sarge@thirdi.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode) (04/11/88)
In article <2738@saturn.ucsc.edu> melissa@ucscb.UCSC.EDU (PUT YOUR NAME HERE) writes: > >Another poster said that Freud's ideas have pretty much been discredited. >Some have, but some haven't, and there is a great deal of disagreement. >There are a lot of practicing psychotherapists that follow Freud pretty >closely, and remember that Freud did manage to cure his patients. At >least that is what my Psych professor said yesterday. What Freud gave >us that is so important is the idea of the conscious,pre-conscious, and >unconscious. This division is still generally considered accurate, and >it changed drastically the way people are thought about. Another useful idea from Freud was the concept of transference, the notion that a person can confuse the contents of present time with the contents of a past traumatic incident that contains something that bears some resemblance to something in present time. Another is the technique of tracing back chains of such traumatic incidents to the earliest, following lines of similarity. This is an extremely valuable technique, when used in the absence of a lot of interpretation. Freud used this technique early on (see *Five Lectures in Psychoanalysis*). Unfortunately, however, (because it is a very good and useful technique), Freud apparently abandoned this technique in favor of free association. -- "The map may not be the territory, but it's all we've got." Sarge Gerbode Institute for Research in Metapsychology 950 Guinda St. Palo Alto, CA 94301 UUCP: pyramid!thirdi!sarge