So this has been a summary of Freud's theory focusing on the major aspects. But as I said earlier, the scope of his theory is considerable. You're allowed to say what dreams for instance, arguing that they were a form of wish fulfillment and he distinguished what he called the Laden dream from the manifest dream. The dream as it really is from a dream as experienced and remembered, and talked a lot about the symbolism of dreams. So, dream interpretation is something which has had a very very long tradition but Freud systematized it and to some extent adopted more of a scientific perspective on it. Freud talked about myths in literature where he argued that often things like fairy tales expressed aspects of the unconscious and capture certain universal themes and he developed a theory of the origin of religion linking it to things like a desire for a father figure and broader aspects of humanity connecting it to his general theory of where civilization comes from. If you're interested in his works, it's a really rich body of ideas to explore. So, so far we've talked about what Freud said, but now let's address the question, how much of it's true and how much of it is good science? Because there's two ways to reject a theory, a theory could be wrong or could contain a lot of mistaken claims. So for instance, if you thought that the disorders of schizophrenia or autism were caused by bad parenting, well that's a theory. It's certainly mistaken, there's too much evidence against it. But another problem of a theory is that it could be too vague to test, it could just be story telling. One physicist famously derided the work of a colleague by saying," He's not right, he's not even wrong", and what scientists aspire to do is to at least be wrong, to have theories that are such specificity and testability that they could be proven mistaken. Philosopher Karl Popper talked about this idea of the notion of falsifiability. So he pointed out that, what distinguishes science from non-science, is that scientific predictions make strong claims about the world and run the risk of being proven false. That is, he argued, you know you're dealing with a science when there are ways to prove its claims wrong. So, for instance suppose we were to make claims like this; damage to the part of the brain known as the hippocampus causes failures of implicit memory but not explicit memory. Or, everywhere in the world men should prefer on average, they have more sexual partners than women prefer. Or, exposure to violent television makes children more violent or, ingestion of certain drugs makes the symptoms of schizophrenia go away, are these true or false? Well each and every one of these claims we'll discuss later on in the course and I'll also explain to you what implicit memory and explicit memory are. But the point here is, these are the sorts of things that can be proven false. This is the stuff of science, these are interesting and substantive claims. I think very few philosophers today would agree with Popper's claim that, falsifiability is the absolute criteria through which you can distinguish science from non-science. But what they would agree with is that if the claim is too vague to be proven false or too slippery to be proven false, then you may not be dealing with a scientific theory in the first place. So I'm a Capricorn and here's a horoscope for my day, Your energy is focused on work today maybe a bit too much so it's a good time to get a lot done for sure but try to make sure that your relationships don't suffer as a result. The problem with this horoscope isn't that it's wrong, it's that it's so vague it can't be wrong depending on what you mean by work. There's always going to be something to be said for your energies focused too much on work, and advice is so banal and empty that there's nothing that can happen or you could say."Oh that was bad advice I shouldn't have done that." I kind of prefer the horoscopes I got from the satirical magazine, The Onion "There's no worse fate than dying alone. Thankfully you'll be surrounded by hundreds of airline passengers when it happens." and part of the humor of this, besides this unremitting grimness and honesty, is that it's specific. It's a specific horoscope and you never see that, and this is of course the sort of thing which could be wrong. If a scientist told me they had a theory of future behavior and they predicted how people go on a diet and then they were right, I'd say that's credible science. So take this back to Freud, one of the main accusations of Freudian theory is that it's unfalsifiable. It's based a lot on anecdotes, on descriptions of clinical events and in fact the therapeutic environment itself has a sort of unfalsifiability to it. So imagine dealing with a therapist and your therapist, suppose you're lucky enough to be treated by Freud himself says you hate your mother and if the patient says "Oh wow what an insight that's true" the therapist will say," Well I'm right, this supports me". But suppose the therapists of those Freud said you hate your mother and the patient is outraged "No I don't. That's horrible." Freud could say,"Well, your anger shows this idea is painful for you, you have repressed it from consciousness. I am right", and when dealing with somebody who has a Freudian explanation, here's the ultimate cause of your problems or of your anxiety. Harder the problem is, it's not clear what could ever prove that explanation wrong. If you can't prove it wrong, it's not science and more to the point, it's not very interesting. Now to be fair, a lot of Freudian's and a lot of the scholars who have followed and been influenced by Freud's ideas have tried to take his ideas and turn them into empirical falsifiable claims, and if you think about a lot of what we talked about in this lecture, it does admit of testing. So for instance, if Freud's right, your experience of breastfeeding should be a reliable predictor of your personality later on in life. If Freud is right, your experience of toilet training should be a reliable predictor of your experience later in life. If Freud is right, whether or not you're raised by one parent or two, whether or not you're raised by a man and woman or two men, two women should have a profound effect on the Electra complex, the Oedipus complex and so on. Freud made specific claims about the origin of sexual preference and he certainly made a lot of claims about success of psychoanalysis. So to some extent a lot of Freudian's would say, " The proof is in the pudding, psychoanalysis rests on a Freudian analysis of what's going on", and so if the Freudian analysis is correct you would expect this method of treatment to be uniquely powerful in curing people's problems. Unfortunately most people believe that it isn't.
