Freud and cognitive psychology?

Question

Freud claims that slips of the tongue are caused by peoples' personal problems.  To illustrate his point, he describes the case of a young man he talked to on a train who made a slip of the tongue. By asking the man to free associate to the slip of the tongue, Freud soon found an association to an important personal problem that was bothering the man. 

 If Freud had been able to find an association to a personal problem for every slip of the tongue he observed, would that prove his point? Talk about at least one of the following: sampling bias, observer reliability, observer bias, self-report bias, chance, small sample size, data fishing, order effect.

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

I suggest you read the introduction to the current Touchstone edition of Freud's "Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria".

While the introduction itself is of course subjective (though not by Freud), it goes into much of this.

There's a reason Freud's ideas are not taught as current theory in psychoanalysis except in a handful of countries.  It's mainly because he admitted that there are many flaws with what he does.  For example: he understood that Yes generally means Yes, while No almost always means Yes.  So he asked himself many times when does No actually just mean No?  If you read his own writings from his later years he explains why some ideas were good, but many were not executed well.

Plus keep in mind that almost all his analyses were based on him having worked out his own personal problems (also admitted by him in the preface to "Dora").

Makoto · Answer

Freud is also quoted as saying..."Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar." Since Psychoanalysis is criticized for not being able to have empirical evidence, it is hard to say that it is right or wrong. It is a working theory and is one way of looking at a person.

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Freud and cognitive psychology?

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