"There are two problems with the scientific theory. One way you could reject a theory is that it could be wrong. So, suppose I have a theory that the reason why some children have autism, a profound developmental disorder, is because their mothers don't love them enough.This was a popular theory for many years. It's a possible theory. It just turns out to be wrong. And so one way to attack and address a scientific theory is to view it as just to see whether or not it works. But there's a different problem a theory could have. A theory could be so vague and all encompassing that it can't even be tested. And this is one of the main critiques of Freud. The idea could be summed up by a quotation from the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. And Pauli was asked his opinion about another physicist. And Pauli said this: "That guy's work is crap. He's not right. He's not even wrong." And the criticism about Freud is that he's not even wrong. The issue of vagueness is summarized in a more technical way by the philosopher Karl Popper who described — who introduced the term of falsifiability. The idea of falsifiability is that what distinguishes science from non science is that scientific predictions make strong claims about the world and these claims are of a sort that they could be proven wrong. If they couldn't be proven wrong, they're not interesting enough to be science.
...Arguably, Freud fails the test because Freudian theory is often so vague and flexible that it can't really be tested in any reliable way. A big problem with this is a lot of Freudian theory is claimed to be validated in the course of psychoanalysis. So, when you ask people, "Why do you believe in Freud?" they won't say, "Oh, because of this experiment, that experiment, this data set and that data set." What they'll say is, "It's — The Freudian theory proves itself in the course of psychoanalysis – the success of psychoanalysis." But it's unreliable.
...And now, I don't want to caricature Freudians. A lot of Freudians have tried and made a research program of extending their ideas scientifically, bringing them to robust scientific tests. But the problem is, when you make specific falsifiable predictions they don't always do that well. So, for instance, there's no evidence that oral and anal characteristics, the personality characteristics I talked about – about being needy versus being stingy – relate in any interesting way to weaning or toilet training. looking at cross-cultural differences in toilet training and weaning, which are really big differences, to see if they correspond in any interesting way to personality differences. And there's been no good evidence supporting that. Similarly, Freud had some strong claims about sexuality, for why some people are straight and others are gay. These have met with very little empirical support. And the claim that psychoanalysis proves itself by being — by its tremendous success in curing mental illness is also almost certainly not true. For most — Maybe not all, but for most psychological disorders, there are quicker and more reliable treatments than psychoanalysis."
© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology, 2007
...Arguably, Freud fails the test because Freudian theory is often so vague and flexible that it can't really be tested in any reliable way. A big problem with this is a lot of Freudian theory is claimed to be validated in the course of psychoanalysis. So, when you ask people, "Why do you believe in Freud?" they won't say, "Oh, because of this experiment, that experiment, this data set and that data set." What they'll say is, "It's — The Freudian theory proves itself in the course of psychoanalysis – the success of psychoanalysis." But it's unreliable.
...And now, I don't want to caricature Freudians. A lot of Freudians have tried and made a research program of extending their ideas scientifically, bringing them to robust scientific tests. But the problem is, when you make specific falsifiable predictions they don't always do that well. So, for instance, there's no evidence that oral and anal characteristics, the personality characteristics I talked about – about being needy versus being stingy – relate in any interesting way to weaning or toilet training. looking at cross-cultural differences in toilet training and weaning, which are really big differences, to see if they correspond in any interesting way to personality differences. And there's been no good evidence supporting that. Similarly, Freud had some strong claims about sexuality, for why some people are straight and others are gay. These have met with very little empirical support. And the claim that psychoanalysis proves itself by being — by its tremendous success in curing mental illness is also almost certainly not true. For most — Maybe not all, but for most psychological disorders, there are quicker and more reliable treatments than psychoanalysis."
© Paul Bloom
Yale Lectures on Introduction to Psychology, 2007
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