Barlow on Freud:

Ted Barlow has some excellent comments about Freud and the scientific method. We completely agree with Ted's views in this matter. With Freud's work, there was no way to test it since it was wholly dependent on subjective evaluations.

However, Freud fans still exist, even at the highest levels. Take, for instance, Eric Kandel, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Medicine for contributions to the field of neuroscience. We heard him praise Freud some time ago on the Charlie Rose show. And as this report from October 2000 puts it:

The news last week from Stockholm that Eric R. Kandel of Columbia... had won the 2000 Nobel Prizes in physiology and/or medicine for ... work on the biochemical basis of learning, mood, and memory would have made Sigmund Freud proud. Kandel [and others] have largely realized Freud's hope that such higher mental faculties as mood, memory, and desire might be reduced to their chemical bases. The Nobelists had proved that one of Freud's heroes, the materialist Ludwig Büchner, was right when he announced that ?ohne phosphor keine Gedanke? (without phosphorous no thought). Nerve cells use phosphorus to send us their news.

and

Eric Kandel grew up wanting to be Sigmund Freud. To this day, he spends summers amidst the shrinks and scholars of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, rather than among the sea-slug students of Woods Hole or Cold Spring Harbor.

So, a hard-science, reductionist investigator thinks highly of Freud. Go figure.

Apparently Freud did opine at one point that biological explanations for mental conditions would eventually be found, but his work was more in the spirit of the 19th century's Romantic Era ("id," anyone?) than anything else.

posted by Quiddity at 9/26/2002 06:17:00 PM