Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories- Freud: Psychoanalysis © The McGraw−Hill^59
Companies, 2009
Karl Popper, the philosopher of science who proposed the criterion of falsifia-
bility, contrasted Freud’s theory with Einstein’s and concluded that the former was
not falsifiable and therefore not science. It would be fair to say that for much of the
20th century, most academic psychologists dismissed Freudian ideas as fanciful
speculations that may have contained insights into human nature but were not science.
During the last 5 to 10 years, the scientific status of Freudian theory has begun
to change, at least among certain circles of cognitive psychologists and neuroscien-
tists. Neuroscience is currently experiencing an explosive growth through its inves-
tigations of brain activity during a variety of cognitive and emotional tasks. Much of
this growth has been due to brain imaging technology afforded by functional mag-
netic resonance imaging (MRI) that maps regions of the brain that are active during
particular tasks. At about the same time, certain groups of cognitive psychologists
began doing research on the importance of nonconscious processing of information
and memory, or what they called “implicit” cognition. John Bargh, one of the leaders
in the field of social-cognitive psychology, reviewed the literature on the “automatic-
ity of being” and concluded that roughly 95% of our behaviors are unconsciously de-
termined (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). This conclusion is completely consistent with
Freud’s metaphor that consciousness is merely the “tip of the iceberg.”
By the late 1990s, the findings from neuroscience and cognitive psychology
began to converge on many cognitive and affective processes that were very consis-
tent with basic Freudian theory. These commonalties have become the foundation for
a movement started by some cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and psychia-
trists who are convinced that Freud’s theory is one of the more compelling integra-
tive theories—one that could explain many of these findings. In 1999, a group of sci-
entists began a society called Neuro-Psychoanalysis and a scientific journal by the
same name. For the first time, some eminent cognitive and neuroscience psycholo-
gists such as Nobel laureate for physiology, Eric Kandel, along with Joseph LeDoux,
Antonio Damasio, Daniel Schacter, and Vilayanur Ramachandran, were publicly de-
claring the value of Freud’s theory and contending that “psychoanalysis is still the most
coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind” (as cited in Solms, 2004,
p. 84). Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio wrote: “I believe we can say that Freud’s in-
sights on the nature of consciousness are consonant with the most advanced contem-
porary neuroscience views” (as cited in Solms & Turnbull, 2002, p. 93). Twenty years
ago, such pronouncements from neuroscientists would have been nearly unthinkable.
Mark Solms is probably the most active person involved in integrating psy-
choanalytic theory and neuroscientific research (Solms 2000, 2004; Solms & Turn-
bull, 2002). He argued, for instance, that the following Freudian concepts have sup-
port from modern neuroscience: unconscious motivation, repression, the pleasure
principle, primitive drives, and dreams (Solms, 2004). Similarly, Kandel (1999) ar-
gued that psychoanalysis and neuroscience together could make useful contributions
in these eight domains: the nature of unconscious mental processes; the nature of
psychological causality; psychological causality and psychopathology; early experi-
ence and the predisposition to mental illness; the preconscious, the unconscious, and
the prefrontal cortex; sexual orientation; psychotherapy and structural changes in the
brain; and psychopharmacology as an adjunct to psychoanalysis.
Although there are some gaps in the evidence (Hobson, 2004), the overlap be-
tween Freud’s theory and neuroscience is sufficient to make at least a suggestive, if
Chapter 2 Freud: Psychoanalysis 53