Annette Taylor, Ph. D. wrote:
Does it matter if we present the quote and/or the lovely images summarized on the blog link, knowing that a few years from now they will only remember the gist--that Freud talked about the mind as largely submerged and out of conscious awareness?
It is mildly important to be able to correctly say "Freud charactierized the mind thus and such" versus "Freud's view of the mind has been characterized by others thus and such." It may not be WILDLY important for low-level teaching, but for one's own intellectual integrity (not to mention one's higher-level teaching and one's own research) it is certainly worth knowing the difference. Other things being equal, wouldn't you rather get it right?
I tried to pull vol. 2 of Fechner's Psychophysik from the U. Toronto library, but it is currently being "searched" (read: it has been lost/stolen). Note Stephen, there are two editions of the Psychophysik (1860 and 1889, I think). Check to make sure you get the one corresponding to your p. 521 citiation.
Whatever the result, it is unlikely to really resolve this dispute because Fechner's "iceberg" is almost certainly going to be about the difference between mere sensory stimulations (or changes in sensory stimulation) that do (or not) rise to the level of consciousness, not about the putatively motivational aspects of unconsious beliefs and desires, in the way Freud meant. It may well turn out that Freud or someone close to him borrowed this metaphor and adapted it to their own purposes. That hardly rises to the level "plagiarism" (unless one is ideologically committed showing that Freud was a low-down scoundrel on all counts). The idea of an iceberg would seem to be common enough currency. It may have been hit upon more or less independently by any number of the many 19th-century thinkers who had used one or another version of the idea of unconscious mentality (recall that Helmholtz and Wundt had a dispute about which of them came up with the idea of "unconsious inference" first, decades before Freud was on the scene). Asuming for the moment that Freud actually used the iceberg analogy, even if he got the idea from Fechner, he might well have wondered whether it was really original to Fechner. Would you bother to cite "quiet as a mouse"?
Regards, -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-5115 ex. 66164 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.yorku.ca/christo ============================= --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
