Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Different Iceberg

When I started in psychology, the model of the human personality was something like an iceberg, with the conscious mind showing above the surface while the huge unconscious mind beneath the waves was the real deal.

It turns out that the iceberg is still a good metaphor - except the unconscious is now part of the exposed material above, while beneath the surface, genetics and chance war it out.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

& we were incorrectly told "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," when we should've been told:
wild ducks come from wild duck eggs, apples don't fall too far from the tree, & the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior!

makes me mad all the time we spent memorizing freudian junk. well, what actually makes me mad (underneath my iceberg) is that i couldn't see it was all mainly wrong & that the field didn't really know much & couldn't know much - except for psychometrics - & they tried to keep that hidden, since it didn't provide happy palatable truths!

still we soldiered forward, & managed to get meaning out of what we do:)

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Yes, we were actually made to repeat that phrase in class until we got it right.