I'd like to welcome people to the second lecture,
who'll help me present the work of
Sigmund Freud and the Psychoanalytic theory that he founded.
This will be followed by the third lecture where I'll talk about B.F.
Skinner and the Behaviorist theory that he founded.
What we're doing in this one and the next one
is working on the foundations of Psychology,
exploring the grand theories that started the field off.
One of the things that makes these theories interesting and sort of
exceptional compared to contemporary work is that it really are grand theories.
They have a great deal of scope.
So, most of the work I'm going to be talking about throughout the course,
most of the ideas and research are narrowed.
They specific focus, specific domains they're looking at,
so you might have a theory of prejudice.
That's not going to be the same as a theory of language acquisition.
Your explanation for sexual attractiveness isn't
going to be the same as your theory of schizophrenia.
In contrast, the work of Freud and work of Skinner,
which we'll talk about next week,
are meant to encompass just about everything that matters.
Now, this isn't a history course.
I'm not so much interested in wrong ideas from the past,
but the reason to devote so much time to the scholars is that their ideas
really do have a powerful influence about how we think about the mind right now.
For better or worse, we live in a world profoundly affected by Sigmund Freud.
His work has influenced how we think about every aspect of day to day life,
how we think about the development of children,
the causes and cures for mental illness, origins of religion,
the nature of war,
and everything you want to know but love, romance, and sex.
He's had a profound influence on 20th and 21st century.
And if there's one psychologist you ever heard of, it's going to be Freud.
Freud does had a huge influence on contemporary culture,
mostly for instance reflected in
television shows where he shows up in Star Trek The Next Generation,
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure,
the seven percent solution where he meets Sherlock Holmes,
and a Dangerous Method where he teams up with his most famous student Carl Young.
Freud was born in 1856.
He spent most of his life in Vienna, Austria.
He died in London soon after retreating
there at the prior to the beginning of World War II.
He died in 1939.
He's one of the most famous scholars ever,
but he's not known for a single discovery.
Instead, he's known for the development of an encompassing theory of the mind.
Encompassing scientific theory of the mind developed over the span of many decades.
He's a scholar of extraordinary energy and productivity,
and was enormously well-known in his later life.
They set a very interesting life.
Among many other tidbits about Freud,
he suffered from various addictions.
For part of his life, he was a pretty serious cocaine addict and he found
cigars irresistible and was perpetually smoking them,
leading to is eventual suffering from cancer of the mouth.
Paul BloomBrooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University
