Staats Chapter 38: Critique of Psychoanalytic Concepts and Theories Flashcards
Freud’s Description of His Achievement
“My life has been aimed at one goal only: to infer or guess governmental apparatus is constructed and what forces interplay and counteract in it.”
Mental Apparatus
Toomany followers of Freud, the mental apparatus appears to be equally as real, and the expiration such an apparatus is similarly except as the goal of the science of behavior
Skinner believes, however, that Freud did not discover the mental apparatus but rather invented it, borrowing part of its structure from traditional philosophy of human conduct but adding many novel features of his own devising
Constructs
Freud’s mental apparatus for scientific construct rather than an observable empirical system
Nevertheless, attempts are made to justify it in the light of scientific method
Animism
Inner explanation of behavior is best exemplified by doctrines of animism, which are primarily concerned with explaining the living organism, which is extremely complicated and behaves an extremely competent way
Traditional procedure had been to invent an inner determiner, demon, spirit, meticulous such capable of spontaneous change
Such an inner determiner offers only a momentary explanation of the behavior of the outer organism, because it must be accounted for also, but is commonly used to put the matter beyond further inquiry, and brings the study of a causal series of events to a dead-end
Freud was a determinist, who pointed to external causes in the environment and genetic history of individual – he did not need to traditional explanatory system for traditional purposes, but he was unable to eliminate the pattern from his thinking:
environmental event–effect on inner mental apparatus–behavioral manifestation or something
Alternative to Freud’s Determinism
Freud: environmental event – mental state or process – behavioral symptom
Skinner: Environmental variables the physiological effects that may be inferred from the behavior of the individual
Freud therefore accepted the traditional fiction of the mental life, avoiding dualism by arguing that physiological counterparts would eventually be discovered
Two classical problems that arise once the concept of a mental life has been adopted
- How can mental life be observed?
- -Even if there were a method, for himself what about that not all of one’s mental life is accessible through direct observation
Behaviorism: conscious and unconscious events are inferences from the facts – individual organisms simply reacts its environment rather than to some inner experience of environment
- How can mental life be manipulated?
- - the psychoanalyst necessarily acts upon the patient only through physical means, only the first link of Freud’s causal chain
Features of the behavior that was punished early and later represented by psychoanalysis is a state of conscious or unconscious anxiety without specific details of the punishment
Freud’s treatment of Behavior
Behavior was relegated to the position of a mere mode of expression in the activities of the mental apparatus with the symptoms of an underlying disturbance
In spite of Freud’s valuable analysis of verbal slips, he rejected the possibility of an analysis of verbal behavior in its own right rather than the as expression of ideas, feelings or other inner events
Freud and Perception
Fantasy in dreams were for Freud not perceptual behavior of the individual that pictures painted by an inner artist and some inner art studio which the individual then contemplated and perhaps than reported
Freud and Learning
Learning was never treated in terms of changes in behavior, but rather as the acquisition of ideas, feelings, and emotions later to be expressed by behavior
Freud’s terminology
Freud use many terms that suggest the activity of an organism yet are not descriptive behavior
E.g. discriminate, remember, infer, repress, decide etc.
Such terms to not refer to specific acts
Behaviorism:
- discriminate – behaving differently with respect to two objects
- repress – when one engages in another behavior just because it displaces the punished behavior–but “repressing” is not action
The misunderstanding of the Freudian distinction between the conscious and unconscious mind
The important point was not that individual was often unable to describe important aspects of his own behavior or identify important cause relationships, but that his ability to describe them was irrelevant to the occurrence of the behavior or to the effectiveness of the causes
The act of self-description and self-observation plays no part in the determination of action. It is superimposed upon behavior
General conclusion
Freud’s methodological strategy has prevented the incorporation of psychoanalysis into the body of science
Psychological “organizations”, “mental systems”, “interaction” all imply arrangements for relationships among things, what exactly are the things so related or range?
Until this question hasn’t answered, the problem of the dimensions of the mental apparatus cannot be approached
