Scientific evidence in favour of Sigmund Freud - your opinion?

Most of the critiques of Freud one reads nowadays are from people who


favor a reductionistic view that equates mind and brain and views


phenomenological exploration of the inner life of human beings as


inherently unscientific.





Evidence in favour of Freud comes from the field of


Neuropsychoanalysis:








Neuropsychoanalysis and benefits of the usage of reconstruction as an


intervention (Mitchell Slutzky, PhD, Geriatric Psychologist)





"[...] I want to distinguish between new models that reject the


importance of unconscious factors from those that continue to hold


these forces central to the change process. [...] as a whole,


psychoanalysis is losing effectiveness when it denies unconscious


motivations.


One of the most striking omissions from current psychoanalysis,


including problems with relational treatment models, is the omission


of the use of reconstructions in interpreting what could have


potentially occurred during preverbal phases of development, or which


have been "forgotten" after a severe trauma. To support this


assertion, I refer to the development of the brain from birth through


age 5 as having a developmental sequence that his just now becoming


fairly well understood. In addition, I will describe the effects of


trauma on the memory centers of the brain. Finally, I will


demonstrate the value of reconstruction, especially when memories are


not encoded or retrievable from the hippocampus. For this I will draw


upon my own clinical experience in treating patients with dementia


using a neuro-psychoanalytic approach.


At birth, an infant has a fully functioning amygdala and


hypothalamus, with most processing going upwards from the amygdala to


the right frontal lobe. The amygdala stores information in


fragmentary forms that have emotional valence indicating whether a


perception is of something safe, dangerous, appetizing, etc. This


knowledge, more emotional than cognitive, continues to play an active


role throughout human development. Next online, beginning at


approximately 3 months, is the hippocampus, a structure necessary for


more factual-based knowledge. Even so, it relies extensively upon


feedback from the amygdala which provides the emotional significance


to the fact. It should be noted that the hippocampus does not rely


upon verbal processing until much later, around the age of 12 months,


although precursors of this can be found much earlier in that infants


can respond to their names at somewhat earlier ages. Until about five


years of age, the right hemisphere remains the dominant hemisphere


for most processes. It is only after that time that the left


hemisphere -- particularly the left temporal lobe -- matures


sufficiently to allow for finer discriminations of language. From


this point forward, he left hemisphere becomes the seat of our


conscious thought while the right frontal lobe seems to play an


active role in whether thoughts and feelings are acknowledged or


repressed.


One more feature of brain processing needs to be elaborated at this


point. When undergoing a severe trauma, a person may respond by


activating the fight-flight response, corresponding to an increase in


cortisol, a naturally occurring steroid that allows for a sustained


release of energy. Unfortunately, prolonged exposure to cortisol has


deleterious effects on the hippocampus, destroying its overall


functioning. This effect does not become noticeable until senescence.


Another normally occurring substance, beta-endorphin, is released


when the person is so overwhelmed that he/she could neither fight nor


flee. Beta-endorphin dulls physical pain while erasing memory of the


event from the hippocampus. Nevertheless, the emotional, fragmentary


memory remains stored in the amygdala.


In individuals with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, flashbacks occur


when some fragmentary memories are triggered. Cortisol becomes hyper-


secreted in a moderate traumatic recollection. Beta-endorphin becomes


hyper-secreted in more severe traumas, leading to dissociative states


and even to dissociative identity disorder, a condition in which the


recall of the trauma is split off into fragmentary selves who are


often completely unaware of the existence of each other.


From the above discussion, it is clear that there seems to be some


correlation between Freud's psychosexual stages, and the sequence of


brain maturation. I want to add that these dates are very general,


and have not been referenced for this entry. Nevertheless, I refer


you to the works of Allan N. Schore, a developmental psychoanalyst


who has had an extensive impact on the analytic community by


demonstrating the relationship between normal brain development and


emotional development, as well as ways in which the brain develops


poorly in response to trauma and non-optimal attachment


relationships. Dr. Schore is currently researching the effects of


affect regulation actual brain structures and function. His work


clarifies many of the brain connections summarized here. He is a true


pioneer in the field of neuro-psychoanalysis. My work in dementia has


been greatly influenced by his theories. In contrast to Schore,


however,my own work focuses more on the limbic structures than it


does on the right frontal lobe. What I'm presenting here is my own


theory, in turn influenced by Schore, Joseph LeDoux, Antonio Damasio,


and Rhawn Joseph, among many others.


Since much of what can go wrong in human development takes place


prior to verbal encoding, and since trauma often leads to an erasure


of memory, or prevents the conscious memory formation from occurring


in the first place, it often becomes necessary to rely upon the


fragmentary memories stored within the amygdala in order to


reconstruct the traumatic events.


I myself rely very strongly on reconstruction, perhaps more than most


others in the field need to, because I specialize in the treatment of


people with dementia. In my clinical experience, there are many


people with dementia who have a relatively intact the amygdala with a


relatively damaged hippocampus. Their frontal and outer-temporal


lobes tend to be relatively well preserved, so they can talk about


their experience and use reason to improve their understanding of


their feelings. Performing the role of an auxiliary hippocampus, I


help my patients take fragmentary emotional responses and


recollections, assemble them into a whole, and repeat this over time,


so that it gets into long-term memory despite the poorly functioning


hippocampus. Usually, these individuals have had severe traumas in


their lives, which led to hypervigilance and an over-active danger


alarm. I teach my patience to contain the intensity of the emotional


response while retaining the reconstructed memory, which is in turn


paired to a more adaptive emotional response.


From the above description of my technique, summarized and over-


simplified, it may be difficult to see how my work connects to


psychoanalysis. That may be because I'm leaving out the content of


the traumas, which typically have psychodynamic significance. In


fact, I find that the perception of what happened matters more than


the veridical truth. (Of course, this opens up the issue of screen


memories, a subject for a whole book on psychoanalysis and the nature


of memory itself.) It is through exploration of these unconscious


conflicts that the fragmentary recall emerges. It is through the


reconstructions that trauma can begin to be recalled in a safer


light. While the dementia is not reversed, excess disability is


diminished. These patients become less depressed or anxious, and have


improved cognitive functioning. What was unacceptable becomes more


acceptable. Using Freud's tripartite terminology, where formerly


these memories were contained in the id, they are now able to be


transformed through the ego.


In this brief summary, I am omitting many other brain structures, as


well as over-simplifying and over-generalizing the roles and


interconnectedness of those that I have addressed directly. I just


wanted to give readers of this forum a viewpoint from one who


practices psychotherapy employing an integration of neuroscience and


psychoanalysis. I hope you see that there may be benefits to such


integration, not just in expanding technique, but in validating and


building upon some of Freud's brilliant observations. His model is


gaining greater support as more is known about the function of the


brain. In this way, neuro-psychoanalysis represents the best way


forward, infusing the most comprehensive system of the mind with


empirical neuroscientific support. This enables the widening scope of


psychoanalysis to treat a greater number of disorders while


simultaneously enabling the therapist to make greater conscious


choices as to what therapeutic intervention would be most useful for


which patient. While this posting focused on the neuropsychology of


reconstruction, it obviously has much broader implications in this


emerging field of neuro-psychoanalysis."

Scientific evidence in favour of Sigmund Freud - your opinion?
I am a bit puzzled how my posting to a user group on neuro-psychoanalysis got onto yahoo! answers as a question. I suppose that means people are reading the board it was posted on. It was not intended to answer a simple question about scientific support for Freud's theory. It was more of a mini paper.





Saying it simply: the field of neuroscience has many studies in support of Freud on many levels. No longer can we say that there is no such thing as "the unconscious". fMRI's, SPECT and other brain measurement of regional cerebral blood flow have yielded an enormous wealth of data on how information is processed unconsciously milliseconds before it is consciously recognized. And the information is repressed by the right frontal orbital lobe (the front right outer-part of the brain under the forehead) if deemed by that part of the brain to be too unacceptable to acknowledge. That suggests that Freud was right to see repression as a common psychological defense.





I could say more, but I have already been told I was too technical in the "question" within which I was so lengthily quoted. Wait for the articles and the book.





MS
Reply:wow. so you study psychology. okay ill give you my little opinion-i agree, but if you wanted accurate opinions from everyone you should have retold this using general terms
Reply:I agree ! its just that it's too long to keep focused on ! Younge had a different approach to the whole issue, but I believe they both were very bright minds of Psychoanalysis.
Reply:I Will be brief and say that Sigmund Freud was a genius in his time. since then times have changed the way we think and do in the way we behave. in his time it was scientific . now days i do not think so as much. our brainwaves are different and our cognitive side is more complex. we are learning more in how the brain works by taking control in the way we think and do. modern society now is about empowerment of the brain .we can and have taken control in the way we think. our lifestyle s has changed . our mental capacity of individualism has changed . more and more people have taken more control over their lives. we sleep differently the mistake with Freud that he observed things in general rather making assumptions.. these days observation there is no such thing. it is more intuition now and we know much more.