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andrew browne’s
very reasonable but, i think, off base message deserves a more thorough
response than i can possibly give here, but i think that one aspect of this
complex question might be addressed, and that aspect hinges on two related but
far from synonymous terms that andrew uses: he talks both about “psychological
theory” and “philosophical concepts” and, in a related
binary, about the brain and the mind . . . the mind is the seat of the phenomenological
concepts of both self and world that are the tools through which we experience
the world, and as a result of which we develop philosophical concepts; the
brain is a material organ in which lots of chemical and electro-neurological
events take place to which we have no direct access . . . thus to tell me that
when i feel love it is simply because certain chemical or neurological events
in the brain are occurring is to tell me noting useful, however accurate it may
be . . . an attempt to EXPLAIN the experience of love rather than provide an
account of the brain events that cause that experience has to find a different
discourse
this is not to
defend any specific claims made by freud, or by contemporary followers of freud
. . . it is merely to say that if we want to discredit freud we’ll need
to do it by coming to grips with what andrew calls his “abstruse
philosophical concepts” and not just by saying that philosophical
concepts have nothing to tell us when we can explain everything by analysing
the activity of the brain
mike
From: Film-Philosophy
Salon [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Andrew Browne
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2007
2:19 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Freud and Film Studies
The recent Hitchcock/Freud discussion
raises a number of points. One that springs to mind is why Film Studies still
pays reverence to Freudian theories and structures when they have been so long
nuanced, if not challenged or even discredited, within Psychology itself. It is
an example of a wider problem that many film academics are somehow caught in a
time-slip when using inter-disciplinary approaches.
In the mid 1950s clinical psychologists
began to develop cognitive approaches to understanding how the brain worked.
This followed a number of clinical research results that contradicted Freudian
theory and a growing feeling that Freud's approach to emotions - that they were
somehow an aberration resulting from cogintive imbalance - was
simplistic. Development of Freudian psychological theory, by Lacan and
Klein amongst others, had led to psychological theory that was almost
impenetrable with its abstruse philosophical concepts. With the advances in
neuro-psychology and brain mapping generally, we have moved on a great deal in
our understanding of how the brain processes information.
Freudian structures are good fun
and, like any structure, they can be forced to fit any situation.However, Freud
is seen by most psychologists as a quaint but respected founder of their
science. To quote him would be similar to film writers quoting Melies.
Andrew Browne