" by his ideas.
> Cognitive neuroscientists make sense of such cases by delineating
> different memory systems that process information "explicitly"
> (consciously) and "implicitly" (unconsciously). Freud split memory along
> just these lines.
The cognitive notion of "implicit" memories has little in common with Freud's concept of the unconscious. Can people process information without conscious thought? Yes, that has been amply demonstrated. However, psychoanalytic theory does not simply make the claim that implicit processing is possible. Freud asserts that there is a mental realm/entity ("the unconscious") that exerts a significant impact on conscious thought and behavior. Classic Freudian example: inordinate anxiety and difficulties at the age of toilet training will cause someone to become "anally fixated" in later years. This unconscious fixation will lead to compulsive cleaning and stinginess (or by reaction formation, sloppiness and compulsive spending). The cognitive notion of implicit cognitive processing has little to do with the Freudian idea of the unconscious, even though both approaches posit mental processing without conscious thought.
>
> If the hypothesis is confirmed, then the wish-fulfillment theory of
> dreams could once again set the agenda for sleep research. But even if
> other interpretations of the new neurological data prevail, all of them
> demonstrate that "psychological" conceptualizations of dreaming are
> scientifically respectable again. Few neuroscientists still claim as
> they once did with impunity that dream content has no primary emotional
> mechanism.
Again, this is eliding a huge conceptual chasm. Freud did not simply claim that "dreams have meaning"; rather, he argued that dreams are disguised representations of unconscious wishes, and by interpreting dreams, we can deduce some of the content of a person's unconscious. The research here does nothing to substantiate Freud's specific theory of dreaming.
All that said, I should note that I'm very interested in research that directly tests Freudian hypotheses. However, I'm more than a little disappointed that these neuroscientists are inaccurately representing Freud's basic ideas.
Miles