In Adler's Freudian analysis of the US Supreme Court's nude dancing cases, at http://ssrn.com/abstract=875840
,
she responses to the "Freud Debates" as follows:
"Thus, in the argument that follows, I am not
citing Freud as a “correct” scientist whose work can be proven. Instead, I
invoke the Freud whose narrative of the human psyche, regardless of
whether it was true or not, was so powerful that it has irreversibly shaped
our culture and our conceptions of ourselves.
106
106 See, e.g., Thomas Nagel, Freud’s Permanent Revolution, N.Y. REV. OF BOOKS, May 12,
1994, at 34 (“Great intellectual revolutionaries change the way we think. They pose new
questions and devise new methods of answering them—and we cannot unlearn those forms of
thought simply by discovering errors of reasoning on the part of their creators . . . .”)."
Adler, Amy M., "Girls! Girls! Girls!: The Supreme Court Confronts the G-String" . New York University Law Review, Vol. 80, No. 600, January 2006 Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=875840
Original Message -----
From: Andrew Browne <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 6:14 pm
Subject: Freud, let's move on
>
> No-one is trying to ‘trash’ Freud. If anything my original e-mail
> was
> seeking to ‘trash’ film academics and their use of outdated
> Freudian concepts (so
> there !).
> Psychology is advancing at an exponential rate. We all know the
> examples :
> Pharmacology has shown that mood states are linked to
> neurotransmitters
> /hormones. Neuro-scientists are able to map the brain and
> identify what happens
> during thought identifying the locations of functions and the
> presence of
> neurons that are linked to emotions such as guilt or empathy (the
> ‘mirror neuron’
> ). At the same time, DNA research has begun to show the
> importance of
> hereditary factors and how cultural responses are inflected by
> evolution.
> My point is that film academics cling to Freudian theories,
> despite the fact
> that most psychologists have long moved on and Freud’s theories
> have by and
> large been shown to be at odds with reality. As indeed has the
> society that
> Freud knew. Alone in the introspective world that is film studies
> is Freud
> still trotted out to identify Oedipal relationships, superego
> conflicts,
> fetishism etc.
> The suggestion has been made that despite this dislocation from
> reality,
> Freudian analysis is still useful as an analytical tool in film
> studies. Also
> some of you feel that Freud had a significant impact on Hollywood
> films. Well
> of course the folk in Hollywood were aware of Freud and one or
> two may even
> have read a book of his. He was of course a cause celebre when he
> visited
> America. However, most ‘Freudian influence’ is projected onto a
> film by
> academics. It is not ‘in’ the film - it is in the mind of the
> academic.
> Polemically yours,
> Andrew Browne
>
>
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