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Participants who had been provoked by a stranger who disagreed with them on important opinions, and who had
also been reminded of their own death, administered significantly more unpleasant hot sauce to the partner than
did the participants in the other three conditions.
Source: Adapted from McGregor, H. A., Lieberman, J. D., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Arndt, J., Simon,
L.,...Pyszczynski, T. (1998). Terror management and aggression: Evidence that mortality salience motivates
aggression against worldview-threatening others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(3), 590–605.
Strengths and Limitations of Freudian and Neo-Freudian Approaches
Freud has probably exerted a greater impact on the public’s understanding of personality than
any other thinker, and he has also in large part defined the field of psychology. Although
Freudian psychologists no longer talk about oral, anal, or genital “fixations,” they do continue to
believe that our childhood experiences and unconscious motivations shape our personalities and
our attachments with others, and they still make use of psychodynamic concepts when they
conduct psychological therapy.
Nevertheless, Freud’s theories, as well as those of the neo-Freudians, have in many cases failed
to pass the test of empiricism, and as a result they are less influential now than they have been in
the past (Crews, 1998). [5] The problems are first, that it has proved to be difficult to rigorously
test Freudian theory because the predictions that it makes (particularly those regarding defense
mechanisms) are often vague and unfalsifiable, and second, that the aspects of the theory that can
be tested often have not received much empirical support.
As examples, although Freud claimed that children exposed to overly harsh toilet training would
become fixated in the anal stage and thus be prone to excessive neatness, stinginess, and
stubbornness in adulthood, research has found few reliable associations between toilet training
practices and adult personality (Fisher & Greenberg, 1996). [6] And since the time of Freud, the
need to repress sexual desires would seem to have become much less necessary as societies have
tolerated a wider variety of sexual practices. And yet the psychological disorders that Freud
thought we caused by this repression have not decreased.
There is also little scientific support for most of the Freudian defense mechanisms. For example,
studies have failed to yield evidence for the existence of repression. People who are exposed to