Word: freud
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...human mind--our emotions, our wants, our needs--evolved in an environment lacking, for example, cellular phones. And, for that matter, regular phones, telegraphs and even hieroglyphs--and cars, railroads and chariots. This much is fairly obvious and, indeed, is a theme going back at least to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. But the analysis rarely gets past the obvious; when it does, it sometimes veers toward the dubious. Freud's ideas about the evolutionary history of our species are now considered--to put it charitably--dated. He hypothesized, for example, that our ancestors lived in a "primal horde...
...small but growing group of scholars--evolutionary psychologists--are trying to do better. With a method less fanciful than Freud's, they're beginning to sketch the contours of the human mind as designed by natural selection. Some of them even anticipate the coming of a field called "mismatch theory," which would study maladies resulting from contrasts between the modern environment and the "ancestral environment," the one we were designed for. There's no shortage of such maladies to study. Rates of depression have been doubling in some industrial countries roughly every 10 years. Suicide is the second most common...
...living arrangement, especially for wives. Moreover, the bygone American life-styles that do look fairly natural in light of evolutionary psychology appear to have been eroded largely by capitalism--another challenge to conservative orthodoxy. Perhaps the biggest surprise from evolutionary psychology is its depiction of the "animal" in us. Freud, and various thinkers since, saw "civilization" as an oppressive force that thwarts basic animal urges such as lust and aggression, transmuting them into psychopathology. But evolutionary psychology suggests that a larger threat to mental health may be the way civilization thwarts civility. There is a kinder, gentler side of human...
...every scandal is a career move. Grant may have saved his career by going on his Summer Atonement Tour--by telling Jay and Katie how sorry he was to have hurt his family and girlfriend, by schmoozing stalwartly with Regis and Kathie Lee, by enduring Larry King's penny-Freud psychoanalyzing while admitting that his own behavior was "disloyal and shabby and goatish." And by defending Hurley (who uneasily accompanied him to the Nine Months Hollywood premiere) against the predatory voyeurism of the tabloid press. "They can go on hounding me, I suppose, as much as they like," he told...
...subject to the scientific method. But the paradigm of the scientific method--testable propositions subjected to double-blind and replicable experimentation--is not the only criteria for evaluating academic undertakings. This is certainly true in the formative, exploratory phases in the development of an idea. If Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx or Martin Buber had been required to satisfy a committee before they could continue their research, the world might have been deprived of significant insights...