Sigmund Freud
Sun Apr 09 2000 at 13:59:53
Thu May 10 2001 at 20:54:38
Freud is little read today, but he was actually a very engaging and amusing writer who is a joy to read. And in fact, although we are not generally aware of it, Freudian ideas permeate modern consciousness. Indeed, the very idea of consciousness, and its corollary, unconsciousness, was popularized and concretized by Freud.
Another idea developed by Freud which is pretty widely accepted today is that experiences that happen to us as children affect how we behave as adults. It was a pretty unusual idea at the time, when people were often thought of as born into what they are. It s interesting to see how this concept has worked its way into popular consciousness in a distorted form. Think about the whole discourse of repressed memory. The idea here is that very traumatic experiences in childhood, like sexual abuse, can be repressed - that is, pushed into the unconscious - only to suddenly reappear much later in li