Posted by alexandra_k on October 26, 2005, at 5:38:58
In reply to Re: romantic love » alexandra_k, posted by Declan on October 25, 2005, at 21:34:41
> Alex, I'm just making this up so.......
lol thats okay. i make things up as i go along too...
> We have within us an idealised mother part which when projected into the desired other (who can't have been desired to much prior to thre projection or my theory won't work) makes them arttractive and stuff, able to be idealised. Actually I've never grasped projective identification, not even when I had more of my brain than I do now. Still my T was big on it and I think worked with it. (Holding the distressed baby part etc)
yeah. that sounds fairly psychodynamic. but how are we to figure whether this line of thought is true or false? thats one of the main criticisms of psychodynamic theorising... that if you choose to see things that way you can look to the world and find stuff that seems to support your theory... but if you don't believe it then what do you need to look for to show it to be false? there doesn't seem to be anything... and thus... some people have been led to conclude that psychodynamic theory is not scientific theory. which is to say... either it is bad scientific theory or it is not appropriately considered to be scientific theory after all.
lots of work has been done on trying to tie in psychodynamic theory with the neurosciences. i suppose... well its a little like how the behaviourists thought physics was the ideal science, the epitome of science. if anything was scientific then physics surely was and so if we want a science of the mind then this is what it needs to look like... (they messed up rather but that was their line of thought there at any rate). and so now... well neuroscience is surely a science if anything is and thus people often look to ground their theory in neuroscientific facts to lend it plausibility...
i'm not sure what we are to make of psychodynamic type claims...
something that has sparked a fair amount of fairly recent interest is the notion of evolutionary cognitive neuro-psychology. the thought is basically that... we have evolved. our brain is composed of arrangements of different modules. different modules have different functions. we know this because we can study what happens when certain parts of the brain are damaged. we can work out what function they have because we can see what ability the organism now lacks. we can work out what function it serves because we can say what selectional advantage that ability conferred, and we can say how organisms without that functional mechanism would have been worse off. language production is one example of a mental module that has been selected for. within that modules... there are other modules of increasing degrees of specificity. there are perceptual modules too. edge detectors etc.
so... i suppose it is looking a little like phrenology. the phrenolegists got it right that there is localisation of function (to a certain extent). the facultys / modules they posited were way out, however. and the notion that the more developed the module the bigger it would be was way out too. and the notion that the skull fits the brain like a glove was wrong. but i don't suppose one can get everything right all the time ;-)
so we have these localised modules. we can figure out what different parts of the brain do because we can see what happens when people suffer cerebral trauma to that region. we can also damage that area on purpose in animals. we can figure out what it does. then we can theorise as to what selectional advantage that function confers on the organism.
so while psychodynamic theories posit mental structures such as the 'id' 'ego' and 'superego' which are best understood metaphorically (for the simple reason that there are no such structures on the neurological level) people are working on the mental structures that are there on the physiological level.
so you have
neuroscience (different damage, different behaviours)
cognitive neuroscience (forming hypotheses as to the function of the areas that have been damaged)
evolutionary psychology (forming hypotheses as to the evolutionary function of the areas that have been damaged)and ideally... there should be some convergence going on.
with respect to psychodynamic theorising... well... where that fits into the picture is very unclear... some people want to turn it into a science and thus they attempt to map psychodynamic structures onto neurology... other people say it is best conceived of as an art. not science.
i think...
art, not science.while the early psychodynamic theorists were influential with respect to the experiments that were conducted on childhood development in particular... psychodynamic theorising doesn't help with respect to scientific theorising / progress anymore best i can figure.
it is interesting though...
i do think it is interesting...
i'm just not sure it captures literal truths...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:568417
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/relate/20051002/msgs/571992.html